I’ve been building Urban Makers Construction for a year now, and the experience keeps reminding me of something unexpected: the survival and real-time strategy games I grew up on. Don’t Starve, StarCraft, Warcraft. The rhythm is almost identical.
There’s a period of learning the game. Then resource collection. Then optimization. And only after all of that are you ready to go out on missions.
Don’t Starve got it right
Of all of them, Don’t Starve is the closest match, because it layers real survival mechanics on top of the strategy. Poor planning today might still get you through the next few days. But if you’re playing for a longer-term objective, you need to constantly generate resources and make sure the finite ones don’t run out. That means exploring further from your base, or discovering new resources entirely. Coasting is a decision too, and the game punishes it a few in-game weeks later, long after you made the mistake.
The parallels keep going. Game updates are new technologies and new ways of doing things arriving in the real world. The enemies and random variables are competitors and clients. And the first few months are pure trial and error, learning an entirely new content area.
Wearing every hat
That learning isn’t just about the industry. It’s about the functions of an entrepreneur and a business owner, which are very different from taking up a specialized role as an employee. You have to do marketing, finance, operations, HR, maybe all in the same day, and some days much more of one than the others.
A lot of the time these demands are in conflict, and many things seem urgent. So there’s a new skill to build that no previous role taught me: figuring out what is truly the most urgent thing today.
The health bar is real
On top of all that, there’s a very real finite resource that games only gesture at: your personal well-being and your life. I’m married. There’s a house mortgage. There’s my own mental and physical health, family, and friendships. No job prepares you to manage that resource as an entrepreneur, because in a job it was never really yours to manage.
In my past job, planning for the future wasn’t truly a requirement. A salary arrived at the end of every month. A performance appraisal came every six months with clear metrics. There was mentorship from bosses who, if you followed closely, would all but guarantee a pay raise or some financial reward.
In entrepreneurship, you are responsible for your actions today, and many of the decisions you make now carry high upfront costs that only pay out months later. The learning curve echoes the same cadence: lessons take weeks or months to pan out before you can even review whether they worked.
Easy wins versus the long build
The hardest trade-off is between chasing wins that look easy today but carry a high cost in the end, and taking a pause to build longer-term strategic capabilities. And while you’re weighing that, there’s a voice of fear and doubt asking whether you’re just making excuses to avoid the difficult parts of the job in front of you.
These are decisions where you’re accountable only to yourself, and perhaps your business partner. There is no one else to tell you what to do. You have to spend time searching your own heart and mind to figure out the truth.
That, more than anything, is what the games never simulated. The resource maps, the tech trees, the seasons that punish poor planning: all of that transfers. But in the game, the objective is printed on the screen. Out here, deciding what the mission actually is turns out to be the hardest part of playing.