Startup Dev Story vs Minimum Effort

Found your own software startup and grow it from a one-person garage hustle into a world-changing tech giant, one pixel at a time. Startup Dev Story is a cozy, fast-paced business simulation inspired by the management-sim classics. Hire developers, designers, and marketers, organize them into teams, and cook up products in the Lab by mixing a type, an audience, and secret ingredients. Discover powerful combos, ship them, and watch the subscribers (and the cash) roll in. But the tech world never sits still. Survive and thrive across shifting eras, the SaaS & Mobile Boom, Crypto Winter, the AI Revolution and beyond, each one reshaping what sells and who your rivals are. FEATURES • Hire & grow a team, level up staff, manage energy, loyalty and burnout, and promote your stars. • The Product Lab, combine type + audience + ingredients to discover hidden synergy recipes. • Ride the eras, adapt as the market transforms decade after decade. • Rivals & market, competitors ship their own products; trends rise and fall. • Research & perks, unlock new product types and kit out your office. • Three difficulties, from a gentle Learn-the-Ropes run to a brutal lean-runway challenge. • New Game+, bank a veteran co-founder and a cash head start for your next venture. • Multiple save slots, run parallel companies. • Handcrafted pixel art and a chiptune soundtrack, all generated with love. Free to play, supported by ads. No account required, your progress is saved on your device. Can you survive the burn, out-ship your rivals, and IPO your way to the singularity? Your startup story starts now.

You have a job. You do not want to do it. Minimum Effort is a satirical workplace strategy game. Every workday runs from 09:00 to 17:00, and everything you can do with those 480 minutes trades three things against each other: the time it saves you, the output it actually produces, and how conspicuous it makes you. The goal is not to be good at your job. It is to find the least amount of work that survives. HOW A DAY WORKS • Do the work, fake the work, or avoid it entirely. Looking busy covers part of a shortfall when the boss checks the deliverables. It never files the report. • The boss patrols the floor. When he walks past in the middle of something you get a couple of seconds to look busy . and less time the hotter you already are. • Repeat an act and it gets riskier every time. The fourth bathroom break is not the first bathroom break. • Colleagues talk. Each one has their own trust in you and their own doubts, and a rumour that crosses the floor twice reaches the boss's office from a direction you were not watching. THE PEOPLE Your accomplice will cover for you. The overachiever notices an unearned win. The snitch keeps a note of when people leave their desk. The gossip has already told two other people. You can chat, delegate your work, ask somebody to cover, genuinely help them . or put your name on their work, which they never forget. PROMOTIONS ARE A TRAP Every rung on the ladder pays more and expects more. Getting promoted is easy. Staying just competent enough not to be fired, one rung higher, with a bigger quota and the same amount of effort . that is the game. FIVE CAREERS - Corporate. Easy. Meetings, decks and a quarterly review nobody reads. - Startup. Chaotic. Twelve people, no structure, and everybody notices everything. - Consulting. Medium. Frameworks, workstreams, and never being the one with the answer. - Investment banking. Extreme. Enormous money, enormous work, and an associate who never leaves. - Home office. Nobody can see you and everything is measured. The green dot is your new boss and it cannot be charmed. Corporate and Startup are included. Consulting and Investment Banking are unlocked together by the Career Pack. Home Office is its own pack. Both are one purchase each, not a subscription, nothing recurring, and either one removes the advertising. THE ONLY SCORE THAT MATTERS Total money earned, divided by hours you actually worked. Retire at the top of a ladder having been paid for years and worked for weeks, and the number on your record board will say so. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account and no sign-in. No server of ours. Your careers are saved on your device and nothing about them leaves it. It does show advertising, which Google's ad kit loads over the network, and either pack removes it. Minimum Effort is a work of satire. The offices, the colleagues and the careers are invented, and nothing in it is advice about a real job.