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v0.1.0 - First build anybody can open
An accelerator bought on the day it launches is worth about half of what you paid, that same day.
It loses another quarter every time a better one ships. Nobody tells you at the point of sale, and by the time it reaches your books the decision is two years old.
Every mechanism in this build exists to make that one fact expensive to ignore.
Everything before today was source only. You needed Unity and a checkout to see any of it.
This is first version of Scaling Laws that anybody can download and run, and it plays end to end, from cold open in January 2022 to a company that is either still trading in 2026 or is not.
You design the model, not a stat block
Eight pages: branding, foundation, scale, data, compute, safety, review, and what happens after training.
The model creator, eight stages.
The scale page decides most of the outcome. Parameters against tokens on a logarithmic belt, so half of optimal and twice optimal sit the same distance from the middle.
About twenty tokens per parameter is compute-optimal, from the corrected Chinchilla fit rather than the constants printed in original paper, because those do not reproduce paper's own ratio.
Money is not what gates scale.
A two-person company in January 2022 cannot schedule a trillion-parameter run however much cash it has.
The parameter slider stops at about 31 billion, and fifty research nodes move it through four rungs to ten trillion.
The lock lives in the simulation rather than on the slider, because a cap that exists only in the interface is a suggestion the moment there is a second way to commit.
Architecture: five directions, one budget, and a locked half that names the node that would open it.
The numbers on those sliders are not the numbers the game uses.
Effort is normalised, so 35, 20, 30, 15 and 10 is really 32, 18, 27, 14 and 9 per cent of one budget.
Both figures sit on the row, because showing only raw ones hides entire trade.
Compute is a queue, not a number
A fleet at a hundred per cent, and renting the way out of it.
Response time is the queueing shape rather than a line: a floor of 180 milliseconds divided by the headroom you have left.
At half load a request takes twice the floor. At ninety per cent it takes ten times it.
That curve is the whole reason overprovisioning is a decision rather than waste, because difference between eighty and ninety five per cent is not fifteen per cent of anything.
The market reads yesterday's load, not today's. So you fix it and you still pay for it tomorrow.
Seven cards beat eight.
Fill a server cabinet completely and heat throttles everything in it.
Swap one accelerator for a fan and the same cabinet delivers more, because a rack's rating is what it sheds unaided.
Cabinets do not age. Chips get hotter. A room you filled in 2023 and never went back to is quietly losing you throughput by 2027.
Shipping an update does not move everybody onto it
Upgrades priced as one basket, and a version list where the audience is split.
A quarter of your users take the new version on day one. The rest drift across at twelve per cent of remaining gap per day, and if the new version is worse they never come at all.
What the market thinks of your company is what your users are actually running, not the best thing you ever shipped.
Fourteen labs, and three of them come apart
Rivals, what they think of you, their share price, and the option nobody is proud of.
Each rival carries a dated history you can open.
Three fall apart during the campaign and the reasons are your own exposures: a data question that lands in court eighteen months late, a team a cloud vendor hires away, a bill nobody worked out how to pay.
A dossier opened in 2023 cannot mention a 2024 collapse, and no individual person is ever named.
You can buy into them, up to 35 per cent of the float.
You can also run a smear campaign, and being caught costs more than landing it would have gained, on purpose, or it stops being a decision and becomes a purchase.
A regulator gives you five days.
A serious safety incident does not fine you. It opens a file, says nothing has been decided, and puts a banner across the top of whatever screen you are looking at. Five days later the verdict is rolled against the protections that model shipped with.
Researching better protections next year does not retroactively harden something you released today.
What this build is, honestly
An alpha. The art is partial, several screens are still plain, and the world map in character creation is a placeholder I do not like.
The city is not in this build.
A surveyed blockout across 2048 metres, houses on subdivided plots, a downtown grid, offices you rent before you can buy them.
It is where the company physically exists and it is being built next. I would rather say that here than have you go looking for it.
Six hours before this went out
I found out the game opens in a window exactly the size of your screen.
Not slightly too big. Exactly.
The title bar sat above the top edge of the display and the game's own bottom bar, the one holding the clock and every tab, sat behind the Windows taskbar. It could not be resized, because I turned that off eight months ago and never thought about it again.
I had never seen it once, because the Unity editor draws your game inside its own window with its own title bar.
The first thing every player would ever see was the one thing I was structurally incapable of noticing.
Two more from the same afternoon.
The build said version 1.0 while the changelog said 0.1.0, and the game stamps that number onto every bug report a tester sends me, so every report from launch would have been filed against a release that does not exist. And a sentence in my own README said an automated test fails the build if a coasting company is not insolvent inside three years.
The test checks eight. Nothing had ever measured three. I had been repeating it in public for weeks because I wrote it once and it sounded right.
All three are fixed. I am writing them down because the next person to ship their first build will hit the same class of thing, and because pretending it was smooth would make everything else here less believable.
The receipts
| Automated tests | 888 EditMode across 88 files, 21 PlayMode across 7 |
| C# | 99,872 lines across 337 files, 70,314 of them in Scripts/ |
| Commits, all public | 174 since 2 August 2026 |
| Save format | v44, changed forty-four times without breaking a campaign |
| Research nodes | 50, across four eras and three tracks |
| Rival labs | 14, each with a dated history |
| Tutorial | 53 steps across six acts, skippable at any point |
| Languages | English and Polish, 1,321 phrases, switchable mid-sentence |
| Engine | Unity 6000.5.8f1 |
| Download | 75.9 MB zipped |
Twelve. That is how many mechanisms I have shipped that were finished, tested, and impossible for a player to reach. One of them was an entire progression system that charged research points, cash and four months of in-game calendar and delivered nothing, with 531 tests green the whole time. There is a script that checks for it now, and that number is in this table on purpose.
Install
Download the zip, unpack the whole folder, run Scaling Laws.exe.
Keep the folder together. Windows will show a SmartScreen warning the first time because the executable is not signed with a paid certificate.
More info, then Run anyway.
Windows 10 64-bit or newer, 8 GB RAM, 1366x768 or larger. There is a README.md and a short Meet me.md inside the zip.
The game has no networking of its own and never sends anything on its own.
Unity analytics, crash reporting and performance reporting are all switched off in the project settings.
If you play it
Tell me the exact moment you got confused.
Not whether you liked it. Where you stopped understanding what the game wanted from you.
There is a REPORT button in the pause menu that opens a form carrying the build number and how far into the campaign you were, and nothing else. One sentence in that box is worth more to me right now than a hundred downloads nobody opens.
Built by Marcin "HCK" Firmuga in Radom, Poland, in the evenings after driving a taxi.
Everything else: https://linktr.ee/marcin_firmuga
Coffee, if you feel like it: https://buycoffee.to/hcklabs