A food truck, a griddle and one pastel

Every idle game starts small, but almost none of them start honestly small. Ours starts with four reais in the till — exactly the price of one pastel — and a food truck parked on a corner. There is no welcome bonus dressed up as generosity, and no ten-minute tutorial before you are allowed to touch anything. You tap the griddle, you fry a pastel, you sell it. That is all of it, and it is enough.

What an idle game is, if you have never played one

It is a game about a business that keeps running while you are not looking. You start doing everything by hand, earn enough to hire someone who does it for you, and from there your job stops being production and becomes decision: what to invest in now, what to postpone, when to start the whole thing over in exchange for being permanently stronger.

The genre has a reputation for being a game about waiting. It is not quite that. It is a game about picking your next bottleneck — and the pleasure is watching a number that was impossible twenty minutes ago become pocket change.

Why a pastel food truck

Because that ladder is real, and everyone here has watched somebody climb it.

The street-fair pastel stall is the Brazilian entry-level business: little capital, plenty of hands, thin margins. Out of the stall comes the food truck, out of the food truck a fixed location, out of that a franchise — and if things go very well, the frozen-food plant that sells to the supermarket where the owner used to buy flour. There are twelve products on that ladder, and the last one is called Império Gastronômico because by then it stopped being about pastel.

We picked this over the usual settings — the gold mine, the medieval farm, the spaceship — for a simple reason: those are nowhere. A food court is somewhere. The game is in Portuguese and in English, but it is Brazilian in both.

The griddle is the heart of it

The single most important design decision in the game is this: a product does not earn per second, it earns per cycle. Each one has its own griddle, and the griddle takes time to heat, fry and finish. While it runs, you watch the bar move.

That changes everything, because it creates something idle games usually lack: a moment. The street-fair pastel finishes its cycle in seconds, and early on you sit there tapping one order after another, feeling the business turn in your hand. It is not decoration — it is the only way to make money before your first manager.

Which is why hiring that first manager is the milestone we measure most. He is expensive, he arrives within a few minutes, and the instant you close the deal the griddle starts turning on its own. That product leaves your hands for good. It is the first time the game works for you, and from then on it never stops — including with the phone in your pocket.

No account, no login, no server of ours

Something we decided early and will not change: the game is yours and it runs on your device.

There is no sign-up. There is no login. There is no server of ours holding your progress, because there is no server of ours at all. The save is a file on your phone; if you want a backup, it goes to your Google Play Games account, not to ours. Opening the game on a plane works exactly like opening it at home.

That costs us something — no global leaderboard, and no syncing across two devices without Google’s cloud — and it is still the right side to pick. An idle game keeps you company for months. It should not depend on our infrastructure continuing to exist.

And now

The game is finished and being prepared for Google Play. It is free, it works offline, and it speaks Portuguese and English.

In the next posts I open the machine up: how griddles, managers and milestones fit together, and what still stands between the game that already runs here and the install button you will eventually press.