Why we started with a clicker
Snow, family visiting and the question of why people keep pressing the same button. How a small experiment became OshiYa.
It was cold. There was snow outside, and family was visiting. A game studio wasn't part of the plan. We just wanted to build a simple game.
Not because we confused "simple" with "easy". We wanted to get to know a genre and an industry we had mostly known as players.
What is it about that button?
Clicker games always struck us as slightly absurd. So many people download an app to press the same button again and again. A number rises, an upgrade unlocks, and then it starts over. On paper, that is remarkably little game. And yet a good clicker is hard to put down. Why?
Writing code wasn't new to us. We have built enterprise software for years. But games asked different questions. A function can be technically correct and still feel lifeless. A click needs a response, a rhythm and a reason to try again. That was the hardest and most interesting part at the start: not the programming itself, but turning a feeling into rules.
Trains are cool
The clicker still needed a world. Trains are cool, so that decision was quick. Instead of collecting points, you push passengers into a carriage. A train pulls in, fills up and leaves. Upgrades make the station busier and boarding faster.
We built the first prototype with Go and Ebitengine. We knew Go from other projects, and Ebitengine was enough for a small 2D game without having to learn a new language and a big editor at the same time. The first state in the repository dates from 10 December 2025. It already had a train, tracks, passengers, upgrades and a click that pushed people towards the carriage. It was rough, but playable.
Correct is not the same as right
Once the first train moved, the project stopped being a technical exercise. We tuned how passengers react, how fast the train arrives and how much an upgrade should give. Every change pulled another one along. Faster trains changed the rhythm, more passengers changed the pressure on the platform, and a strong upgrade suddenly made the previous one feel pointless.
In enterprise software we ask whether a system is correct. The game kept asking whether it felt right. A train can arrive at the mathematically correct interval and still feel slow. A reward can be balanced in a spreadsheet and still create no anticipation.
Today we would start differently
As the game grew, so did everything we had to organise in code ourselves: scenes, interface, animation and getting assets into the game. For a new project we would choose Godot with C# today. Not because Go or Ebitengine are bad, but because the editor and scene system fit the way we build games now.
The first technical decision doesn't have to last forever. It has to make the idea playable. Ours got the first train moving.
The small experiment became OshiYa, our first game, and JourneyBit Studio grew around the work on it. Back then we only wanted to understand what was so fascinating about that button. Apparently we're still pressing it.
The longer, personal version of this story is on Medium: I Started With a Clicker. Then We Added Trains.
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