Every command is actually parsed: in SysAdmin Crisis, tab completion and man pages both work

I did not want SysAdmin Crisis’s command line to stay a surface: every command you type is actually parsed and produces a real effect in the simulated world — a night shift only feels tense when the syntax underneath it is not just decoration, it actually works.

Unix syntax, real parsing

The syntax is a gamified Unix — the common flags of the real commands are also accepted. top really reads the server load, logs really lists the incident history, block_ip really cuts off an attack source; there are twenty-nine commands in total, tab completion works, and man <command> opens a built-in manual. The shift is built on seven incident types (starting with a DDoS attack and running through six more scenarios); the tutorial introduces two of them — a memory leak and a DDoS — at a slowed pace, using the same commands.

One engine, two platforms

The web (a Next.js-based PWA) and mobile (Expo) versions share the same game engine; on mobile the terminal screen is not a web page embedded in a WebView; it is drawn with native components. The ten-night campaign mode, with its rising load and reputation-to-budget loop, runs on that same shared engine; endless mode and its difficulty options are built on top of the same core. At the end of a shift the run is summed up with a letter grade (S/A/B/C) and a local top-ten list is kept; an unfinished run also stays local, exportable and importable, in a versioned save format.

Development discipline is tied to the code chain

Some things are not left to code review alone: on every push, dependency audit, lint, type-check, the test suite, coverage, the mobile test suite and the web build all run automatically in CI. The end-to-end suite and the accessibility audit run outside CI, in the developer’s own environment — the accessibility audit is kept free of serious or critical findings.

Zero data collection is enforced in code

No accounts, no analytics, no ads — the game makes no network request while playing, aside from the initial page load and the web version’s service worker update. That is not a privacy paragraph; it is a constraint tied to the build chain: fetch/XMLHttpRequest use inside the game packages is blocked by lint rules, and analytics or ad clients leaking into a dependency are caught by a separate dependency-audit script.

The record sits here as halted: it was prepared for release as v1.0.0 and is playable today at sysadmincrisis.com, but no further development is happening on it.