UniSchool

A university management simulation about building an institution from a small college into a major university.

Develop academic programs, hire faculty, expand your campus, attract students, conduct research, and shape your institution over decades. UniSchool is inspired by the long-term building and management loops of Cities: Skylines, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Civilization and Football Manager, with a particular focus on the feeling of watching an institution grow. A run is fifty years: the fiftieth summer files a final report — six graded axes and a name for what the school became — and seals it as the record. There is no score; there is a legacy, and more than one way to earn a good one.

Status: in active development · Stack: React + TypeScript + Vite · Genre: university management / simulation · Perspective: campus map + full-screen management interfaces

What you do

• 🏫 Expand the campus with academic buildings, dormitories, dining, recreation, health facilities and athletics venues.
• 📚 Develop the curriculum across 473 courses, 42 majors, graduate programs and seven schools: a hall becomes a school's once it holds three of its programs, and a program that isn't earning its place can be closed.
• 👩‍🏫 Hire faculty with different teaching and research strengths, read against your own faculty's — and decide who teaches what.
• 🔬 Conduct research by commissioning a topic, a team and a depth out of a specific facility, producing publications, breakthroughs and prizes.
• 🎓 Manage admissions once a year, setting tuition and selectivity and living with the class those two decisions draw.
• 🏛️ Develop student life through clubs, Greek life, varsity athletics and the facilities they need.
• 📈 Build prestige over decades across four pillars — academics, research, student life and athletics — and choose, once and for good, the one the college will be the very best at.
• 🏛️ Leave a legacy: twenty ambitions to reach along the way, and at fifty years a final report that grades the run on six axes and names what the school became.
• ⏩ Play on after the Final Report: the college keeps running into the Epilogue, and every tenth summer adds a decade to the record.
• 🧪 Sandbox mode, from the title screen: unlimited funds and instant building, every building open and no curriculum committee, to lay out a campus without waiting; a standing building can be moved, and any building drawn in any of the nine architectures.
• 🌷 Decorate the grounds for free: paths in flagstone, cobbles or brick (hold Shift for a straight run), seven kinds of tree, lamps, banner lamps in the school colours, benches and flower beds, anywhere on open ground.
• ⚖️ Deal with the unexpected — donor offers, faculty departures, facility failures, chapter scandals and student demands. Every answer does what it says (a hire, a named scholarship, a campaign, a repair on the building in question), and the college remembers how it answered. From Year 25 the board also asks one question a year, each answer trading one pillar for another for five years.

The core loop

        Develop programs & facilities
                    ↓
        Prestige is graded each summer
                    ↓
        Attract more / better students
                    ↓
              Tuition revenue
                    ↓
        Expand campus & capabilities
                    ↺

Growth is slow on purpose: prestige is a stock graded once a year, stepping toward what the school earned that year — slowly up, faster down — rather than a tally that jumps when something finishes, so standing is earned over decades and can be lost. The freshman class cannot exceed the seats the catalogue has room to teach; everything else — beds, dining, health — is the students' satisfaction, which word of mouth carries to the next pool.

Money is the pacing mechanism, and cost leads revenue — every commitment is charged up front while every payoff waits for the next summer admissions boundary, and what a section, a service and a salary cost rises with the school's standing. A cash shortfall stalls expansion; it never ends the run.

Four pillars, one specialization

Prestige is a blend of four pillars: academics, research, student life and athletics. A school can be excellent at all four, but it can be the very best at only one. The first summer the college stands in the guide's top 30 — or, from Year 20, in the top 10 of any one pillar, or with student satisfaction of 85 or more in over half its years — the board convenes, on a page of its own with a panel for each pillar and what it would build, and offers the college a single specialization: the faculty training program, the research park, the downtown and its festival, or the athletic performance complex. Each brings a building and a way of working only it has, and fills the share of its pillar that only it can fill: without one, no pillar reaches the top. The choice is kept for good, and the rivals make theirs too.

Current state

UniSchool is a playable, systems-first prototype. The core simulation is implemented: curriculum development and the milestone chain, campus construction on a tile map, faculty hiring and course assignment, annual admissions, finances, student life and athletics, research, prestige (its four pillars and the specialization) and rankings, decision events, graduate programs, and save/load (three named slots beside the autosave).

The current focus is presentation and player experience — the campus map, the management interfaces, curriculum presentation, faculty interaction and the research systems. There is no art pipeline yet: the campus and the portraits are drawn from data, and the title-screen background is an AI-generated stand-in until commissioned art replaces it.

Five architectures, eight colours

A school chooses its architecture and its colours at its founding; the map, the banner and every screen wear them. The same fifty-year campus as above, in the other four architectures, each in another of the eight colour pairs:

Collegiate Gothic · crimson and silver	Classical · forest and gold
Mission · maroon and gold	Modern · purple and gold

The camera

The view turns a quarter at a time and tilts through ten steps, from close to the horizon, with the hills and the haze, down to a plan. The same campus at four of them:

Low · the lowest tilt	Shallow · one step flatter than the opening view
Steep · two steps steeper than the opening view	Plan · straight down

In motion

• Fifty years in thirty seconds: one campus from its first week to year 50, a frame a season.
• The walkers crossing the Grand Quad in year 51.
• A walk drawn with the path tool, two straight runs out from the campus in year 3.
• A hall going up: footings, frame, shell, and the finished hall, over its 34 weeks.

