This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam
I built Solstice Sidebar: AI Incident Desk, a fast-paced, retro-corporate time-management strategy puzzle game.
Instead of taking the typical path of a serious historical code-breaking cipher, I wanted to inject some humor into the jam while sticking strictly to the prompt's structural options: creating a game where daylight is your resource and everything reaches a turning point when the game resets at midnight.
Daylight & The Passage of Time: A visual "Daylight Depletion" progress bar acts as your literal game timer. You have exactly 90 seconds of real-world time to manage your resources before the clock hits 12:00 AM Midnight.
You play as an Incident Commander on June 21, 2026. The extreme daylight anomalies of the June Solstice are causing major AI subsystems across the globe to buckle and glitch. To survive your shift, you must frantically manage resources, stabilize rogue AI models running weird June holiday algorithms, and make it to midnight without getting fired!
Solstice Sidebar: AI Incident Desk is a frantic, retro-corporate time-management strategy puzzle game built entirely using Vanilla HTML5, CSS3, and modern JavaScript.
Developed in under 24 hours for the June Solstice Game Jam, this game subverts traditional cipher/puzzle tropes by casting you as an overworked corporate IT Incident Commander struggling to balance global resource loads and buggy holiday algorithms during the ultimate seasonal turning point.
It's June 21, 2026. The extreme daylight shifts of the June Solstice are causing intense data load line degradation across enterprise neural network nodes. Worse yet, your automated AI agents are malfunctioning as they attempt to over-optimize code for global June celebrations.
As automated technical emergencies flood your dashboard queue, Daylight is your primary ticking resource. If you mismanage an issue or freeze under pressure, your core metrics will collapse. Surviving until…
Solstice Sidebar features a deep, functional integration with the Google Gemini API that forms the narrative climax of the entire game.
When you successfully manage your daylight resources and survive until 12:00 AM Midnight, the game reaches its structural turning point. The gameplay loop freezes, and you are required to type out an official text-based "Shift Handover Summary Report" for your manager.
The game takes your written text summary, combines it with your final game metrics (Corporate Approval % and AI Stability %), and sends a direct browser fetch
POST request to the Gemini 1.5 Flash model via Google AI Studio (gemini-1.5-flash:generateContent
).
Gemini acts as your dry, humorless corporate supervisor—reading your custom summary in real-time and dynamically generating a witty, completely personalized three-sentence performance evaluation and score out of 100. (I also built a secure client-side localStorage
token key configuration modal on the login screen so judges and players can test it safely with their own AI Studio keys!)