The idea
I’ve played a lot of idle games, and in the current one I’m playing, The Tower, I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed. It expects me to wait days for progress, but also wants me checking in every 10 minutes like I’m on call.
That got me thinking about an idle game that actually encourages you not to play. I wanted to make something truly idle, where you can come back whenever it suits you and still feel like you’re moving forward.
I also realised the whole idea works best if the game can laugh at itself. It’s basically a joke about the genre while still being part of it, which is why one of the core resources is “idle time”, earned by doing the revolutionary act of waiting.
The tech
For the stack, I went with React and Node.js. Building it as a website felt like the right call because I could not imagine many people rushing to download an app called Max Idle. I also wanted a backend from day 1 for competitive time wasting, and using one language across frontend and backend kept things simple.
I’m not exactly a world-class web engineer, but that has actually helped me move quickly because I’m not too precious about structure early on. That said, there have definitely been moments where the AI started generating an unmaintainable spaghetti factory and I had to step in.
I used Postgres for the database, even though parts of the data are arguably more document-shaped. I just trust tables, and at this point I think tables trust me back.
For deployment, I chose Digital Ocean. The project is small enough to run on a single machine, and this setup lets me avoid accidentally turning a joke game into a DevOps degree.
The result
You can play it at max-idle.com. It’s functional, it already has a good number of features, A mostly empty leaderboard and the core premise is holding together better than I expected. There is still plenty of room to grow if I keep putting time into it while everyone else hoards their idle time.
So far the UI looks very utilitarian, at this point I’m not sure whether I should stick with that and keep the focus on numbers or aim for something flashier.
The biggest challenge right now is finding a strong hook that makes people remember to come back. When your game is designed around checking in once a day, “please don’t forget this exists” becomes a surprisingly important design problem.
I’m also still figuring out where the game should sit overall. It started as a joke, and it’s not always obvious how far that joke should go before it either becomes genius or just confusing.
What it really needs now is feedback, especially from real users, once I manage to find some.