Monster Shop Idle

A small idle clicker about running dodgy shops, in ten settings: a goblin in a haunted mall, an ex-smuggler on a space station, a pirate captain on a ship that sails from port to port, a street vendor in a cyberpunk night market, a repair bot on a planet of robots, an expelled wizard who never left the academy, a jackalope in a Wild West ghost town, a raptor who has just invented shopping, a fired raccoon sidekick in a superhero headquarters, or a benched fox mascot selling "found" merchandise around a basketball arena. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in one file, with no build step and no dependencies.

Status: early prototype. All numbers are placeholders.

Run it

Open index.html in a browser. Progress saves to the browser's local storage.

Add ?speed=10 to the URL to run the game 10 times faster while tuning. Add ?debug to expose the game state as window.__game in the console. Add ?skin=starport (or mall, ship, neon, robot) to force a setting.

To host it, enable GitHub Pages on the main branch (root folder).

On your phone

The game can be added to a phone's home screen, where it opens full screen like an app and works without a connection:

• Android (Chrome): open the game, then the ⋮ menu, then Add to home screen (or Install app).
• iPhone (Safari): open the game, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.

On iPhone the home-screen app keeps its own save, separate from Safari's, so progress in one doesn't show in the other. On Android they share one save.

manifest.webmanifest and sw.js (network first, so updates show up as soon as you're online) make this work. The icons in icons/ are drawn by python tools/make_icons.py (needs Pillow).

Settings (skins)

The side panel has a Setting picker. Each setting has its own cast, shops, story, currency names and colors; the numbers are the same, so one save works in all of them and you can switch at any time.

Setting	Owner	Episodes	Currencies	Look
Haunted Mall	Grizzle, a goblin	Haunted Mall, Swamp Market, Crypt Quarter, Midnight Carnival, Sunken Casino, Ghost Line	Beer, eggs, crystals	Dripping ectoplasm: slime green and lilac on green-black, Rubik Wet Paint
Starport Nine	Juno Vance, an ex-smuggler	Docking Ring, Hydroponics Deck, Reactor Row, Zero-G Stadium, Pirate Moon, Comet Cruise	Scrap, keycards, stardust	Deep space navy with amber and teal, Russo One
The Salty Gull	Captain Nell, a pirate	Barnacle Harbor, Smuggler's Cove, Skull Island, Floating Fair, Treasure Reef, Frostbite Bay	Grog, doubloons, pearls	Jolly Roger: black, bone white and blood red, New Rocker
Neon Night Market	Kix, a street vendor	Gutter Street, Rain Bazaar, Chrome Row, Overdrive Circuit, Skyline Tower, Undercity	Batteries, tokens, shards	Black-violet with magenta and cyan, VT323 terminal pixels
Planet Cog	Rivet, a repair bot	Scrapyard Flats, Toaster Works, Server City, Spark Festival, Old Spaceport, Rust Moon	Oil, bolts, cores	Scrap heap: tin grey, copper and patina green, Black Ops One
Hexwick Academy	Fizz, an expelled wizard	Bell Tower, Greenhouses, Library, Dueling Grounds, Potion Cellars, Observatory	Potions, scrolls, moonstones	Spellfire: plum dark, flame orange and spell cyan, MedievalSharp
Tumbleweed Gulch	Dusty, a jackalope	Main Street, Gold Creek, Silver Mine, Rodeo, Railroad Depot, Painted Canyon	Sarsaparillas, horseshoes, nuggets	Saloon lamplight: saddle brown, lamp amber and turquoise, Rye
Fern Valley	Clawdia, a raptor	Fern Valley, Tar Pits, Volcano, Dino Games, Ice Age, Meteor Hill	Berries, eggs, amber	Jungle sunset: deep green, orange and lime, Chewy
Rimshot Arena	Hoops, a benched fox mascot	Parking Lot, Concourse, Locker Room, Courtside, Jumbotron, Owner's Box	Popcorn, tickets, rings	Championship: black, gold and white, Teko
Hero HQ	Patch, a fired raccoon sidekick	Lobby, Training Room, Gadget Lab, Hero Awards, Supervillain Prison, Orbital Watchtower	Sodas, comics, medals

Each setting's drawn art runs through the page: the episode's scene sits behind the cash with the owner's portrait beside it, the rival heckles from the top of the Goals panel, and the finale character waits in the Finale panel.

How it plays

The rules below use the Haunted Mall's names.

