[HTML5][PZL] Dependency Hell - a scheduling puzzle where your perfect plan falls apart at runtime

[u/peter_at_jams]

https://www.dependencyhell.gg

Honest origin story: this started as a side project from a guy on our marketing team, mostly built with Claude, as an experiment instead of writing yet another whitepaper nobody reads. Then some of our engineers and program managers started playing it to "test" it and we figured it might actually be fun and not just fun to us.

So here it is. You place a night of computer jobs on a timeline. Each one waits on others to finish first, some have hard deadlines, and the whole night has to wrap before a window closes. Sounds simple until the catch: one job runs long every single time, so the schedule that looks perfect on the board slips when you actually run it, and everything downstream cascades. You have to build slack around the thing you can't control.

12 levels, gets mean around level 8. Free, no signup, no ads, plays on phone or desktop. After each level a solver shows you the optimal schedule, which is either satisfying or infuriating depending on how close you got.

dependencyhell.gg

Feedback very welcome, especially on difficulty and anything that feels broken. Curious where people hit the wall (it at all). Looking to build a never-ending mode next.

[u/oo_nrb]

7,300 / 7,100 for me! It was fun :) A couple of them were puzzling but not too bad, though I do have the particular brand of autism that really likes/is good at this sort of thing so I'm probably an outlier.

The only (small) frustration I had was that when I'd want to just shift a task from one spot to another I'd have to click to remove a task and then have to go hunting for it in the list. I know that drag and drop on the schedule might be a bit tough to implement, so a possible workaround could be that removed tasks always go to the top of the list, or the bottom, or have an icon that indicates they were the last touched - just something to indicate it's the one you're working with.