Tickwork: Idle Game Framework + Balancing Simulator for Godot 4

Tickwork handles the engineering of an idle game, so you can spend your time designing it.

Idle games look simple, but under the hood they need numbers past 1e308, correct bulk-buy maths, prestige resets, offline earnings and saves that hold up to crashes and content updates. Tickwork provides all of that in documented GDScript for Godot 4, plus something we did not find in other Godot idle templates:

A balancing simulator

Point it at your content and it plays the game headless with a greedy "smart player". It reports when each generator, upgrade, achievement and prestige is first reached, where players hit walls (long gaps with nothing to buy) and what is never reached. On our test PC, 8 simulated hours of the demo took about 2 seconds, or about 27 seconds with 10 prestiges. Run it from the editor's Tickwork Sim panel or the command line, and export CSV for charts.

Our own demo shows why it matters. The first draft of its prestige formula looked fine on paper. The simulator showed that after 4 hours the player would prestige every 2–3 minutes, so we retuned it before release.

What's included

• TickNum: numbers far beyond float range. Below 1e300 it uses plain 64-bit floats, so simple sums don't drift the way log/pow-normalised big-number classes can (in our tests, 15 + fifteen 1s stays 30 rather than 30.000000000000013). Above 1e300 it switches to mantissa × 10^exponent (64-bit exponent; 1e1000000 is tested).
• TickFormat: 1.23M · 1.23e45 · 12.3e45 · 1.23aa · 1,234,567 · "1h 02m". Rounding carries correctly (999,999 → 1.00M).
• Content as Resources or JSON: currencies, generators, upgrades (7 effect types), achievements (5 condition types), multi-layer prestige. validate() catches typos in ids and numbers.
• TickGame: closed-form bulk prices and "buy max" (checked against brute-force sums in the tests), requirements and chains, reveals, achievement bonuses, prestige multipliers, signals. Pure logic, so it is testable and runs headless.
• Offline progress: earnings while away calculated in one step from the production rate (production is constant while nothing is bought), with cap, efficiency and minimum, plus a "Welcome back" signal.
• Careful saves: JSON parsing only (save data is not passed to Godot's object decoders), write-to-temp-then-rename with an automatic .bak fallback, a SHA-256 check that detects truncated or edited state, ordered migrations for content updates, optional password, and export/import strings for players.
• TickRunner node: drop it in and assign content. It ticks, autosaves, and saves on quit and on app pause.
• Spore Garden demo: a complete small idle game (10 growths, 38 upgrades, 21 achievements, prestige). All visuals are drawn in code; no third-party art.
• Tests: 264 automated checks plus demo and editor-panel tests. Run them after you change anything.
• Docs: README quick start, a design guide (formulas, prestige, saves, migrations, simulator tips) and an API reference.

Requirements

Godot 4.7 (tested on 4.7.2 stable, Windows). GDScript only. Earlier 4.x versions are not tested.

Honest limitations

• The simulated player is greedy, not optimal. Use its times to compare versions of your content, not as a promise about real players.
• There are no auto-buyers or timed boosts yet.
• Save encryption only deters casual editing (keys inside games can be extracted). The checksum detects accidental damage and casual edits, not a determined cheater.
• TickNum keeps about 15–16 significant digits, like a float; above 1e300 it does not track fractional parts.
• No software can promise that saves survive every power loss or disk failure. Tickwork keeps a backup, and its tests cover recovery from a truncated save.
• Web and mobile exports were not tested in this release.
• Code, documentation and the demo's code-drawn art were produced with AI assistance (Claude) and checked with the automated test suite.

Try before you buy

Tickwork Lite is free (MIT): the TickNum + TickFormat number core.

License

Use it in any number of commercial and free games. No attribution required. You may not resell or redistribute the framework itself. Full text is in LICENSE.txt.

Support

Ask in the comments below. Bug fixes for 1.x are free updates on this page. If it doesn't work for you and we can't fix it, ask for a refund within 14 days.