• Six shops unlock in order. Each episode has its own six (episode 1 runs from the pretzel kiosk of mystery to the dragon anchor-store lease).
• Get customers (x1, x10 or Max) to raise a shop's income; each one costs more than the last. Max gets as many as you can afford up to the shop's next bonus, so it never skips past one; after the last bonus (150) it gets all you can afford. Cost grows geometrically.
• Each Get button shows what it adds: $/s for automated shops, $ per run for tapped ones. A green badge (x2) means the purchase crosses a milestone.
• Tap a shop to run it once, or pay to automate it.
• A shop's meter counts down the time left in the run on its left end and shows what the run pays on its right end; the money lands in your cash when the meter fills. Each shop's earnings per second sit under the meter. Money always shows two decimals ($26.00, $55.88M, $1.30B).
• Owning 10, 25, 50, 100 and 150 customers of a shop doubles its income and gives 1 beer.
• Each shop has 3 upgrades, bought in order, each doubling its income (x8 with all three). They cost 600, 6,000 and 60,000 times the shop's automation price, and reset with the episode.
• Each episode has a story goal (listed first, in the setting's accent color, with a line on why it matters there) and 8 shared goals. Clear any 5 and sign a dragon lease to unlock the episode finale. It resets cash and shops, keeps beer, eggs, crystals and cards, and gives 3 eggs plus a permanent income bonus: each finale multiplies it by 1.5 (x1.5, x2.25, x3.4 and so on), so it keeps pace with the rising costs. From episode 2 on, the first shop starts automated.
• On phones and narrow tablets, a bar slides in at the top once you scroll past the header: your cash, income, and a goals chip with the next goal (or "Finale ready") that jumps to Goals or the finale. The header's income counts every automated or running shop, so tapping shows what you're earning.
• The Stats tab (next to Shops and Cards) shows this episode (time, earnings and how much came in while away, customers, taps, top shop, milestone bonuses, automations, upgrades, chests, goals) and all-time totals: earnings (and how much came in while you were away), customers, taps, upgrades, automations, goals, finales, chests, cards drawn and time played. Saves from before it start counting the day they're loaded.
• Saves stay in your browser. To move a game to another device, press Copy next to Save in the side panel, then Paste the code on the other device (it replaces the game there).
• Automated shops keep earning while you're away, up to 8 hours. After a break of 5 minutes or more, a welcome-back popup shows what they earned and any chests ready to open, and asks what to do with it: bank it for 25% more, or, after a break of 30 minutes or more, call a rush hour, where every shop earns x3 for the next 5 minutes (a countdown shows next to the episode number). Banking pays more after long breaks; a rush pays off when you're back to play for a while.

Episodes and story

Each episode has its own district, shops, goal wording and a short story scene at the start and at the finale.

Episode	District	Shops (first to last)
1	Haunted Mall	Pretzel kiosk, phone-case cart, perfume counter, arcade, elevator toll, dragon lease
2	Swamp Market	Mushroom stall, bog-water bottler, lucky charms, fog boat tours, stilt-house timeshare, kraken ferry monopoly
3	Crypt Quarter	Grave-flower cart, coffin showroom, seance parlor, ghost tours, bone-china antiques, mausoleum condos
4	Midnight Carnival	Cobweb candy floss, ring toss for souls, tarot booth, haunted carousel, house of mirrors, big top lease
5	Sunken Casino	Barnacle snack bar, soggy slots, mermaid card tables, shipwreck pawn shop, pearl-diving tours, drowned casino deed
6	Ghost Line	Soot-cake trolley, lost-ticket office, phantom dining car, sleeper-car hire, tunnel-of-screams ride, Ghost Line charter

After episode 6 the list repeats (the story loops back too) (shown as "Haunted Mall 2" and so on), and the permanent bonus keeps carrying over. All episodes share the same six shop slots, but costs grow each episode: customers, automation and the cash goal cost 2.5x more each episode (x2.5 in episode 2, x6.25 in episode 3, x15.6 in episode 4 and so on). The permanent bonus grows by x1.5 per finale (up to x2.25 with the Finale card maxed), a little slower than costs, so each episode takes a bit longer than the last: a gentle long tail rather than a wall.

Cards and chests

Cards survive episode resets. Duplicates level a card up to level 10 (1, 3, 6, 11, 19, 28, 38, 50, 64 and 80 total copies).

Each card is one multiplier that grows with its level. Levels 6 to 10 add half as much each as levels 1 to 5.

Effect	Haunted Mall	Starport Nine	Perk per level (6-10: half)	At level 5	At level 10
Money	Grizzle	Juno Vance	All income +10%	x1.5 income	x1.75 income
Speed	Mort	Sprocket	Shops run 10% faster	x1.5 speed	x1.75 speed
Discount	Countess Vex	Madame Ossa	Customers and automation 4% cheaper	20% off	30% off
Finale	Bramble	Brick	Finale bonus +20%	x2 per finale instead of x1.5	x2.25 per finale
Milestone	Old Bog Witch	Commodore Glint	Each milestone multiplies income by 0.05 more	x2.25 per milestone instead of x2	x2.38 per milestone
Beer	Fang	Scav	Milestones give 20% more beer (scrap on Starport Nine)	2 per milestone instead of 1	2.5 per milestone

Chest (Haunted Mall / Starport Nine)	Cost	Cards	Where the currency comes from
Egg chest / Keycard locker	2 eggs / keycards	3	1 per goal, 3 per finale
Beer chest / Scrap crate	5 beer / scrap	2	Shop milestones
Crystal barrel / Stardust vault	12 crystals / stardust	4	Duplicates of maxed cards

Opening a chest deals its cards in a popup, with new cards and level-ups highlighted and a button to open another if you can afford it.

