Devlog 0: Exit Liquidity is playable (and why there's a squirrel)

DRAFT / NOTES — not final copy. Outline assembled from project decisions so far. Rewrite in your own voice, keep the facts, delete this box.

What Exit Liquidity is. A stock-trading roguelite that runs in your browser. You start broke — actually worse than broke — and trade your way out or deeper in. The market is the boss fight. Runs are short and the game does not pretend the market is fair, because that would be lying.

Where it stands. v0.8. One character class is live: the Debtor (start underwater, dig out). The class roadmap is “same market, different scoreboard”: Fund Manager, Getting-By, Quant, Market Maker — each one changes what winning means, not what the market does. Current work: saves and meta-progression, so your runs finally leave a mark.

Notes to expand: what actually broke while building v0.8; one real number (playtest count, average run length, bankruptcy rate — the bankruptcy rate is probably the funny one); what the Debtor taught us about the other classes.

Why the site has a squirrel. ArcadeSquirrel isn’t just the game’s landing page. The other thing being built here is a game-discovery engine — “games like X” pages powered by what thousands of players actually say games feel like, instead of the tag-overlap junk that currently ranks. As of this week the pipeline has pulled ~5,700 management/economy/trading games’ worth of data. The engine has a quality gate to pass before any pages go live; if it doesn’t beat the incumbents visibly, we’ll say so here.

Notes to expand: the mascot saga is genuinely funny content — the cursed first squirrel, the banana tail, the pixel lab. Screenshots exist. Dev logs that show failures earn more trust than ones that don’t.

What’s next. Saves ship, then the class system opens up. Site-side: the first “games like” pages once the engine clears its gate. If you want to be told when a new class drops, the email list below is exactly that and nothing else.