I make Last Thaw , a free browser strategy game where up to a hundred players start with five settlers on a real map of Earth and have 30 real days to build an empire before an ice age, advancing from both poles on a public schedule, takes the land. It's in early access and I'm looking for people to test it.

The design rule that shaped the whole server is simple: there is no pause . You queue a building, start a research, send an army across the Atlantic, close the tab and go to work. When you come back eight hours later, all of it has happened, in the right order, whether or not anybody was logged in.

That sounds like a game loop. It isn't, and the first thing I learned was that treating it like one would have been the wrong call.…