The Deadlock Empire

The Deadlock Empire is a programming puzzle game created in a team with Michal Pokorný for the 2016 Hack Cambridge hackathon.

In the game, the player assumes the role of a computer scheduler. In each level of the campaign, the player sees two or three threads of a computer program written in C#. He must then step through the program, performing context switches as he deems appropriate in order to demonstrate that the program contains bugs in its parallelism code.

For example, the player might simulate an execution order such that two threads enter a critical section at the same time or that results in a deadlock.

The game won the 1st place at the hackathon. In addition, we won two auxiliary prizes – Improbable‘s prize for “the best gaming/VR hack” and Bloomberg‘s prize for “most interesting project”.

The game is programmed in Javascript.

We created the game at the age of 23, in 2016.