Teaching the Core Loop in Two Lift Rides
The most important idea in an idle game is automation. The tutorial was rebuilt so the first lift attendant can be hired after exactly the second ride, staff replaced faceless managers, and the prestige system was rethought as reputation.
Every idle game rests on one idea: at first you do the work, then you hire someone who does it for you, and from then on your job is to grow. If a new player does not understand that, nothing else matters.
The attendant after the second ride
In the first version, a manager for the first lift cost so much that new players never saw one in the first minutes. So I designed the opening backwards from the moment I wanted:
- The player buys the platter lift. It runs.
- The player collects the money. It runs a second time.
- The player collects again, and now exactly enough money is there to hire the lift attendant.
- From then on the lift runs and pays by itself.
This needed a special low staff price for the very first business only, and a starting balance tuned to it. There is a test in the code that checks this sequence, because one careless balancing change could break it silently.
After the attendant comes one more lesson before saving up for the next business: every additional lift you buy makes each ride more profitable. I first skipped it and noticed that testers never bought a second platter lift. Now it is a separate tutorial step.
Coach marks instead of a narrator bar
The tutorial used to be Sepp at the bottom of the screen in a speech bar. When I watched someone play, it was obvious: nobody looks at the bottom of the screen. The tutorial now uses coach marks: a short speech bubble with an arrow attached to the button it talks about, and for the first two steps a spotlight that dims everything else. Each step has a trigger (when it appears) and a completion (the action that ends it). The texts are two or three words of title and one instruction.
Another fix from testing: buying another unit while a coin stack waits now collects the stack automatically and restarts the ride. Before, players bought a unit and wondered why nothing moved.
Staff, not managers
"Manager" is the genre term, but it does not fit a ski resort. Who runs a platter lift? A lift helper. A hut? A host. A ski school? An instructor. So managers became staff, and every business in every region got a person with a name, a role and a short line about their work.
The business card itself does not show the profession, only the state in a small slot next to the name:
- an empty circle: nobody available yet;
- a pulsing plus: you can hire someone now;
- a face: someone works here. Tapping it shows the person, their role and their quote.
A faceless silhouette for "not affordable yet" turned out to be a nice teaser, and tapping it shows the hiring dialog with a greyed-out button, so players learn the price early.
Reputation instead of investors
Most idle games have a "prestige" reset: you give up your progress for a permanent multiplier. In my first draft it was called investors, which felt wrong. You are building a ski brand, not raising venture capital. I rewrote it as reputation: you restart, but the world remembers your resorts, and every reputation point increases production.
The concept was later switched off completely. Resetting progress felt like a punishment in a game where regions take days, and reputation became the currency of the special projects instead (see the World Cup entry). But the reframing from money to reputation stayed and shaped everything after it.
Building blocks
On a more technical note, the interface got a small component library: Card, Button, ProgressBar and IconTile, all driven by central design tokens for colours, outlines, radii and shadows. Since then, new screens are built from these pieces instead of hand-styled boxes. It is the main reason the game still looks consistent after dozens of new dialogs.
The Android app also got its launcher icons generated from a single source file (adaptive icon, themed monochrome icon, Play Store icon), and the browser-only "reset game" button and "saved in this browser" note were hidden in the app.