An idle/clicker game about building a coercive high-demand group. Cookie Clicker meets Plague Inc, with rigorous academic sourcing.
Every mechanic maps to real research on coercive control — the BITE model, Lifton's thought-reform criteria, Hassan's influence continuum — and every upgrade tooltip cites its real-world parallel (Moonies love bombing, Scientology auditing, Heaven's Gate sleep control). Educational influence literacy disguised as entertainment. The game never uses the word "cult" — it's always "movement," "community," "family."
Open index.html in a browser. That's the entire game — single-file HTML5, vanilla JS, no build step, no dependencies. Progress autosaves to localStorage every 30 seconds.
You are the founder of a new "community." Click to reach people, spend resources to move members up the pipeline — Seeker → Newcomer → Initiate → True Believer → Inner Circle — and manage their growing doubt before they walk away.
Three click actions:
- Love Bomb — +Influence, +Devotion (the personal-attention bonus fades as the group outgrows the leader's bandwidth)
- Reassure — spend Influence to calm Doubt and generate Devotion
- Fundraise — +Tithes, +Doubt
Three currencies:
- Influence — outreach bandwidth (how you reach people)
- Devotion — compliance energy (how you keep them)
- Tithes — institutional capital (how you build infrastructure)
One anti-currency:
- Doubt — the accumulated "something doesn't add up" that makes people leave
The BITE model tech trees (Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion control) hold 24 upgrades sourced from real coercive-influence research, with cross-tree prerequisites and milestone gates. On top of that: 4 active abilities (Ecstatic Worship, Rewrite History, Confession, Thought-Terminating Clichés), 4 buildings (Community Center, Publishing House, Compound, Political Action Committee), Inner Circle role assignments (Spiritual Counselor, Lobbyist), outreach teams (growth vs. stability tradeoff), and an Org Health indicator tracking support ratios.
Shelved. Wave 1.5 is complete and stable — the full loop above is playable end to end. Wave 2 (crisis events, the Scrutiny anti-currency, cascade defection, irreversible Strategy-tree choices — the systems meant to turn an accumulation simulator into a tension simulator) is fully designed but not implemented. The groomed roadmap and first implementation slice are preserved in Issue #21, closed while the project is dormant; revival starts there.
| Doc | What it covers |
|---|---|
DESIGN.md |
Why the game should be tense — thesis, five design principles, emotional arc |
ECONOMY.md |
Currency system, what 100 of each means, known problems, Wave 2 proposals |
upgrade-tree.md |
All upgrades, buildings, events, and hierarchy mechanics with implementation status |
GDD.md |
Original vision doc (some terminology outdated — DESIGN.md and ECONOMY.md are authoritative) |