Developing a web-based economic strategy game: take over a small business in a real Spanish city and try to make it work.
Anthropic added a $100 Cloud credit to my account so I thought I’d try something that can run mostly unattended.
Claude Cloud runs from a GitHub repository so I’ve created one here https://github.com/robotzero1/Traspaso with an initial CLAUDE.md and SPEC.md file created by Claude after a brief discussion of what I wanted.
Off we go…
Milestone 1 is complete. We had a brief discussion about needing opening hours rather than just hours per day because some businesses are very reliant on certain parts of the day.
Milestone 2 is complete. I wanted to know how far it’s possible to measure footfall:
Milestone 3 is done with some choices made by Claude. I want to keep the game pretty low key without a hard failure or win scenerio.
Milestone 4 is done. It’s not making a simple game for sure!
Milestone 5 is done:
Milestone 6 is done:
I thinking the game should be in English for an international audience but I like the use of the Spanish terms to make it more authentic feeling to play.
Milestone 7 is done:
Thought it was time to take a look at the front end…
A few commands…
and I have the interface to play with:
It’s pretty complicated but this is OK because we are making the game’s financial engine at the moment and we need to test the maths are good before automating any boring elements.
I did a one month test. The game’s obviously not finished but it seems wildly optimistic with it’s income figures.
2184 customers spending an average of 3.86€ (nearly all will only be spending 1.50€ on a coffee). Also the total number of customers is about 15 per hour in a 17 seat café. Not normal for Spain. Let’s see what the next milestones bring.
Milestone 8 is done but I have to do some extra steps…
Quite a lot of cool stuff in this milestone:
Hmmm… there was a lot of messing around on this milestone to get the Streetmap data. Something that might have been easier if the whole thing was built locally.
Apologies to the Overpass team if I was abusing your API for the tiles…
Assuming it’s actually doing this properly, it’s incredible how quickly it moves through this stuff. I would have taken days to set up these tests and look over the results.
Seems to be happy with the footfall…
I’m not really happy with the way footfall is done through the day as some places in the city are swarming with people at times and other times .. dead. This is the improvements:
So, after the changes…
I found some real population data on the Zaragoza Ayuntamiento website (https://www.zaragoza.es/web/espacio-de-datos/servicio/catalogo/?query=poblacion)
After some pulling, regenerating the geo stuff and pushing back to the repository…
nice!
Some results are in…
OK, now it seems to be going in circles tweaking things to make the game work in different scenarios. I’ll leave it running and then ask it some questions about average spend etc to see if if has sensible values for Spain.
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