Utopia: Nexus
Every system is connected.
Utopia: Nexus is a sustainability simulation in the spirit of Oregon Trail, used in the Sustainability and Global Sustainability curriculum at the University of South Florida. Players run a region’s interlocking systems (water, food, energy, carbon, economy, health and morale) through five years of policy trade-offs and region-specific crises.
Every decision ripples. A neglected system drags the others down, seasonal events hit each region differently, and a narrator named Tobi explains how it all connects without telling you what to do. At the end, players get a score out of 1,000 and a cause-and-effect debrief of exactly which choices set off which cascades.
For the classroom, instructors create classes with their own region, run length, starting conditions and events. Students join with a six-character code, and class analytics and CSV exports make results ready for grading.
TYPE
Educational simulation game, web app
USED AT
University of South Florida, Sustainability & Global Sustainability curriculum
ROLE
Built solo: product strategy, design, build and launch
BUILT WITH
React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Express, Postgres (Neon), Drizzle
Built for every screen
From a laptop in a lecture hall to a phone on the bus, the whole simulation adapts to the screen, from the region briefings to the live system map.
Three regions, three lessons
Each region has a different binding constraint. That difference is the lesson.
Coral Haven
Gentle
Hurricanes, disease outbreaks and coral bleaching. The reef pays for everything.
Desert City
Severe
Water scarcity and extreme heat. 2.4 million people, one aquifer.
Great Lakes
Testing
Lead pipes, brownfields and a workforce in transition.
Frontier Modes
Unlockable
Mars, the Jurassic and the Ice Age, each with its own rules.
Under the hood
Monte Carlo balancing
A headless harness plays thousands of seeded games through the real engine. Its win rates and loss reasons drove each region’s difficulty tuning.
Turn-length invariance
Every rate and threshold is expressed in months, so choosing 1-month or 6-month turns never quietly changes the difficulty.
Never lose a run
An outbox with retries, idempotent writes and resume-from-save keeps student runs safe on bad Wi-Fi.
