Rack Em Stack Em Game

About This Game

Screenshots from Unreal Engine are slowly being swapped in from old Unity effort screenshots, please check back or our social media.

Rack em Stack em Game – Cloud Building Simulator

What does that mean?

It’s actually a construction and business management simulation game.

The game will cover construction, projects, resources, and emergency management aspects of running multiple data centers to support a cloud environment.

You, The founder of Cloud Provider Co are tasked with establishing a scaled system deployment capable of running for as long as possible while avoiding disasters and incidents that try to attack it.

Game Modes:

Historical timeline

Allowing players to build different types of systems and learning how older tech such as mainframes worked at the module level up to modern data centers and their various complex high availability and redundant subsystems and infrastructure.

Modern walk through and scale out

In this mode, players will start sometime around the dot com boom and learn to tackle the challenges of scaling from several phone banks and a basic telco telephone switch up to modern scale HPC designs (no really!)
During this mode players will overcome budget constraints, hardware changes and having to decide if holding onto that old Pentium 3 to have a high score of a “uptime” value in the game’s achievements tracking, or go with the latest server gen12 Extreme

Sandbox mode (unlocked, or tech tree based)

This mode will offer the basic game setup, players will be given a basic fund to start, select a plot of land and conditions available (or a premade facility in the real estate pane). As players progress they can option for specific technology trees to target potential customers or offerings to the “global user demand of that era”

Another option for mode is military/hostile systems

This mode if I decide to do it would basically be a FOB or Major theater base type situation, or CRAPR (made up) type situation where you are a facility communications systems commander tasked with ensuring mission survival, and trust me with my military background I can make this one a real thing. Players will be challenged with equipment damage from incoming attacks, desert storms bringing dust and risks, etc.

Game Aspects:

Project management

players will be given tasks or project requests (may go as far as customer management)
players will be able to offer up assets in game using a selection on specific assets and a percentage value or hard value of the assets. Example: 35% of rack/server/switch/appliance goes to project X

The real challenge will be what if they over allocate a rack and somehow two customers are given the same equipment?
Well in that situation I’d have to figure out the math but most likely both will be at 50% of need from what’s there OR if a customer is given a higher priority value in the customer management pane then the rack will be allocated to them more. This could lead to project failures, fines, and or equipment being damaged.

What if you leased instead of bought hardware? The choice is up to you!

Emergency Management and risk reduction

players will have to make choices on what to keep from causing risk
(IE: heat dissipation vs falling equipment due to overloads)
players will have to learn about facility power management, fire management, security management, and grounding.
Resource Management

power, cooling, network capacity, etc

players will be able to build out various aspects of infrastructure using snap together parts.
players will have to determine how to manage equipment failure rates using game controls. So if you decide to run things hotter by reducing output on your HVAC to save on power costs
each aspect of the game will be in a item selection/purchase/lease menu
players will be able to select an item to utilize, drag and drop (or click to buy, then drag from purchased items inventory menu)
players will learn about the risks involved with hot/cool aisles, poor HVAC conditions, fires, etc.
players will learn how to mitigate these situations with basic intro maps and then be thrown into larger spaces as the game progresses (or jump straight to long game mode)
players will have to make decisions such as which racks to power off, move around, and try to save from risk events.
players will have to react and manage weather event risks (grid power loss to the game space, power plant loss at site, etc)

Facility Management:

Customizing the overall design aspects, or fighting a prebuilt/historical reference design
ensure the facility is well funded in maintenance aspects.
may offer a “budget” repair option that basically adds a risk or random event chance increase to different aspects of the facility aka speed tape only works for so long type situation.

Cyber Security

Data Center SCADA risks

This will be depicted as insider threat type stuff, tailgating maybe (if we go NPC route) This could also be if you opted to tie your SCADA to your facility system or pay for separate equipment to network the various systems (“air gap” awareness, DONT CROSS THE STREAMS /s)
Virus/worms/DDOS type events

Players will have to decide if they leave systems powered/connected or risk exposure if a network/tenant space is at risk. There will be potential L2/L3 complexity options at a super high level (IE setting a vlan number on switch ports using a click toggle or applying a number using a click and apply type deal to devices in racks)

Another aspect I haven’t touched on is WHAT the devices can do or WHAT categories you’ll see.
5-10 types of equipment
5 variations of each type of equipment (cost, and specs players can unlock and choose from)

5-6 compute main categories with flavors under each, storage, network, industrial, and more.

You’ll be able to upgrade/replace assets, sell them at a reduced value to make room for new equipment, and more.

An inventory system will be implemented and players will need to either buy cage nuts or scrap equipment in the shredder to return scrap for cage nuts to mount equipment.