Devlog, Game design
Big Chair devlog: designing a career roguelite you play with one thumb
Devlog for Big Chair — how Reigns-style swipe decisions, flick mini-games and a data-driven career engine combine into runs through a footballer's, rock star's or founder's life.
Indie game developer · Aarhus, Denmark
Big Chair is my career roguelite: live the life of a footballer, a rock star or a startup founder, one swiped card at a time — and when the big moment comes, play it yourself with a flick. Three lives, one chair. This devlog covers the design skeleton and the engine that makes three careers feasible for one developer.
Why a career is a perfect roguelite
Reigns taught everyone that one thumb can rule a kingdom. What struck me is that a career fits the roguelite frame even better than a kingdom does. A career has acts (youth, rise, peak, legacy), escalating stakes, temptation (money now versus form later), and a natural permadeath — retirement, burnout, scandal. Nobody expects to win their first life. Runs are the fantasy, not the compromise.
Each swipe is a decision card that moves hidden and visible meters — form, fame, money, sanity. Tier gates sit between acts: perform, or the run ends in the second division of life.
Decision meets execution
Pure card games have a flaw: the biggest moments are the ones you read about. In Big Chair, the climactic beats break out of the deck into flick mini-games. Cup final? You flick the decisive shot. Arena gig? Your timing writes the review. Investor pitch? One gesture under pressure.
Mechanically these are tiny — a canvas layer sharing the same one-thumb input model as the cards — but they change the game’s emotional math completely. When the run dies, it dies by your hand, not by a dice roll you read about. That’s what makes “one more life” irresistible.
Careers are data, not code
The engine doesn’t know what a footballer is. A career is a content package: a deck of authored cards, meter definitions, tier gates, mini-game bindings and endings. All of it is validated with Zod schemas at build time, so a typo in a card can’t silently corrupt a run three acts later.
This is the whole reason three careers can exist at launch. The Football Player deck taught me the format; the Rock Star and Founder decks reuse every system and only bring their own words, art and failure modes. Career four will be cheaper still.
The stack is my usual: React + TypeScript + Vite, Tailwind for UI, Framer Motion doing the card physics — the drag, the tilt, the snap-back, the commit-past-the-threshold. If the swipe doesn’t feel like a decision, nothing downstream matters, so an absurd share of development time lives in those spring constants.
Status
Full rebuild underway with the release checklist in sight — App Store next. The careers currently in the build: Football Player, Rock Star, Startup Founder. Follow the Big Chair page for the release; the store subtitle is already carved: Live a life. Take the chair.