- 01Read waiting jobs
- 02Estimate finish times
- 03Choose the next job
- 04Watch other deadlines
Scheduling a service queue
Jobs share a server and have durations and deadlines. Arrival order, shortest-job-first and urgency produce different outcomes.
Play the lab
An original teaching experiment. Parameters explain a tradeoff and do not reproduce the referenced games.
Resource tradeoffs: from a mechanism to a small game →
The player's decision
Finish a quick order to improve throughput, or rescue a long order near its deadline?
Original scenario
Original setup: jobs last 1, 3 and 2 minutes, due at minutes 4, 3 and 6. Starting the shortest job misses the three-minute job that must begin immediately.
Start with this prototype
Build a scheduling lab with one server and three fixed orders. Show durations and deadlines; serving advances time. Win by finishing all on time. Explain missed deadlines and allow a retry with identical orders.
Change one variable
Vary deadline slack to distinguish useful scheduling pressure from an unavoidable failure.
What to observe in a playtest
Can users predict completion times and improve by reordering rather than clicking faster?
Take the full design card
Includes rules, scope, tuning questions and sources for further planning. It does not create a project automatically.
Original analysis · version 1
Common pitfall
Unwinnable random arrivals undermine learning. Fix arrivals for the teaching experiment.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- PlateUp!
Customers spend patience in distinct seating, ordering and food-waiting phases, changing service priorities.
- Overcooked! 2
Cooperative kitchens combine preparation and delivery, providing a comparison for how roles affect waiting.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Build a scheduling lab with one server and three fixed orders. Show durations and deadlines; serving advances time. Win by finishing all on time. Explain missed deadlines and allow a retry with identical orders.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.