We kept the canvas and threw away the game

Too Many Requests is about the datacenter behind an AI company. Requests come in from the internet as little packets on wires, and you build whatever answers them. Until late September I was making a different game on the same canvas. Then I threw it away.

The old game was about money. You made compute and sold it, and the more you sold, the less each unit was worth. Power, cooling, internet and chips went in, compute came out, and four kinds of buyers paid for it. Their prices dropped as you flooded the market. On top of that there were upgrade levels, server parts that wore out, heat, a price crash, shortages and random events.

That was a lot of systems, and players saw very little of them. You could see a jam on a wire, but you couldn’t see a price slowly dropping inside a buyer’s books. Worse, the main rule was “every rack you add lowers the price”. In a building game, that tells the player to stop building. The theme was the AI bubble, but only the art and the jokes were about it. The rules were about prices.

The canvas was the fun part. Boxes, wires, and things moving along them. So on 23 September I kept the canvas and rebuilt the rest of the game on top of it.

The new game is about routing. Requests come in different types. Chat, image and code come first, then agent and video. From tier 2, some of the chat is jailbreaks. Customers pay for every answer. A Router sends each type down its own wire. A Queue holds a sudden rush instead of losing it. A Cache answers repeat chat questions without a GPU. Each GPU pool runs one AI model. To answer more, you build more. The puzzle is building the right thing in the right place, because the mix of requests keeps changing.

The game got its name the same week. Too Many Requests is also the error a website gives when it’s overloaded, HTTP 429. That’s what you spend the game fighting.

It wasn’t the first rebuild, either. I started on 1 August with an idle game about money, where you could cut three zeros off your currency. I added the canvas on 5 September, and from then until routing, it was the datacenter money game above. Every time, I kept the canvas and threw away whatever sat on top of it.

Next time, a request is a rate on a wire.