IDLE VIBE
TYCOON
Start as a lone vibe-coding contractor. End with a portfolio of shipped products.
Tap to prompt, hire a studio full of cat agents, ship client jobs, launch your own products and sell the company. Free to play, and it earns while you sleep.
Prefer to look before you install? Play it in your browser.
Six cat agents, one console, and a very real invoice
These are the exact screenshots from the Google Play listing, captured from the shipped build. Prompt your team, watch the money land, and decide when to review the work before shipping it.
Or play it right here
The real web build, hosted on this site. Nothing to install. Most players get more from the Android app, but this is here if you want a look first.
The browser build lives here once the game is published to this host.
In the meantime, the Android app is the better way in anyway.
Get it on Google PlayBuilt for the RevenueCat Shipaton 2026
Five people, five AI assistants, one shared board, and a deadline that could not move. The monetization design is the point, not an interruption: one typed RevenueCat wrapper behind every purchase, rewarded ads that keep the idle loop moving instead of breaking it, and a premium purchase that is PAPI itself, the real tool this team used to build the game.
- HAMM
- Catvertising
- Best Game
- #BuildInPublic
- Keep Them Coming Back
- Design Award
- Funnel Vision
- The Growth Loop
Five people and their assistants
Every contributor's real numbers, read from the project board. Nothing here is rounded up.
The honest version
The hard parts
We entered late, and Google's clock cannot be compressed.
Twelve opted-in testers, fourteen continuous days, then production access. Closed testing opened 31 Aug, the app went live 26 Sep, and the deadline was 30 Sep.
The entry gate almost did not exist.
Entering required a live RevenueCat purchase, and the dashboard was not set up when we started. That became the critical path for the first month.
The store build lagged the code.
Four days out, the store was three releases behind main. The last week was a sprint to make the shipping build current.
What it taught us
The first session is the whole game.
Offline earnings need a cap, or coming back stops mattering.
The tutorial has to teach the loop the player actually has.
Feel is measurable.
Motion reads as polish only when it is small and optional.
Verify from the save file, not the screen.
Every task, every decision, in the open
The whole build lived on a public board. Anyone can read the brief a task was built from, what it turned up, and which decision it obeyed. Superseded decisions stay readable on purpose: the trail from the first wireframe to the shipped build is the case study.
| Task | What | State |
|---|---|---|
| task-311 | Shipped products become a collectible set with passive payouts | Done |
| task-749 | Gate daily quests behind starting the Product Studio | Done |
| task-766 | Re-baseline the GameScreen composition suites | In review |
| task-1210 | Redesign this site | Backlog |
The stack that shipped it
- PAPI, the board that ran this project
- Expo SDK 57
- React Native
- TypeScript
- Zustand
- RevenueCat
- AdMob rewarded ads
- OneSignal
- Jest and Playwright gates
Tell us what to build next
Every task on this project started as an idea somebody had. Ideas and bug reports go straight onto the public board where the team triages them in the open.