In the summer of 2016 we released a series of idle games called Tip Tap Soccer, Tip Tap Rio, and Tip Tap Farm. They were very similar games – in fact, I’m fairly sure Soccer and Rio shared the same underlying economy balance – but it was an experiment in how well we could reskin a simple and retentive game concept to touch on different subject themes: football, farming, and a generic international sporting event which we decided, apropos of nothing, to set in Rio de Janiero.
Working in a very small team – most of the ‘real’ work being done by one talented producer/developer – my role was mainly to research and design the in-game economy, and maintain our economy spreadsheets. These games also represent our first live attempts at A/B testing different premium currency costs and values, and I spent a lot of time working with the team to explain how it should be done (only to be foiled by a very poor choice of analytics platform). Also I wrote all the funny bits.
My personal highlights included:
- Shipping three games in the space of a few months
- Delivering a fully-featured economy for a genre of game I knew almost nothing about before we started
- Honestly, some of the joke NPC names had me crying with laughter – those afternoons were great
My personal disappointments include:
- Not having a little dancing pineapple man conga across the screen during Fever Mode