A Catskills resort tycoon game built on a 3D map of the actual mountain. Formerly Hunter Mountain Tycoon — now with a name that sounds less like a brochure.
The Story
My kids are obsessed with Hunter Mountain. We go as often as we can, and on the drive home they're already redesigning the place. More terrain parks. A gondola to the summit. Hot chocolate stations on every trail.
I've always loved tycoon games — the particular satisfaction of watching a spreadsheet turn into a functioning little world. So the pitch wrote itself: build the actual mountain, let them run it, see how long until they bankrupt the place.
White Steel: Hunter Empire is a ski resort management game set on a 3D map of the real mountain. Lifts, trails, snowmaking, finances, guest satisfaction — the works. Your decisions affect everything from wait times to snow quality, and the weather doesn't care about your plans.
Where We Are
Version 2 is a ground-up rebuild. The original was a proof of concept; this one uses MapLibre GL with real 1-meter LiDAR terrain data. The mountain actually looks like Hunter -- the ridges, trail cuts, and lift lines are all where they're supposed to be. My kids saw it for the first time and immediately started arguing about which runs were missing.
Real Terrain
1m resolution LiDAR elevation data renders the actual mountain in 3D with seasonal terrain overlays.
Weather System
20 real historical winter seasons (2004-2024) from Open-Meteo, driving snowfall, temperature, and snowmaking decisions.
Full Economy
Lift tickets, food & beverage, rentals, lessons, and season passes vs. payroll, snowmaking, maintenance, and energy costs.
4 Zones
Unlock zones with cash + reputation gates. Upgrade lifts across 5 tiers. 79 trails, 10 lifts, 6 POIs.
Tree Sprites
8,846 billboard tree sprites in the Niehues trail map style, plus falling snow particles and animated skiers.
Analytics
8 draggable chart windows tracking revenue, weather, guest satisfaction, and more in real time.
It's playable. You can pick a difficulty, choose a historical season, and run the mountain from November through April. The financial model works, zone progression feels right, and the visual polish — seasonal overlays, snow particles, those Niehues-style tree sprites — is at the point where you look at it and think "mountain" instead of "tech demo." There's also a tubing hill, because apparently we couldn't stop.
Built with Claude
This was the most technically ambitious build: terrain rendering, coordinate systems, elevation data, texture mapping, camera controls. Version 2 is 1,530 lines of game logic and 1,850 lines of UI rendering, built on MapLibre GL's terrain API with GeoJSON trail rendering and a weather simulation driven by twenty years of historical data.
The process was iterative. I'd describe what the mountain should do and how the game should feel; Claude would work out the implementation. Hundreds of rounds of that produced something that genuinely plays like a tycoon game, not a tech demo.
