I Built a Tiny Game About Finishing the Deck

I used to think a consulting website should only hold the serious stuff. Tools. Articles. A clean page that says how I can help. Then I spent a few evenings watching a little consultant I had drawn run down a street I had invented, swinging a briefcase at a client who would not stay in his calendar slot.

It started as a joke. Most of what I have been building lately is useful on purpose. Project charters. Process maps. Root cause notes. After a while I wanted something I would actually play when I should have been writing a status update.

So I made Deadline Dash

You pick a consultant. Then a short mission screen comes up in that early-90s arcade type, the kind that used to sit under “FINISH HIM.” It tells you the job in plain language. The consultant is running to complete the decks, finish the project, and present it to the executives.

After nine levels, he may become a partner.

I was fussy about that last sentence. Partnership is not a sticker you get for showing up. The bosses, once you beat them, can say you are on your way to make partner. The actual title only shows up after the ninth floor. If it appeared earlier the joke would be cheap, and I have sat in enough year-end conversations to know how that feels.

Why put a game on a business site?

Because it is small enough to belong here. A few megabytes of HTML, CSS, pictures, and some JavaScript. No install. No account. No 200 MB game engine sitting on a page that is supposed to load on a client laptop during a coffee break.

I ran a check before I copied it over. No extra libraries. No node_modules. No calls out to a font CDN. If the pictures had been huge I would have left the game on my machine. They were not. The whole thing is about the size of a couple of blog images from the old days, which is the kind of constraint I actually like.

Also, I wanted one thing on the site that is allowed to be fun. The free tools are for workshops. This is for the ten minutes after a workshop when nobody wants another slide.

What I had to learn the hard way

I am not a game studio. Some of the jumps still feel a bit polite. On a phone it will be awkward. Use a keyboard.

The rest of it was the same loop I use on client work. Decide the slice. Build a thin version. Play it. Notice the boss speech is wrong, or the partner line shows up too early, or the mission screen looks like a Word document. Fix that. Then play it again.

The models write a lot of the code. I still have to be the person who says the joke only lands if you do not hand out partner on floor two. That part felt familiar. Requirements are requirements, even when the requirement is “make it feel a bit like Mortal Kombat 2, but about decks.”

If you want to try it

It is on this site. Play the Game! Arrow keys to move, space to jump, J to swing the briefcase, F once you find a Hot Take. There is a short training stretch at the start. Then the street opens.

If you clear a client, they get friendlier. If you clear nine, you might make partner. I will not spoil the last screen more than that.

And if you came here for the actual consulting work, that is still here too. The game is just the part I built when I was tired of making another form.