3. Game loops

Quorum has six nested loops, and each feeds the one above it. A short loop must pay off before the player loses interest, and a long loop must give a reason to keep playing the short ones.

L0: Pulse (1–10 seconds)#

The player glances at the board.

1. Glance. Particles move. A card turns amber. The $/s number ticks.

2. Collect. Revenue piles up in the Payments drawer. The player clicks to collect it. Research "Stripe Billing" automates this (Progression).

3. React. The player clicks Upgrade on a red card, or ignores it.

The pulse gives an idle player a small, satisfying action at any moment. It becomes automatic by the end of the Garage Era, because a pulse that never changes turns into a chore (pillar 5).

L1: Bottleneck (30 seconds to 3 minutes)#

This is the core loop: Factorio's loop, applied to requests.

Rules that keep this loop deep:

• One tightest Node. The simulation is a flow network. At any time, one Node limits each request path (Simulation).

• Several kinds of bottleneck. A Node can run out of CPU, workers, memory, connections, disk I/O, or network. Each needs a different fix, and more hardware fixes only some of them.

• Fixes have side effects. A cache removes database load but adds staleness. A replica adds read capacity but adds replication lag. More app servers add database connections.

• The bottleneck moves both ways. Faster app servers send more queries to the database, and a faster database lets app servers finish sooner, which frees workers.

L2: Growth (5 to 20 minutes)#

• Users grow while the design keeps Apdex above the Era target, and they leave when it drops (Simulation).

• Cash buys capacity. Insight buys research. Dev Hours buy features, migrations, and fixes (Economy).

• Features raise revenue and change the request mix. A successful feature creates load, so it feeds the L1 loop again (Team and velocity).

• Growth follows an S-curve toward the Era's market size, so growth slows near the cap. The player needs a new Era, a new feature, or a new region to grow further (Balancing).

L3: Era (30 to 120 minutes)#

An Era is a stage of the company, from Garage to Public. When users reach the Era's milestone, the player can raise a funding round.

Each Era is a phase shift: it changes what the player optimizes.

Progression lists the milestones, grants, kinds, and unlocks.

L4: Company (6 to 15 hours)#

• An Exit ends a company. Its payout depends on Equity and valuation (Exit and Legacy).

• Legacy buys permanent perks, Playbooks, and new Ventures.

• A Venture changes the rules of the next company: its request mix, its constraints, and its incidents. A fintech company and a game backend need different designs (Exit and Legacy).

The first company takes 9 to 12 hours. Later companies take 3 to 6 hours, because Legacy speeds the early Eras and Playbooks remove repeated setup.

L5: Mastery (unbounded)#

• Challenges. Fixed puzzles inspired by real events. Each one scores cost, p99, and complexity on three histograms (Challenges).

• Daily drill. A seeded incident that every player gets on the same day.

• Sandbox. Guided Sandboxes teach one mechanic each, and the free Sandbox is a test bench. Neither feeds the Company (Sandbox).

• Public Era quarters. An endless mode in which the player must beat growth and margin targets each quarter (Progression).

• Achievements. Achievements reward knowledge and unusual builds, not hours played.

Interrupt: the incident loop#

Incidents break into any loop from the Pre-seed Era on.

Pacing#

Pacing aims for a steady stream of goals, as Factorio does (Influences). The times below are for a person playing in real time. The Balanced bot in Balancing runs on sim minutes and moves faster, so its Era times do not match this table.

The Balancing document holds the curves behind these targets and the scripted players that check them.

Session shapes#

Offline rules are in Simulation.