What it simulates, and who it's for: a tiny web host's back room, where traffic, heat, hardware failure, customer mood and reputation all feed each other; for players who like short, tense management runs.

You run a small web hosting business out of one rack. Bakeries, dentists, bands and taco trucks pay you by the day to keep their sites online. Survive 60 days.

The system

• Every site has its own traffic, busy by day and quiet at night. A server above 100% load makes its sites slow and unhappy.
• Busy servers heat the room. Past 31°C, servers start to die, and every site on a dead server goes down.
• Unhappy sites cancel. Cancellations cost reputation, and reputation is what brings new sign-ups. At zero reputation the shop closes.
• Price is a lever: $2 a day grows fast and fills your rack, $5 grows slow and wears patience.
• A site that goes viral gets triple traffic for 12 hours. Keep it fast for most of that and the owner pays a $25 thank-you; let it crash and your reputation takes the hit.
• A DDoS gives one site eight times its traffic for 4 hours, and its neighbours drown with it. Null-route it and only that site goes dark until the attack ends.
• Heat waves push the outside temperature up 7°C for a day.
• Big clients (0.4): now and then a ticket shop or a city council wants in at double your price, with three times the traffic. Take it or pass; it lands on your quietest server.

The back room

The top of the screen is the room itself, drawn from the same numbers: the window follows the hour and the heat wave, each server's lights blink faster as it fills, a dead one goes red and smokes, the cooling fans spin up as the room warms, and the thermometer marks the 31°C line. A tip pops up (and pauses the game) the first time each situation happens; "No more tips" turns them off.

Controls

• Click a site chip, then click a server to move it there.
• Rack a server ($60), upgrade it to T2/T3 (more capacity, more heat), add a cooling unit ($45), repair a dead server ($40, 6 hours).
• Null-route a site under DDoS from its server card.
• Speed: pause, 1x, 3x. Space pauses.
• Today's rack: everyone who opens the shop on the same UTC day gets the same 60 days. The end screen has a one-line result to paste in the comments and compare.

Theme

The whole game is one simulated system: every number on screen feeds another one, and the interesting moments (the heat wave on the day a site goes viral) come out of the rules, not a script.

Credits and AI disclosure

Made by Design Master Solutions for the Game Gauntlet SIM Jam 2026. Code and text were written with AI assistance (Claude) and reviewed by me. No AI-generated art, music or voice: the look is plain CSS and SVG drawn from the game state, and the sounds are synthesized at runtime with the Web Audio API. No third-party assets.

Updates

0.4 (Nov 2): big clients, a take-it-or-pass decision. 0.3 (Nov 2): the back room scene, first-time tips, the viral bonus and the null-route decision; the log names servers by rack slot. 0.2 (Oct 30): uptime % and today's rack.

Source (MIT): github.com/DesignMaster-Solutions/uptime-simjam