UniSchool

An early playtest build. Your feedback will help inform version 1.0.0!

UniSchool is a university management simulation about watching a small college become a robust institution.

You begin with one building, a handful of students and a lot of empty land. Over the next fifty years, you decide what it will become.

Will you build a great research university? A college known for its students and campus life? An athletic powerhouse? A little of everything? Your decisions shape the answer.

Build a campus

Start with a single hall. Over the decades, build laboratories, libraries, classrooms, residences, dining halls, student centers, health facilities, athletic venues and landmarks.

Lay out the campus yourself on an isometric map. Choose its architecture and school colors. Watch familiar places emerge as the years pass: the quad, the science buildings, the residential quarter, the stadium, the places that eventually become part of the school's identity.

Grow the institution

A university is made of people and programs.

Develop your curriculum and decide which fields deserve investment. Hire professors with their own strengths, careers and personalities. Give them courses to teach and research to pursue. Watch promising faculty become stars, and occasionally watch another university come calling.

Create the student experience too. Build the facilities, clubs, organizations and athletic programs that make students want to be there.

And when your university starts making discoveries, winning prizes or attracting attention, decide what to do with its growing reputation.

Make the big decisions

Every summer brings another year of consequences.

How much should you charge for tuition? How many students should you admit? Where should the next major investment go? Should you expand into a new field or deepen the ones you already have?

You won't always know exactly what those decisions will produce. The students who arrive, the professors you attract, the opportunities that appear and the reputation you build all feed back into the institution.

Eventually, the university's identity starts to take shape.

At a certain point, the board will ask you to choose what the college will become known for. You get one specialization, and your rivals will make their own choices. From there, the university's path is increasingly its own.

Fifty years from now

The fiftieth summer brings the Final Report.

It looks back at the institution you built, evaluates it across six dimensions, and gives the university a name for what it became.

There is no single right way to play. A small, exceptional college can be a success. So can a sprawling university with a little bit of everything. Your campus, your faculty, your students and your reputation are the record of the choices you made.

And after the report, you can keep playing.

What to expect

• A full run is fifty years: roughly two to four hours, depending on the speed you play at, over as many sittings as you like. Growth is slow on purpose, and money paces the first decades.
• It plays in the browser, on a computer or a tablet.
• Your run is saved in this browser. Browsers can clear a site's storage, Safari after seven days without a visit, and a private window when it closes, so keep a copy: Menu → Download save, and Load a save file on the title screen to carry on. Every fifth summer the game offers a backup too.
• Sandbox, on the title screen: unlimited funds and instant building, to lay out a campus without waiting.

Tell me what you think

• Menu → Send feedback opens a two-minute form. Report a bug saves a record of your session to attach to it.
• Or leave a comment below.

What I most want to know: where you stopped, and why; whether you reached the specialization; and what you thought of the opening, the summers and the Final Report.

Play statistics

The first time it opens, the game asks whether it may send anonymous play statistics: how far runs get and how long they take. Nothing is sent unless you say yes, and you can turn it off in Settings. It sends no names and nothing you type: every value is a number, a yes or no, or an item from a fixed list. No cookies, and no recordings.

Made by Halifax Games.