About TycoonForge
Kids meet exponential growth and manipulative monetization long before anyone names either — inside the idle games they already play. TycoonForge makes both visible: your child builds the money loop, watches it compound, then decides, as the designer, how it should (and shouldn't) make money.
Compounding, by building it
Three dials drive a reinvestment loop: each upgrade multiplies output, and the bigger output buys the next upgrade sooner — a curve that bends upward. That's compounding, the same maths behind savings and populations, felt from the inside instead of read off a slide.
The design-ethics turn
Once the loop is fun, TycoonForge asks the question real studios ask: sell shortcuts, or not? A "pay to skip" button and a paid crate are shown as dials that trade simulated spending for fun — and on the same screen, more money means fewer players still enjoying it.
The Timer Rule
The happiest players are on no monetization. That result is the Timer Rule behind every Spark & Anvil game — no wait can be bought, nothing you built rots. We show the manipulation dials so a child can recognise them in the wild, not so anyone ships them.
What it's good for (and what we don't claim)
TycoonForge is practice in systems thinking (feedback + compounding) and in reading a game's incentives. The money-and-fun numbers are a deliberate illustration, not real sales data, and we make no claim it changes how a child spends — it's a lab for seeing how game economies work.
Safe by design
- Deterministic + on-device. The whole sim runs in your browser — no network, no accounts, nothing sent anywhere.
- No dark patterns — and it's about them. No timer, no streak, no score, nothing to buy; the manipulation is the subject, never the product.
- Progress stays with you. Kept in your browser only.