This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam
What I Built
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.
- Light and Darkness: One of your primary crashing models is Sol-Power-Beta. Because it's the longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, the solar-grid AI is having a panic attack because the sun won't set. You have to actively inject "Simulated Darkness Packets" to trick it into cooling down.
- June Celebrations: The other crashing subsystems are running amok celebrating June global holidays. You have to debug Flip-Flop-Bot-3000 (failing its pathfinding because National Flip-Flop Day tourists have unpredictable walking friction vectors) and Wasabi-Mind (a chef AI over-indexing on creativity parameters for International Sushi Day and trying to serve strawberry-mayonnaise sushi capsules).
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!
🕹️ How to Play
⌨️ Controls & Setup
- (Optional) Configure AI: On the login screen, click ⚙️ Configure Gemini API Key to paste your Google AI Studio key for live grading. If left blank, the game seamlessly runs on an intelligent local fallback log simulator!
- Login: Click Bypass Authorization & Start Shift to boot into the terminal workspace.
- Select Incidents: Use your mouse to click on the incoming warning and critical alerts flooding your left-side Urgent Incidents queue.
- Dispatch Fixes: Read the active bug report in the center panel and click the correct matching technical command button from the action grid to resolve the ticket.
🏆 Win Condition (The Turning Point)
- Survive Until Midnight: You must balance your infrastructure and successfully hold the line for a full 90-second round until the Solstice Clock ticks up from 08:00 PM to exactly 12:00 AM Midnight.
- Once midnight hits, the sun resets its course, the alarms freeze, and you reach the ultimate turning point: typing out a "Shift Handover Summary Report" to get dynamically evaluated and scored by the Google Gemini API.
❌ Loss Conditions
- Corporate Approval Drops to 0%: If you repeatedly select the wrong command protocols or let critical bugs fester, your corporate manager will fire you on the spot.
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AI Core Stability Drops to 0%: If you ignore the incoming queue, the cascading alerts will actively drain your systems, causing a complete global network meltdown and an immediate Game Over.
## Vedio Demo
## Code
Github Repository - ## How I Built It I built this game as a lightweight, single-page web app from scratch using Vanilla HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, completely free of bulky game engines or frameworks. The core logic relies on asynchronous loops (setInterval) to drive the ticking Solstice Clock and dynamically stream randomized technical anomalies into the player's sidebar queue. Finally, I integrated the Google Gemini API (gemini-1.5-flash) using a native browser fetch POST request to analyze the player's final metrics and text report, dynamically generating a witty, customized corporate performance evaluation at midnight.
⚡ Solstice Sidebar: AI Incident Desk
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.
🌌 The Concept & Narrative
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…
Prize Category
🤖 Best Google AI Usage
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!)