I built an idle clicker game about bananas and learned way more than expected

BananaClicker started as a joke — click a banana, get banana points, buy upgrades, repeat. Classic idle game loop. What I underestimated was how much of the actual work is math, not code.

Getting the curve right

Get your cost-scaling curve wrong and the game either stalls out after five minutes or becomes trivial in thirty seconds. There's a reason idle game devs talk about their exponential growth constants like they're tuning a guitar.

Offline progress is its own problem

Save systems for idle games need to account for time away from the tab, not just state at the moment you close it. So there's offline progress calculation running on load, which sounds simple until you're deciding how to fairly cap it so people don't just leave the tab open for a week and come back to absurd numbers.

It's a small, silly project on paper, but it's the one that made Svelte's reactivity actually click for me, and taught me more about progression design than any tutorial did.