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. They have strong opinions about mountain management for people who can't parallel park.
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 — every ridge, every trail cut, every lift line is where it's 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
I have no business building a 3D game. I want to be clear about that. The terrain rendering alone involves coordinate systems, elevation data, texture mapping, and camera controls — concepts I could not have defined twelve months ago.
Version 2 was the biggest build yet: 1,530 lines of game logic, 1,850 lines of UI rendering. We worked through MapLibre GL's terrain API, GeoJSON trail rendering, and a weather simulation driven by twenty years of actual historical data. I'd describe what I wanted the mountain to do; Claude would figure out how to make it do that. Repeat several hundred times.
The honest summary: a litigation attorney built a 3D tycoon game, and it works. I am still not entirely sure how.
