Single-player management sim · PC · concept & prototyping stage
Everyone you hire is a number you can't quite read. So is your company. So, in the end, are you.
Football Manager's granularity × Metal Gear's recruitment × the detachment of the boardroom.
The wedge · what a deep sim hasn't done before
Football Manager taught a generation that a person is a stat block under a fuzzy scouting layer. Fog of People takes that one cruel step further: it separates two kinds of not-knowing, and builds a whole game in the gap between them.
The honest lie
Vasquez reads "Guarding: B." True. It's a correct average.
It's also an S-grade static sentry and an E-grade patrolman wearing one letter. The grade misleads precisely because it's accurate. Reading it and trusting it is the most defensible decision in the game, and the one that damns you.
Two errors that don't behave alike
Observational fuzz: your read is noisy, a better scout fixes it.
Aggregation loss: even a perfectly known grade has already thrown the detail away, so the only fix is to resolve deeper rather than scout harder. FM models the first kind. The second kind is what this game is built on.
The proof it's a different kind of sim · subject 003 resolving ▸
Every role earns one axis no personnel sim has split before.
For the sentry, it's signal detection itself:
Detection Sensitivity: S Can he actually tell a real infiltrator from a fox in the wire? Vasquez grades S... almost nothing gets past him.
Response Criterion: shy How trigger-happy is he about calling it? Shy. He might let a real one walk before he'll risk a false alarm. Miss vs false alarm carry wildly asymmetric costs, and you staff for one or the other.
Four pillars
The voice · a comedy with the lights about to come up
The register is dry, venal satire: vain operators, a CEO weighing lives like a fleet lease. You laugh. You're supposed to. The chrome is built so the flippant interface that clears an expense report clears the worst day of a hundred people's lives without changing a single pixel. Try it: the queue is live. The redacted notes only resolve if you choose to look.
Same font. Same button. The only thing that changes is the noun. And whether you bothered to read it.
Nobody changes the font when the noun gets worse. That was the deal you signed in the first hour.
At a glance
Positioning
For the players who loved Metal Gear, Suzerain, Football Manager, and Crusader Kings, and wished one game had the spine to be all four.
It sits in a gap the market keeps proving is real: deep, legible systems on one side, authored, uncomfortable storytelling on the other. A hardcore sim with a strong point of view tends to compound its audience rather than split it; the deep-systems crowd and the story crowd are more and more the same people. Fog of People is built for that overlap: a sim hardcore enough to be tabbed into for a hundred hours, wrapped around satire pointed enough to be talked about.
Status & the ask
For publishers
We'd like to show you the build.
The full design bible and prototype materials are available. We're looking for one partner who reads "a granularity sim about the cost of not looking closer" and leans in rather than blinks.
[ bane williams ] · press@fogofpeople.com
[ linkedin ]