Delivery Simulator: a game built against a frozen data contract

The Delivery Simulator is a driving game about the economics of 外卖, food delivery in China. It is the second half of a pair: the Wage Transparency Tool collects what riders actually earn, and the game makes those numbers playable.

One frozen interface

The two halves meet at a single documented interface, the trip CSV contract, which lives in the tool’s repository. The game reads the tool’s aggregate export and, by design, cannot tell it apart from synthetic data — which the README gives as the reason the contract was frozen before either side was built.

What the commits show

The economy layer was brought to contract version 3, with Chinese units — 分, kilometres, fines — and the difference between grabbing an order and having one dispatched (抢单 against 派单). A later part added electric scooters, a late-delivery countdown that “bites”, and residential compounds (小区) that cost minutes. A check compares the CSV contract against the file actually shipped, and an end-to-end fixture prints the take-home figure so the two projects can be compared. The most recent commit, on 10 October, covers the economy, scene and router.

It is a Unity 6000.0.83f1 project. The scene is built in code by an editor script rather than committed as a hand-assembled asset, so it can be regenerated and reviewed as a diff, and scripts/check.sh rebuilds it and runs every check. A script produces a Windows release package.

The dates

The HUD should look like a gig-work app (25 April 2027). Windows build support and a playable package come by 25 June, a playtest of the shift loop with riders by 20 May, and a clearly labelled playable build is published by 30 June 2027. One undated item is to verify the game’s economy numbers against the wage tool’s fixture.

Written on 16 Oct 2026 from the repository’s README and commit history. Open items below come from Reminders.