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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/Due-Bat-9880 on 2025-11-24 18:26:10+00:00.
A couple weeks ago, I was once again explaining to a junior dev why his API was crashing under load. I drew diagrams, showed him charts, talked about load balancers and scaling… And I saw that familiar emptiness in his eyes. He was nodding, but I knew he wasn’t really feeling the problem.
Then it hit me - what if I made a game where you actually see your architecture collapse in real-time?
What I built
Server Survival is basically tower defense for DevOps. You build cloud infrastructure from blocks (WAF, Load Balancer, EC2, RDS, S3), connect them with arrows, and then watch your creation try to survive waves of incoming traffic.
I posted this on r/devops and r/webdev last week expecting maybe a few comments. Instead I got mass of upvotes, mass of feature ideas, people playing and sending incredibly detailed feedback. Someone called it “Factorio meets AWS” and honestly that’s the best compliment I could get.
The game is still rough - balance is off, one EC2 can handle way more than it should, onboarding needs work. But the response showed me this thing should exist.
Now I’m here because I want to hear from the open-source community. What would make you excited to contribute? What’s missing? What would you build differently?
I’m actively working on the game economics and math model right now - figuring out the right balance between traffic growth and budget pressure. But there’s a ton more to do and I’d love help from people who care about both good code and good games.
Tech stack is simple on purpose: Vanilla JS + Three.js, no build step, MIT licensed.
GitHub: github.com/pshenok/server-survival
Would love to hear your thoughts!