Game design document · Quorum Wiki

This is the internal design document behind Quorum, an incremental systems game in the spirit of Upload Labs and Factorio, built on real engineering behavior. The game is the source of truth for every number, and these pages describe what it does.

The game in one paragraph#

You are the first engineer of a startup. Users send requests, and you wire Components on a board, pick the runtime and framework that each server runs, and watch requests flow through your design as particles. Served requests earn Cash. Sampled traffic earns Insight, which buys research. Each fix moves the bottleneck somewhere else, and funding rounds bring new kinds of requests that break your design in new ways. At the end of a company you Exit, earn Legacy, and found a new company with different rules.

Every number comes from a real behavior. PHP-FPM workers run out of memory, a Node.js event loop stalls on bcrypt, a JVM is slow until it warms up, and an average latency hides the p99.

Table of Contents#

#	Document	Answers
1	Vision and pillars	What the game is, who it is for, and the rules every design decision follows.
2	Influences and research	Why players love Upload Labs, Factorio, and Opus Magnum, and why some players quit.
3	Game loops	The six nested loops, from a two-second glance to a hundred-hour mastery goal.
4	Simulation	How requests, capacity, queues, latency, errors, and users are calculated.
5	Components	Every placeable Component, its real product, its stats, and its options.
6	Runtimes and frameworks	Languages, runtime variants, and frameworks as tradeoffs, not tiers.
7	Data tier	Databases, caches, replicas, quorums, consistency, and storage.
8	Team and velocity	Engineers, Dev Hours, features, tech debt, services, and Conway's law.
9	Economy	Currencies, sources and sinks, the cloud bill, pricing models, and funding.
10	Progression	Eras, the research tree, product features, and pacing targets.
11	Incidents and reliability	The incident catalog, the incident loop, SLOs, and error budgets.
12	Observability and Insight	Fog of war for systems: what the player can see and how they earn the right to see more.
13	Exit and Legacy	The prestige layer: Exits, Legacy, Ventures, and Mutators.
14	Sandbox, Challenges, and achievements	Guided and free Sandboxes, fixed puzzles with histograms, daily drills, and achievements.
15	Interface and game feel	The board, Node cards, feedback, bulk actions, and accessibility.
16	Balancing	Every formula, every tunable constant, and the pacing model.
17	Scope and roadmap	What the game contains, the milestones, and open questions.
18	Mail	Mail: colour-coded senders, threads, teammates, CVEs, and spam as the game's main channel.
—	Measurements	Balance snapshots taken at a named simulation version.

Reference documents#

Document	Use it for
CONTEXT.md	The game vocabulary. Code, UI copy, and these documents use these words.
Engineering glossary	Real engineering terms that the game teaches, each linked to its mechanic.
Reality check	Each real-world claim, the game rule built on it, the simplification, and its source.
Decision records	The reasons behind load-bearing decisions.

Conventions in these documents#

Bold Capitalized words, such as Node, Era, and Insight, are game terms defined in CONTEXT.md.
Engineering terms, such as event loop, link to the engineering glossary.
Every number is a balance target unless the text says otherwise. The source of truth for numbers in code is packages/simulation/src/catalog.ts. When this document and the catalog disagree, Balancing records which one wins.
"Real" marks a behavior taken from real systems. "Stylized" marks a behavior that the game simplifies or exaggerates for play. Reality check lists both.