Transcode Tycoon Idle API Game
In my ever search for things to keep my brain occupied, I had an idea for a simple idle game. The concept is that you own a computer that renders video. You load up a job board and choose which video job to render and get paid with (fake) money upon completion. The amount you get paid in fake money depends on the total run time, resolution, and job priority. You then use the earned money to upgrade your computer so that you can render jobs faster. Upgrade CPU clock speed, the number of cores you have, gigabytes of RAM so you can add more jobs to your queue, etc.
I took inspiration from Space Traders as well as the ever classic Cookie Clicker.
It's basic and 100% API-based, so a little imagination is required. But the benefit is that it's an API. You can interface with it using literally any programming language of your choosing. I put this together over the course of a weekend with a few bug fixes brought up from some willing (and slightly obsessed) testers.
The API is written in Python3 using FastAPI and a simple JSON dump as state management between service restarts. Really simple stuff, but it's a ton of fun to automate. There's also a leaderboard to try and see who has the most total revenue.
This could honestly be a great tech-interview candidate like the Star Wars API; a way to proove that someone is able to interact with an API and automate it.
Anyway, it's open-source and free to download, tinker with, and host yourself. I have this running on my own server at home for some friends and I to play with. The documentation can be found on the Project's GitHub Repository for how to self-host. As always, there's a Docker container.