The Venue Operations Game

Design Document · Rev. 2 Management Sim · Live Event Mode 14 Aug 2026
SCROLL TO RUN THE DAY
Form 1 — Project Brief Sheet 1 of 6
Logline
A game about the four hours before the lights go on.
Premise
You run operations for a venue technology company. You win the deal on paper, hang the hardware in the dark, and then stand in a control room at 7:42 PM while sixty-eight thousand people look at your screen. Everything you did for six months is now one cabinet that either lights or doesn't.
Genre
Management sim with a live event mode. The rhythm is Motorsport Manager's, not Two Point Hospital's — you prepare all week, then a night arrives that you cannot pause.
The Hook
Every other system in the game exists to buy you the right to be standing in that control room. Win the bid, staff the crew, hold the SLA — all of it is preparation for a night you have to survive live.
The Currency
Not money. Attention. There is one of you and four things happening. Money is just how you buy more of yourself, badly.
Session Shape
Twenty quiet minutes of paperwork, planning and staffing, then eight minutes you play with your hands off the keyboard because you're leaning in.

Four movements

Paper
becomes
light.

The loop runs cold to hot. It starts in a spreadsheet and ends in a stadium, and the whole design is the distance between those two rooms.

MOVEMENT 01

Pitch

The paper war

RFPs arrive with a clock already running on them. You scope the deal across three lines — hardware, service, sponsorship — and submit before the deadline. Rival vendors are bidding the same room and you never see their number.

MechanicBidding is poker, not arithmetic. You can spend time and money buying your way toward the range: a site visit, a relationship, a friend on the inside.
Fails whenYou bid to win every job. Cheap wins are the ones that eat your crew in October.
MOVEMENT 02

Hang

The install

Won deal, scheduled install. Crews, lifts, a loading dock, a union hall, and weather. Techs are people with home cities, fatigue, specialisations, and a limit. Every day you slip is a day of reputation you don't get back.

MechanicStaffing a Tuesday–Wednesday–Friday across three states is the actual puzzle. Travel costs money and morale; morale costs you the next job.
Fails whenYou treat techs as interchangeable units. Tomas has a bad knee and hates working the catwalk.
MOVEMENT 03

Run

Game day · live mode

Doors at six. Kickoff at seven. Everything you built is now load-bearing in front of a crowd. This is the only part of the game that runs in real time, and it is the reason the rest of it exists.

MechanicReal-time triage against an SLA clock, with a client standing behind you. Detailed below.
Fails whenYou planned for the game and not for the night. Nobody schedules a storm.
MOVEMENT 04

Hold

The long tail

Between events: tickets, RMAs, walkthroughs, the SLA table nobody reads until it's evidence. Deeply unglamorous work that quietly decides whether the renewal is a phone call or another bid.

MechanicCompliance is a slow bar that only ever moves down. Happy venues expand; unhappy ones stop returning calls long before they formally leave.
Fails whenYou chase new logos while the accounts you have go quiet.

Movement 03 · live mode

Nineteen
forty‑two.

Second quarter. The ring board loses a cabinet. You have an SLA, a crew spread across the building, and a client who has just turned around to look at you.

Huntington Bank Field Attendance 67,431 Q2 · 06:18 ● FAULT

Active incident

Cabinet 14 — No Signal

RING BOARD · NORTH · SECTION 4 OF 9 · RECEIVER CARD SUSPECT

  • D. Okafor — lead techon site · catwalk
  • M. Reyes — control roomon site · console
  • Spare receiver cardsin the truck · 4 min
  • J. Whitlock — regional40 min out

SLA remaining

00:14:59

Contractual response · Tier 1 venue

You cannot fix this and watch the west board and take the call from the sponsor. Pick two, and find out at 21:00 which one you should have picked.

Failure · Hardware

A receiver card dies mid-quarter. Fifteen minutes on a lift, in front of a full house, with the camera cutting to the board every whistle.

Failure · Feed

The broadcast feed drops on the main board. Nothing is broken and everyone can see that something is.

Failure · Contract

A sponsor's spot doesn't render in its window. That's a make-good, and make-goods come out of next season's inventory.

Failure · People

A tech no-shows. The crew you needed tonight is the crew you sent to the install you underbid in March.

Failure · Weather

Lightning inside eight miles. You have a call to make about two people standing on a catwalk, and it isn't a game-design call.

Failure · Thermal

Processor runs hot in a room that was never specced for it. It doesn't fail tonight. It fails in week nine.

Survive the night and the venue renews. Survive twenty and they stop taking other bids.

Revision pass · six changes

What I
changed,
and why.

The original outline was structurally sound and mechanically soft. Six edits, each one trading a system that solves in an afternoon for a system that stays interesting at hour two hundred.

01
WasThree consecutive game-day failures and your biggest venue walks to a competitor.

Death by irrelevance

Reputation doesn't kill you — it gates which RFPs you're invited to bid at all. Lose enough of it and you don't lose the game. You just stop getting mail, and starve in a quiet office with a clean record.

