Why we write these
Building a tycoon game means making a hundred arguments with yourself about what the genre is for. Should the economy be legible or discoverable? Is a map a puzzle or a place? When does a management game stop asking for judgement and start asking only for patience?
We were having those arguments anyway, so we started writing them down. The articles here are the ones that turned out to be about something larger than our own build — the genre, its history, the real industry it borrows from — rather than about a decision we happened to make on a Tuesday.
That means they are opinionated, and they are meant to be. An essay that carefully avoids taking a position is not worth the reading time.
What you will find here
The genre and where it came from. Transport tycoons have been around long enough to have a lineage, and the constraints that shaped the classics — a machine that could not hold a whole world in memory, a map that had to be generated because no one could ship a real one — are not our constraints any more. What survives when those limits lift is a question worth asking, and how tycoon games moved into the browser is where we ask it.
What makes one good. The genre has a failure mode: a game that looks like management but is really a clicker in a business costume, where every decision resolves to “wait longer, then buy the bigger one”. Five design tests is our attempt to name the difference precisely enough to be useful — including where our own game would fail them.
Why the map matters. Most transport games are played on terrain designed to be fair to you. A real city was designed for other reasons entirely, and it does not care whether your depot is well placed. What changes when the streets are real works through what that does to routing, to planning, and to what expertise in the game even means.
The words the industry actually uses. Deadhead, backhaul, dwell time, payload — freight vocabulary carries freight ideas, and each term names a decision a good game should let you make. A logistics glossary for tycoon players translates them, and points at which ones our game models and which it does not yet.
Where to find the others. Not every browser tycoon is trying to do the same thing, and we would rather point you at the good ones than pretend we are the only option. Games like Transport Tycoon you can play in your browser is exactly that list.
Blog, devlog, guides — which is which
Three sections, three different jobs, and it is worth knowing which one you want.
The blog — this section — is about the genre. You can read it without ever having opened the game, and most of it would still be true if we had built something else entirely.
The devlog is about this build specifically: what shipped, what broke, what we changed our minds about. It is dated, chronological, and written by the people doing the work.
The guides are practical. They explain how a system behaves so you can play better, and they are updated whenever that behaviour changes.
If you are new and want the short path into the game itself, skip all three for now and start with How to Play.