Layer8Problem

"The problem is usually located about 30 cm in front of the screen."

A satirical sysadmin simulator. You are GlobalCorp's IT department.
One person. For everyone.

▶ Play now — free, no sign-up, no download. Runs on a phone as well as on a desktop.

Between Chantal from marketing, a boss who thinks IT is voodoo, and a ticket counter that never runs backwards.

Every 30 minutes a ticket lands in your system. At ten open tickets it collapses and you are out. So you take calls, run to the server room, fetch coffee and go on errands — keeping an eye on three values while you do:

Laziness	The higher it is, the harder the boss punishes your mistakes.
Aggro	At 100 % you blow up. The valve opens exactly once.
Boss Radar	At 100 % you get a written warning. After that, the sack.

Every decision costs time, and the clock only runs one way.

Working Day — one shift, 08:00 to 16:30. Survive until clocking-off time. By evening everything is forgotten and tomorrow you start from zero again. Choose beforehand how much you hate your life: a relaxed Friday, an ordinary Wednesday, or a Monday.

Working Week — Monday to Friday in one go. Nothing is forgotten overnight: tickets, values and the contents of your backpack all survive until morning. The safety valve and the written warning come once per week, not once per day. Fail, and you lose the whole week.

The company intranet. Four days without an incident in the server room, and an upward trend detected. The open-ticket deviation has been reported to the division head; a reply is not provided for.	Seven colleagues who remember. Reputation runs from "hates you" to "accomplice", and it pays you back in both directions.
The notice board. Eight notes out of thirty, redrawn every morning — among them a shredder going free to a good home, tear-off tabs included.	Career progress. What you found, what you earned, and how often you walked out — kept across every working day.

• Over 1,300 events in the server room, the coffee kitchen, on the phone, out on errands and in your inbox — plus boss fights, lunch breaks and a company gala that only the most stubborn ever get to see.
• German and English, in full — not just the menus, but every single event. You can switch mid-game: the save file does not depend on the language, so the week carries on exactly where it was.
• Read out loud — every scene and every outcome, in both languages, by a synthetic voice (the credits say which). Choose what it reads and how fast, or switch it off and let a button read a single scene when you want one.
• Decisions with a memory. The machine you had Kevin reinstall turns up in the rack hours later — with a dragon sticker and a program selling compute power overseas. Leave Gabi hanging and you will find a drawer in the tea kitchen that was not there before.
• Seven colleagues with their own reputation, who remember how you decided — and pay you back eventually. In both directions.
• 33 items to find and repurpose creatively. Duct tape fixes more than it should, and some things work without being touched at all.
• 27 achievements, graded by difficulty, plus an archive, a diary that narrates your day every evening, and a company chronicle to keep writing.
• Full keyboard support with freely assignable keys. There is a tutorial too, if you would rather be walked through it.

The game stays complete and free in the browser. Anyone who wants to support development gets a few technical conveniences on Steam:

• Playable offline — on the train, on a plane, in the server basement
• Steam achievements and global statistics — see how often the rest of the world has thrown in the towel
• Cloud saves — archive, achievements and statistics travel with you, and so does the run in progress: start at lunchtime on the laptop, carry on suffering at the desktop in the evening
• Dynamic status — your friends list finds out whether you are currently "Hiding in the server room" or "Surviving the Synergy Gala"
• Leaderboards — one per week level, plus all three in one list: who lasts the longest, how the week ended, and on which values

Both versions run on the same content.

Svelte 5 (runes), Vite, Tailwind CSS 4. The Steam version is the same application in Electron. The web version is served from main:/docs via GitHub Pages, so the build is committed along with the source.

npm install
npm run dev            # development server on port 8080
npm run build          # build into docs/
npm run preview        # inspect the built version (do not open it by double-click)

The game data exists twice: src/data/de/ is the source, src/data/en/ the English version — 24 files each. Both carry the same ids, story flags, character names and numbers; only the prose differs. That is what makes a save file language-independent. Touch one file and you touch both.

Tools live in tools/:

npm run lint:all       # the gate: data (both trees), interface strings, parity
npm run lint:data      # the German data tree only
npm run lint:parity    # holds the two trees against each other
npm run lint:assets    # every image reference, runtime-built ones included
npm test               # five test suites, run in both languages
npm run sim            # simulates thousands of working days for balance
npm run sim:week       # the same for whole weeks

The Steam build needs the Steamworks SDK's redistributable_bin folder in steamworks_sdk/ (from the SDK download on the Steamworks partner site; it is not in the repository for licensing reasons). Without it the desktop build still starts, just without Steam.

If you would like to write events: EVENTS.md explains the data format, from the simple option to the branching dialogue chain. STRUCTURE.md explains why which file lives where, and tools/TOOLS.md describes every tool in detail.

The screenshots above live in screenshots/, not in docs/ — the build runs with emptyOutDir, so anything parked in docs/ is gone after the next npm run build.

Pure satire. Any resemblance to real people, companies or choleric superiors is coincidental, but probably unavoidable.

The web version and the source code are under the MIT licence. You may study the code, use it and modify it for your own non-commercial spin-offs — please with attribution (seluce).

_{Made with a great deal of caffeine, duct tape and attention to detail.}