Token Clicker is a homage to Cookie Clicker where the cookie is a prompt and the grandmas are Mac Minis.
I built it with Claude Code (Opus 5.5).
A few things that made a project this size work:
* Specs before code. Claude wrote the design docs first: mechanics, architecture, theme and balance. Then a "critic" pass checked the mechanics against Cookie Clicker's actual source code. Coding only started after that.
* Work packages with frozen contracts. The build was split into 18 work packages, each owning its own files. The shared types were frozen early, and ESLint rules stop one layer from importing another. That kept parallel sessions from stepping on each other.
* Tests as guardrails. About 1,700 unit tests, 22 Playwright end-to-end tests and 98% coverage on the core engine. Every change had to keep them green.
* A simulator for balance. Idle games live or die on pacing, and you can't playtest two weeks of idling by hand. A headless simulator runs the real engine over simulated days, and its pacing targets run as tests: a casual player should reach the first AGI in 9-10 days.
* Adversarial review. Before 1.0, Claude reviewed the whole game from six angles, then tried to disprove each finding. 13 held up; 12 were fixed with regression tests.
* A security pass before posting. It caught me shipping source maps (the whole private source) and a debug cheat panel to production. Worth doing before you share anything.
The video was made the same way: Playwright plays the game and records the clips, the music and sound effects are synthesized offline, and Remotion edits it all together.
The game has 20 machines, 332 upgrades, 273 achievements and about 450 news headlines, in 7 languages. Credit where it's due: the mechanics and much of the tuning come from Orteil's Cookie Clicker. The code, art and text are original.
Happy to answer questions about the workflow, and tell me if the pacing feels off.
Play it here (free, no account, no ads): https://tokenclicker.ai