Push to Prod: Dev Tycoon

Every pull request in Push to Prod is real Go code that compiles. Approve it or request changes. Approve a bug and watch it hit production. Relaxed mode explains each change in plain words, so you don't need to code to play.

Push to Prod is an idle dev tycoon and coding game about running a backend. You start as a Junior Engineer with one tiny script on one server. Review code, buy infrastructure, survive load tests and incidents, and grow it into a payments backend that serves 800,000 requests a second.

How it plays
• Review a pull request: swipe to approve, or request changes
• A good change ships and your service gets faster, cheaper or more reliable
• A bad one ships a bug: errors climb and you track down the change that caused it
• Spend your budget on servers, caches and databases, then take on the next traffic stage
• Earn XP, learn new topics, get promoted and move to a bigger project

A code review game with real code
• Realistic diffs in a Go codebase that grows file by file
• Spot the bug line: data races, missing timeouts, N+1 queries, retry storms
• Every Go program in the game is checked with gofmt, go vet and go build in CI
• Stuck? Ask the mentor for the right call, the reason and the line
• Hand a change to your team when you'd rather watch the system run

Watch your system grow
• A live flow diagram: requests travel from users through a load balancer, an app fleet, caches, message queues and read replicas
• A credible performance model: CPU, queueing, p99 latency and success-rate targets, not magic multipliers
• Five projects: a webhook relay, a startup REST API, a marketplace backend, a content API and a payments ledger

Load tests and incidents
• Run a live load test: traffic ramps up and you fix the bottleneck before the targets break
• When production breaks, compare the error graph with recent deploys, suspect the right change, then ship a hotfix or roll back

Learn system design as you play
• A Learn map of real topics: profiling, concurrency, caching, indexing, message queues, read replicas, load balancing, sharding
• Every topic you learn changes how your system behaves on the diagram
• A programming game for the parts of the job tutorials skip: code review, scaling and incidents

Run the budget
• Income comes from the requests you serve; servers, databases and data transfer cost money
• Check income, running cost and profit, then pick the upgrade that pays off

Daily, weekly and endless
• Daily PR: one new review every day, with a streak to keep
• Weekly challenge: one scenario for everyone, from a zone outage to a Black Friday ramp
• Scale mode: push your payments backend past a million requests a second, tier by tier
• Replay any finished project and beat your personal records

Idle and offline progress
• An idle game that respects your time: progress is never lost
• Your service keeps serving requests for up to 8 hours while the app is closed
• Come back to a report of what grew, what broke and what your team fixed
• Short sessions work: review a PR or two, check the targets, done

Fair monetization
• Free to play
• No banner ads and no interstitials: rewarded ads only, and only when you choose to watch one
• Optional one-time in-app purchases
• Purchases never buy XP or topics: you earn every promotion

Made for software engineers and developers, computer science students, people learning system design, and idle, incremental and clicker fans who want a tycoon simulator with real depth. If you've ever pushed to prod on a Friday, this one is for you.

Questions or feedback: support@puzzlica.com

Recent changes:
Now in Japanese, German, Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil) and Korean: the whole interface and the first two projects' code reviews. Pick a language in Settings › Language.