Merge Coin
Merge Coin is an amazing idle game where you buy and merge coins, to increase your earnings. Buy boosters to increase the productivity of your bank and become a quadrillionaire!
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Merge Coin can be played now in your browser! This version is not supported, and any minor bugs will not be fixed. Please still let me know (minibonzogames@gmail.com) and known bugs will be posted here.
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Development Story
Merge Coin was the fifth game I made, alongside Fruit Sort at the start of 2022. It was the first idle game I made, specifically a merge-based idle game, with lots of inspiration taken from Merge Plane, which I was addicted to at the time. Many of my friends also had similar addictions, so Merge Coin was one of the most controversial games on release in October 2022, some loved it and some couldn't understand what the point was. It's a weird part of human psychology that a game purely based off “number gets bigger” can be really interesting and addictive for some, and completely pointless for others. I really enjoyed learning about the names of different types of coins in both my home country of the UK but also the US, as I used these names for the coins in the game. Making all the scripts to arrange all the coins on the screen and allow the player to move them around and merge them together was also an interesting experience. While my programming skills had developed significantly over the development of my first 4 games, for some reason all my knowledge of loops and lists was thrown out of the window for this game, and I very much discovered why loops exist. The largest script, “CoinOrganiser.cs” is over 17000 lines long, completely ridiculous. About half of those lines are bodges to fix the errors that slip past the first half, and in general the whole file is a lesson in how not to write efficient, maintainable code. Variable definitions make up over 2000 lines, when a few lists would've done the job perfectly fine.
Gameplay and Controls
The game plays very similar to any over merge-based idle game on the market, there is a bigger number at the top displaying how much money the player has, and a smaller “per second” value showing how much money the player earns passively each second. This “per second” value can be increased by buying more coins and merging coins to level them up. Coins can be bought from the top, and each has a number ranging from 1-45. Buying a coin puts it in a free space in the “bank” which is in the middle of the screen, starting with 4 slots, but can reach a maximum of 12 slots. The player can move coins around the bank, and moving a coin into a slot already containing a coin of the same value will “merge” it, replacing it with one coin of a higher value (for example, 2 Level 1 coins creates a Level 2 coin, 2 Level 2 coins creates a Level 3 coin, and so on). The player can keep buying and merging coins to earn more and more money, and as they do more slots in the bank will open up, so the player can hold more coins at once, allowing for even more money generation. The game is effectively finished when the player has 12 Level 45 coins. When the player is offline, their bank will still produce money, but at a lower rate compared to if they were offline, and it is capped at a specific amount (which increases proportionally as the player progresses) to encourage players to still open the app regularly.
The Shop and Coins
The Shop is the second most important part of the game, after the Bank. The Shop displays a complete list of all 45 coins, from the Level 1 Copper Farthing and Level 2 Copper Half-Penny to the Level 44 Obsidian Dollar and Level 45 Obsidian Pound. I gave each coin a 2 part word based name (1 material, ranging from Copper through Tin, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Tungsten, Cobalt, Amber, Topaz, Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, Amethyst and Diamond to Obsidian at the highest value, and 1 title, from Farthing at the lowest value through Half-Penny, Penny, Cent, New Pence, Thruppence, Sixpence, Nickel, Shilling, Dime, Florin, Half-Crown, Double Florin, Quarter, Crown and Dollar to Pound at the highest value) to make things a little more interesting, though the names don't mean anything in gameplay. Each coin also has a unique symbol, displaying it's number prominently in the middle, and styled around the colour of the coin's material (or fictional colour, in a few cases). Each material has 3 coins, with the size increasing corresponding to value. A full gallery of all the coin designs is lower down this page. Not all coins can be bought from the shop from the start of the game though, coins unlock in the shop once the coin 1 value greater has been obtained in the bank (e.g. Level 33 unlocks in the shop once a Level 34 coin has been obtained in the bank). Everytime a coin is bought, its price increases slightly, to encourage players to buy lower value coins and merge them instead of always buying the highest value coin available.
Levelling Up
As the player buys coins, merges coins and earns money, the player also earns XP points in the background. I decided to not show this counter to the player, as there isn't really much they can do to increase it other than just playing the game, and also because it was an extra thing I couldn't be bothered to do. What the player does see, is when they “level up”. Levelling up happens when the player's XP counter reaches pre-determined thresholds, and it rewards the player with an extra slot in the bank. The border colour of the bank also changes, from Blue at Level 1 with 4 coin slots in the bank to Purple at the maximum level with 12 slots in the bank. Levelling up also rewards the player with Rocks, which can be used to upgrade Boosters, which help the game progress quicker in different ways determined by the player.
Boosters
As the player earns Rocks through levelling up and Achievements, the player can spend these Rocks on upgrading Boosters. There are 4 Boosters, Speed Bonus, which simply decreases the length of a second in game time, meaning the player earns more money per real-life second, Shop Discount, which applies a discount to the purchase price all coins in the Shop, XP Bonus, which increases how quickly the player levels up, earning more coin slots in the bank, and finally Offline Earnings, which increases the amount of money the player can earn in the background while not playing the game. Each Booster can be upgraded several times, with the price increasing each time. Once the player has reached the maximum XP Level and unlocked all Achievements, they will be able to upgrade every Booster to the maximum level, but before that point players can decide which Boosters to prioritise based on what they want to develop in the game.
Achievements
As the player progresses, a key source of the Rocks needed to purchase Boosters come from the Achievements that the player can claim as they reach the specified goals. There are 3 Achievement categories, each containing several goals that scale up as the player achieves them, also awarding more and more Rocks each time. They are Coins Collected, Coins Merged and Total Earnings, all fairly self-explanatory, simply purchase more coins, merge them and passively earn money to unlock them.
