pshenok/server-survival

Server Survival is a browser-based 3D simulation game where you play as a cloud architect. Your job is to build and scale a working infrastructure that handles incoming web traffic while surviving DDoS attacks, staying within budget, and keeping your services healthy. The game is playable directly in a browser at no cost. Traffic in the game arrives in colored streams representing different request types: static file requests, database reads and writes, file uploads, search queries, and malicious attack traffic. Each type must reach the appropriate service in your infrastructure to generate revenue. Malicious traffic drains your reputation if it is not blocked. Your reputation, budget, and service health are the three meters that determine whether you survive or fail. You build your infrastructure using a toolbar of components, each with a purchase cost, ongoing upkeep cost, and traffic capacity. The available components include a firewall (blocks malicious traffic), an API gateway with rate limiting and upgrade tiers, a queue that buffers request spikes, a load balancer that distributes traffic across multiple instances, standard compute servers, serverless functions (pay-per-request with very low idle cost), a CDN for static content, SQL and NoSQL databases, object storage, a search engine service, and a Redis cache. The design of the game maps directly to real cloud architecture decisions: when to add a CDN to offload static traffic, when a queue prevents drops during a spike, how load balancers interact with compute scaling, and why serverless functions become expensive at high request rates. Playing through the escalating waves teaches these tradeoffs through consequence rather than lectures. The game ends when your reputation falls to zero or your budget drops below negative one thousand dollars. Surviving longer requires both building the right topology and managing ongoing costs.