Pitch Draft: Corporate Physics

This game represents the way corporations work through a highly abstract physical metaphor.

The player controls a corporation, which is represented as a series of components that can be connected together a various ways. Each component serves a specific purpose. Having more more employees in a component increases it’s visual size, it’s effectiveness and the amount of capital the player must keep streaming in to keep the company afloat. Some components are:

• Administration provides a large number of tabs onto which other components can be attached.


• Production creates widgets.


• R&D increases the cost at which widgets can be sold to consumers.


• Warehouses allow widgets to be stored.


• Sales acts as a vacuum cleaner, which sucks up consumers can pops them out the other side with less money and in possession of a widget.


• Marketing acts as a magnet, drawing consumers towards itself. The marketing component can be placed to draw consumers towards the sales component.


• Legal acts as a cannon that can be used to attack other corporations, knocking them out of position.

Consumers are represented as little dots, which respond to forces exerted by the corporations. A consumer slowly grows in money, which makes the effects of corporations’ marketing and sales beams stronger, but being sucked up by a corporation’s sales component reduces their money.

Players must balance the need for growth with the dangers of growing too fast and not being able to support their employees. Growth is encouraged by pressure from competing corporations… if rival corporations outpace the player, the player will be crushed by rival corporations legal attacks.

Of course, this is all pie-in-sky kinda stuff. I don’t think I can really make the kinda AI that this would require, and without the AI it all falls down.