Operation Critical Path

You are the scheduler.

Not a foreman. Not the owner. You are the one holding the schedule — and every morning the building is a little further along or a little further behind because of what you did last night.

Operation Critical Path is a construction scheduling life-sim. You walk the project on foot, talk to a crew who each tell you the truth a little differently, and take what you learn back to the project-controls desk. There you edit a real critical-path network — durations, logic ties, float — commit the update, and watch the jobsite respond at dawn.

The schedule is not a minigame bolted onto a walking sim. The schedule is the rule system that animates the world.

What you actually do

- Walk the site. Four phases — Foundations, Structure, Dry-In + MEP, Finishes — each a hand-painted jobsite that visibly changes as work lands.

- Read the field. Thirteen recurring characters, each with a consistent bias. Dutch rounds up. Somebody else always says it is fine. Learning who to trust *is* the information system.

- Run the network. Finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish. Total float and free float. A "why" panel that explains what is actually driving your completion date.

- Live with it. Commit the update, and the crews dispatch deterministically. Read the dawn report. Pass the inspection. Or don't.

- Two projects. The Meridian Office Building and the Ridgeline Distribution Center, each with its own network, conditions, and closeout gate.

This is real CPM

The scheduling engine is not decorative. It computes forward and backward passes, total and free float, detects cycles, burns general-conditions cost by the day, charges premium for authorized Saturday work, and honors whether you padded or squeezed your bid at contract time.

If you have ever built a lookahead in P6 and watched a two-day slip eat your float path, this game is aimed directly at you. If you have not — it is a reasonable way to learn what schedulers actually argue about.

Scheduling honestly: a full write-up of what the engine models faithfully and where it deliberately simplifies ships with the game as `docs/SCHEDULING_FIDELITY.md`. Short version — the CPM math is real (forward/backward passes, FS/SS/FF with lag, free vs total float, retained logic, workday calendars); resource leveling, per-activity calendars, date constraints, and multiple float paths are not modeled. It builds intuition. It is not a P6 replacement and does not pretend to be.

Plays anywhere

Desktop, browser, controller, and landscape phone are all first-class. Text scaling, high contrast, reduced motion, and subtitles are settings, not afterthoughts. Touch targets are sized for real thumbs.

Controls

| Input | Action |

| WASD / arrows / left stick | Move |

| Click or tap the ground | Walk there |

| E / gamepad A | Interact |

| Tab / gamepad Y | Open the field tablet |

| Escape / gamepad Start | Settings + accessibility |

About the art

The visual assets in this game were made with generative AI image tools, then selected, directed, edited, and integrated by hand against a written design standard — one camera angle, one light source, one palette, consistent character proportions and ground anchoring across every facing.

I'm telling you up front because you'd rather know, and because itch asks creators to disclose it.

What is not AI: the scheduling engine, the activity networks, the game design, the dialogue, and every line of the 12,000+ lines of code underneath it. The CPM math is hand-written and covered by a regression suite. That part is the game.

Content note

No violence, no combat. Workplace pressure, deadlines, and professional disagreement. Suitable for all ages, aimed at adults.