Airwave

AIRWAVE is a TV studio tycoon in the spirit of MAD TV. It is 1993. Channel 9
is last in a five-station market, the carpet smells of coffee, and the board
has given you one season to fix it.
You start with $500,000. Finish the season with $4.70M in the bank, or start
looking for a new job.

Buy the programmes
Every morning the market restocks: news packages, series, films and weekend
events, 493 fictional programmes in the catalogue. Spend like it is your own
money, because it is. Films are yours to rerun as often as you like — rest
them between airings and they recover. News has to be bought fresh every
morning.

Schedule the day
Fill six programme slots — early, daytime, the news, a prime show, the movie
and late night — then sell the 20:00 ad break. Every slot inherits audience
from the one before it, so a hit lifts the rest of the night and dead air
poisons the slot after it. Plan the night in broadcast order, not
biggest-slot-first.

Go live
The day plays out slot by slot with live ratings — pause, fast-forward or
skip it. Then read the papers and plan tomorrow. Missed an ad spot? The
ad-desk make-goods policy settles it with airtime next week instead of a cash
fine — the advertiser stays, but the debt is yours to schedule around.
Climb past four rival stations — Kestrel TV, Vista TV, Lyra and Civic One —
across 12 weeks, then take the next season. 1994 is waiting.
And when a fictional name isn't quite right, the in-game Catalogue Editor
lets you rename any programme, rewrite its blurb, change its type, quality
and appeal, add a brand-new one or delete one — and export the whole
catalogue to bake into a future build.
Price: $5.00

Full game vs demo
The demo is the complete first season — 12 weeks, 1993, the whole game loop.
The full game keeps going: finish the season and take on 1994, then 1995,
season after season, chasing the target with a season score at the end of
every year.
Download it, open it in your browser — no install, no account, no launcher.

Try the free demo first: https://tomhs183.itch.io/airwave-demo