Riverside Files

The problem

Idle games look simple and are the opposite. The genre lives or dies on an economy that stays interesting for weeks — fast enough in the first ten minutes that a player comes back tomorrow, slow enough at hour twenty that progress still means something.

The detective-agency setting gives that curve a reason to exist: cases, investigators and an agency that grows are a natural fit for hiring, upgrading and unlocking.

What I built

• An idle economy that runs while closed. Offline progression has to be computed on return rather than simulated tick by tick — get it wrong and players either lose earnings they were promised or find an exploit and stop playing.
• Agency progression. Investigators to hire, cases to take, upgrades that change the shape of the curve rather than just multiplying it.
• Built in Flutter, same as the rest of my mobile work, which is how a solo developer ships a game and three utility apps without maintaining separate toolchains.

The part that was actually hard

Balancing is the whole job. Every number interacts with every other number, and the only honest way to tune it is to play it, repeatedly, at different stages.

Google Play now requires new personal developer accounts to run a closed test before production access is granted. That is a real gate with real testers and a real waiting period, and clearing it took longer than building the feature it was gating.

Where it is now

Live on Google Play.