Too Many Requests so far

This devlog is about Too Many Requests, my first game. I’ll post here once a week, on Fridays.

Too Many Requests didn’t start as this game. On 1 August I began an idle game about money and inflation. It turned into a crypto game, then a game about selling compute, and each time I threw most of it away. The part that stayed every time was a canvas with boxes, wires and packets moving along them. In late September I kept the canvas and built a new game on top of it.

What the game is

Too Many Requests is about the datacenter behind an AI company. Requests come in from the internet as little packets on wires. They can be chat, images, code, agents or video, and you build whatever answers them. A Router sends each type down its own wire. A Queue holds a sudden rush so you don’t lose it. GPU pools run your AI models, and to answer more, you build more. The mix of requests keeps changing, so the build that worked an hour ago is never quite right.

Some of the chat is jailbreaks. To your machines they look like normal chat, and if one gets answered, you’re in the news. Near the end you take the company public, and then the bubble pops. Survive it, and you can build AGI.

The name is also the error a website gives when it’s overloaded, HTTP 429. You spend the whole game fighting it.

Where it is now

You can play the whole campaign, from a garage to a huge datacenter site. The research tree has ninety-five nodes in six lanes and eight tiers. You pay for it with Papers, and your own GPUs earn them by answering tests. Products like the Assistant App and the Cloud IDE sit between your models and your customers and make answers pay more. At the end, an epilogue is written from your run. Then a sandbox opens with the whole tree unlocked.

The game is in English. It has color palettes for color blind players, and Ctrl+Z undoes a building, a wire or a setting.

Most of the numbers are still first guesses. Playtests will change them.

Waiting for Steam

On 23 September I signed Armatura up for Steamworks. Valve checks every new developer before they can make a store page. Today is 9 October, more than two weeks later, and Valve still hasn’t answered.

Until they do, there’s no store page. You can’t wishlist the game yet, and I can’t run a Steam playtest or put out a demo. For now the game runs on app 480, the test app Valve gives to every developer. The Steam overlay and the achievements already work on it.

So I’m getting the rest ready.

• The store page. The capsule art and the screenshots are done.
• A playtest build. Testers see a short note the first time they open it.
• A demo. It stops at a set point and asks you to wishlist the game.
• A press kit on this site, and a first rough cut of the trailer.

I’ll post here the day Valve answers. If they don’t, I’ll still be back next Friday.