Daily chest: once a day, from your second day on, the egg chest opens free.

Tuning

Everything lives at the top of the script in index.html. The numbers: SCHEMES (costs, payouts, run times), MILESTONES, UPGRADES (price as a multiple of the shop's automation cost, and strength), GOALS, STORY_GOALS (one per episode; each skin's episodes have a goal line for it), CARDS (weights and strength per level), CHESTS, LEVEL_AT, LATE_LEVEL_STRENGTH (how much levels 6-10 count), PERM_PER_EPISODE, EPISODE_COST_GROWTH (how much costs multiply per episode), OFFLINE_CAP_S, BANK_BONUS, RUSH_MULT, RUSH_S and RUSH_AFTER_S (the welcome-back choice) and FREE_AUTO_SHOPS (shops that start automated from episode 2 on). Everything players read or see is in SKINS: to add a setting, copy a skin, change its words, episodes and theme colors, and it shows up in the Setting picker.

Smoke test: node tools/smoke.mjs loads the game in headless Chrome or Edge (no installs needed, Node 22 or newer), plays each setting for a few seconds, opens a chest, runs a finale, checks every episode's shop icons and story, and fails on any page error. It takes about half a minute; SKINS=mall,neon tests just those, CHROME=/path picks the browser.

Balance check: node tools/sim.mjs reads the numbers from index.html, plays a greedy player who taps every shop the moment it's idle, and prints when each shop opens and when the finale unlocks. Episode 1 currently takes about 25 minutes that way (it buys 3 upgrades along the way), with the fifth goal landing a few minutes before the lease. It also prints when each goal clears. Real players are less efficient, so expect 30 to 40.

It then plays several episodes in a row (carrying over the bonus, beer, eggs and cards, opening chests as soon as it can, plus the free daily chest for every 24 hours played; DAILY=0 turns that off) and prints the median time per episode. node tools/sim.mjs 9 50 plays 9 episodes over 50 runs, and GROWTH=3 node tools/sim.mjs tries a different per-episode cost growth without editing the game (UPGRADES=0, UPCOST=2 or UPSPEC='[{"cost":100,"mult":2}]' try other upgrade setups).

The same table is printed for a casual player (10 minutes every 2 hours) and an idle one (3 minutes, 3 times a day), who only earn from automated shops while away and, while playing, leave a finished shop idle for a few seconds before tapping it again (3 seconds casual, 5 idle). Current real time to unlock each finale:

Episode	Engaged (nonstop)	Casual	Idle
1	25 minutes	2 hours	16 hours
2	26 minutes	2 hours	8 hours
3	30 minutes	2 hours	8 hours
4	37 minutes	2 hours	8 hours
5	45 minutes	2 hours	8 hours
6	56 minutes	2 hours	16 hours
7	1.2 hours	2 hours	16 hours
8	1.4 hours	2 hours	16 hours
9	1.7 hours	4 hours	16 hours
10	2 hours	4 hours	16 hours
12	2.8 hours	4 hours	16 hours
15	4.5 hours	6 hours	1 day
20	9.1 hours	8 hours	1.3 days
25	16.9 hours	12 hours	1.7 days

Cards reach level 10 across the board around episode 25 (57 of 60 levels in the simulator). When they topped out at level 5 they were all maxed by episode 12 and episode 20 took 22.6 hours.

Early on, one break's offline earnings cover the rest of an episode, so session players finish on their second visit. The growing costs are what slow them down later. OFFRATE=0.25 and OFFCAP=4 try a lower offline rate or cap (a lower rate barely changes this).

Session players live on what their automated shops earn while they're away, so the start of each episode matters most: until something is automated, a break earns nothing. That's why the first shop starts automated from episode 2 on. Without it (FREEAUTO=0), idle players spend more and more visits of each later episode tapping their way to the first automation, which costs as much as that episode's prices: 1.3 days for episode 5 and 6.7 days for episode 12.

Roadmap

• Cards and chests (permanent, survive episode resets)
• Episode-specific shops and story beats (6 episodes per setting)
• Balance pass targeting about 30 minutes for episode 1
• Costs scale per episode so later episodes stay a challenge
• Sound effects (synthesized, per setting)
• Art (card portraits, story scenes and shop icons for every setting)
• Optional rewarded-ad boosts

License

MIT

Inspiration

Structure inspired by the discontinued mobile game It's Always Sunny: The Gang Goes Mobile (schemes, episode-style prestige, character cards). This project uses an original setting and cast and is not affiliated with that game or its owners.