Cookie Empire

After getting burned with React Native, I decided to go all-in on native development with SwiftUI. Halfway through the classic 100 Days of SwiftUI, while dumping another to-do app into the world, I started wondering: could I make a game with this? What is the simplest game I can think of?

I considered Pong, but the idea of something moving in real time sounded astronomically difficult to younger me. So I decided to make a homage to the great Cookie Clicker. There are a gazillion Cookie Clicker clones on the App Store. Why not one more? At least I could try to make mine tasteful and somewhat original. So I started tinkering with it, falling in love with Swift and agonising over the best shade of brown for the cookie.

Some folks started playing it and giving me feedback, so I kept making it better, polishing it and adding new features. What started as a SwiftUI exercise gradually spiralled into a fully-fledged idle mobile game, with proper IAPs and ads, persistence across Apple devices (a nightmare of an implementation), and a complete analytics backend with robust progress-recovery systems.

I started shipping updates maniacally. The game ended up with a realistic stock market simulator where players can day-trade with cookie ingredients, a FarmVille-style farming minigame, prestige mechanics with ascension to heaven, a descent to hell, cryptic lore about yokai and Lovecraftian entities, a narrative-based horror mine exploration minigame full of wandering grandmas, and a complete tile match-3 minigame that later spun off into its own separate game.

The game grew way beyond what I intended, reaching 100k downloads on the App Store and creating a Discord community of nearly 1,000 members.