Cutting three zeros

I started a game on 1 August. It’s an idle game about money, and the working title is Cutting Three Zeros.

I’m making it in Godot. Over the years I’ve made prototypes in Unity, Godot and Unreal, and right now Godot fits this kind of game best.

Idle games are built on one number that goes up forever. This one has two numbers. The first is how much money you have, and it always goes up. The second is what that money can actually buy, and it goes up much more slowly. Sometimes it even falls. The game is about the gap between them, and the screen always shows both.

You run a mint. Your factories make goods and earn money. That money goes out into the country, and prices rise after it. You have four buttons.

• Print makes new money right away. Prices haven’t caught up yet, so you can spend it before they do. But people trust your money a little less each time, and prices catch up faster next time.
• The interest rate slows the money down and wins some trust back. It also slows your factories.
• Factories are what you buy with the money. They’re the honest way to grow, and they cost more every second you wait.
• Cutting three zeros is the reset. When the money is worth almost nothing, you cross three zeros off every bill, keep part of what you built, and start again with new money.

That last one is the point. In most games, runaway prices are how you lose. Here, they’re how you start the next round. I want players to wreck their money on purpose, once it has given them everything it can.

The first version had a bug that broke the whole idea. Prices went down instead of up, so printing money was free. I found it fast and fixed it. Now the bigger your economy grows, the faster prices rise, and the crash comes on its own.

One rule keeps the game small. If something doesn’t touch money, prices or trust, it isn’t in the game. There are no real countries, currencies or people either. It’s a nameless country with a mint and a problem.

Next comes a screen where you can press Print.