The interfaces

Every view other than the map is a full screen laid over it, with the dock kept on top. These are year 51 of a finished school — the same run as the campus above — one screen per tab, in the toolbar's order, each in a different pair of school colours.

Curriculum — the catalogue by school and program, each with who teaches it and the grade they earn; a finished school folds away.	Faculty — the people: a grid of faces, each with a career, quirks and the courses they carry, under one row of figures, or as a table or a plot of teaching against research; the market and the departments a switch away.
Research — each lab's running initiative: the topic, the team, the depth and what it has produced.	Students — satisfaction by attribute and what serves it, the clubs, the chapters and the demands.
Athletics — the director, the subsidy and the gate at the side; every program one line, its rank in its sport and its last season, opening to its staff and money.	History — three views: prestige at a glance, a meter for each of its four pillars with every input that grades them under Details, the record and the legacy once sealed, and the guide.
Treasury — the operating budget as one board: the year's revenue and expenses, cash across the years, and the levers; the endowment, its named funds and the buildings a switch away. Reached through the funds figure.

Run it

cd unischool
npm install
npm run dev

Open the printed localhost URL. Name your school, pick its architecture and its colours, and a short walkthrough takes you through the first clicks — raise Founders Hall and found the first program. From there the first five years run as chapters in the NEXT bar (J opens them): a few objectives at a time, each with help behind its (?) and a Show me that rings what to click. The first summer is walked through control by control, until the college is yours to run.

Controls

Key	Action
W A S D, arrows	Pan the camera
Middle mouse drag	Pan
Scroll / pinch, + −	Zoom
Space	Pause / resume (when the summer waits, open it)
1 2	Game speed
P	Path tool
Q E	Turn the view a quarter turn
Z X	Tilt the view flatter / steeper
Home	Back to the opening view, framed on what stands
R	Rotate the picked-up building
Esc	Back / close
Enter	Dismiss the interrupt on screen
C F L	Curriculum, Faculty, Student Life

src/components/hotkeys.ts is the source of truth for how these behave; see docs/architecture/ui-shell.md.

Architecture

UniSchool uses a data-driven simulation architecture:

• A central GameState is the single source of truth.
• Systems advance the simulation through pure weekly tick(state) functions, composed in a fixed order.
• The reducer owns the game loop and interprets every action. UI dispatches actions; systems never dispatch.
• Game content lives in src/data/ — the curriculum, buildings, rivals and the authored decision-event table.
• Courses, buildings, dorms and facilities share one Buildable abstraction: one develop/build flow, one prereq resolver, one completion-effects applier.
• UI components read state and dispatch actions rather than implementing simulation rules.

See docs/architecture/ for the detailed technical documentation.

Project structure

unischool/
├── src/
│   ├── state/        GameState, initial state, actions
│   ├── engine/       the reducer (game loop) and store hook
│   ├── systems/      one folder per system, each a pure tick(state)
│   ├── data/         seed content: curriculum, buildings, events, rivals
│   ├── components/   campus map, build rail, chrome, interrupt modal
│   └── tabs/         one component per full-screen view
├── test/             suites run by `npm test`
└── sim/              headless balance runs (`npm run sim`)

Development

UniSchool is built iteratively. Current priorities:

1. Campus map and visual presentation
2. Curriculum and faculty UX
3. Research gameplay
4. Student-life depth
5. Events and institutional storytelling
6. Art and presentation

Before opening a PR, run npm run build, npm run lint and npm test — and npm run sim for anything that moves a number the economy depends on. See docs/architecture/README.md for the working conventions.

To look at a change rather than read about it: npm run scenario -- --list builds a save at any point in a run — year 8 of a balanced school, year 40 of a finished one, the week a championship modal is pending — and ?debug=1 on the URL opens a panel that loads it, reads the simulation, sets cash or prestige, jumps years and forces events. See docs/architecture/playtesting.md.

See BACKLOG.md for planned work.

How UniSchool is made

One developer designs and directs it; an AI coding assistant (Claude Code) writes the code and the text from the developer's briefs, plan by plan, and the developer chooses between the designs and plays the game between plans. The campus and the faculty portraits are drawn by that code, and the music is synthesized by it. The title-screen background and the itch.io cover are AI-generated stand-ins, to be replaced by commissioned art. No other image, and no sound or voice, comes from a generator, and the game generates nothing while you play: it makes no network calls. The capsule art and the logo will be commissioned from an artist. The full disclosure, as worded for Steam and itch.io, is docs/store/ai-disclosure.md.

Documentation

Where	What
README.md	What UniSchool is, and how to run it
BACKLOG.md	Work that is going to happen but has not
docs/design/	How each game system works today
docs/architecture/	Technical documentation for the codebase
docs/architecture/playtesting.md	How to stand the game up somewhere and measure a change
docs/plans/	Closed records of how work was sequenced and shipped
docs/reviews/	Reviews of the game on a given date, and the evidence plans cite
docs/assets/	Every buildable asset in every vernacular, as the game draws it

Three tenses, three homes: the docs describe the game as it is, the backlog what will happen, the plans what did. Nothing belongs in two of them at once.