Intro
I've played games my whole life, but in high school, I was able to form a deeper connection to one of my best friends by playing a certain genre of games called "incremental," "idle," or "clicker" games with him. In college, to stave off boredom, we decided to create a game of our own. Called "Voynich" after the famous manuscripts (for now, at least), it's certainly still a work-in-progress, but it symbolizes a lot more to us than just a mostly functional game.
Links
bluezebragames
/
Voynich
An idle game about creatures and resources.
Voynich 
An idle game about creatures and resources. Check it out at https://bluezebragames.github.io/Voynich/!
The Development Process
I've looked at the source code of a lot of idle games to understand what's going on under the hood. Surprisingly enough, several of the most popular games are not exactly following best development practices -- take Cookie Clicker and Antimatter Dimensions, two of my all-time favorite idle games, for example. Both games essentially use a monolithic structure, with single files of 5000 and 13000 lines of code containing almost all of the game's logic! My goal with this game was to use a more object-oriented approach to compartmentalize logic into several much smaller files.
Right now the development stack is just HTML, CSS, JS, but I might swap to React at some point in the future. Working with GitHub as version control has been quite convenient -- the current workflow is to make feature branches and merge them into master when they've been well-tested.
Ultimately I hope to complete the game and then release a series of tutorials based on it. The tutorials about making idle games online are somewhat lacking, and I hope to guide more people to an interest in programming through game development.
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