Why — An X-strikes counter is a fail-state nobody trips, because the correct response is to play safe. A shrinking invitation list is scarier, unfixable in one good night, and it is what actually happens in this business.

02
WasWin or lose the bid based on price, fit and relationship.

Bidding is hidden information

You never see a rival's number. You can only buy your way toward the range — a site visit, a lunch, a relationship with the facilities director, a rumour from a vendor rep. Intel narrows the band; it never gives you the answer.

Why — Price plus fit plus relationship is solvable in three hours, and after that it's a spreadsheet forever. Hidden information turns bidding into poker. That's the difference between a two-hour game and a two-hundred-hour one.

03
WasAssign field techs based on skills, location and availability.

Techs are people, not units

Home cities that make travel cost money and morale. Fatigue that accumulates across a road stretch. Specialisations that make certain venues genuinely painful. Burnout. A named tech you rely on for two seasons and then lose to a competitor who offered him weekends.

Why — Football Manager works because Tomas has a bad knee. Attachment is the engine of a management sim; a roster of interchangeable units generates logistics, not stories.

04
WasThree deal types: tech, services, media — pick your lane.

The verticals fight each other

All three draw on one finite pool: your crew's calendar and your capital. Winning a flagship install eats the techs you needed for Thursday's game. Selling sponsorship inventory commits you to uptime you haven't staffed for.

Why — As written they were three parallel menus, which stack instead of competing. Contention is what makes a choice a choice.

05
WasBuild an empire where game days run themselves — AI handles tickets, staff auto-assign.

Automation buys scale, never rest

Every tool you unlock raises how much you can hold at one time. It never lowers how much attention a night costs. Twenty venues with the full stack feel exactly as tight as three venues did with a clipboard — you just matter more.

Why — "The game plays itself" is the one upgrade path that ends the game. If automation removes pressure, the last hour is the worst hour. It should remove ceiling instead.

06
WasReplace every rival vendor in the region.

One flagship, visible from hour one

A single crown-jewel building — the kind that hosts a championship — that only goes to the vendor with the reputation, the crew, the technology and the balance sheet at the same time. You can see it on the map in the tutorial. You can't touch it for forty hours.

Why — "Beat everyone" is map-painting: it ends in mop-up, not climax. One named target gives every early decision a direction and makes the last bid mean something.

Progression

Four rungs.

Each rung raises what you can hold, not how comfortable it feels. Drag sideways.

Rung 01

Startup

1 venue · 2 techs
  • Basic hardware catalogue
  • Proposals typed by hand
  • You are the crew and the salesman
  • One bad night is the whole company
Rung 02

Regional

5+ venues · a design bench
  • Service scheduling board
  • Estimating that remembers last year
  • First named tech you can't lose
  • Two games on the same Thursday
Rung 03

National

20+ venues · media inventory
  • Sponsorship deals with uptime terms
  • Multi-team allocation across markets
  • Event discovery — you find work early
  • Four nights running at once
Rung 04

Empire

Flagship class
  • Custom installs nobody else can bid
  • Assistants who triage before you see it
  • Rivals bid against your price, not your work
  • The championship building is in reach

The Systems Architect

He isn't a cameo. He's the tech tree.

Between chapters, a contractor you never fully meet ships you a capability: an estimating engine, an operations board, an assistant that reads your inbox. He is terse, never explains how any of it works, and what he delivers is always slightly more than you asked for.

Every upgrade in the game comes through him, which means the automation ladder has a face. Ignore his tools and you keep playing the early game while your competitors play the late one — the difficulty curve is you refusing help.

> done. try the export.

Shipments

  1. Estimating engineRung 01
  2. Pipeline & bid trackerRung 02
  3. Operations boardRung 02
  4. Proposal generatorRung 03
  5. Ticket triage assistantRung 03
  6. Allocation solverRung 04
  7. The one he wasn't asked for—

Win condition

The building everyone bids and nobody gets

One flagship venue, named and visible from your first hour. It only opens to a vendor holding reputation, crew depth, technology and balance sheet at the same moment — and it only opens once.

Winning it isn't the end of a checklist. It's the one night where every system you built is load-bearing simultaneously.

Loss condition

The inbox goes quiet

No dramatic collapse. Reputation slides, invitations thin out, and one season you notice the good RFPs stopped arriving. The venues you have don't fire you — they simply put the next job out to bid.

You can still run a clean operation for a long time after you've stopped being asked. That's the horror of it.

Win it on paper.
Hang it in the dark.
Hold it at 7:42.

Everything in this document is drawn from a real operation: the three revenue lines, the estimating fight, the staffing board, the SLA table, the tools that arrive between chapters. The game is a management sim because the job already is one.

LED Empire · Design Document Rev. 2 Six revisions applied 14 Aug 2026