Clicker Genesis

A Bible-verse idle/incremental clicker built in Unity, for Windows, macOS, and Android. Tap to earn Ink, spend Ink to unlock the next verse of Scripture in canonical order, and grow a roster of themed "scribes" that keep generating Ink while you're away — all wrapped around the goal of helping players actually read and memorize the Bible through play.

Micro-transactions exist in the eventual design but are never required for progress or content. Scripture text is never altered, paraphrased, or reinterpreted — only unedited, recognized translations are used (KJV in v1). This constraint overrides convenience in every implementation decision.

Website: gaming.recontowers.com

Status

Version 0.4.9 Beta — pre-release, core loop implemented and playable.

0.4.9 fixes two real bugs. Law-tier manager rows (theme/teaching-content managers in law-heavy books like Leviticus) could show as unlocked on a completely fresh save, because their unlock check wasn't correctly gated the same way Person-tier managers are — now fixed.

The Achievement screen's two dropdowns (the book picker and the category filter) had the achievement-card grid visibly bleeding through their parchment background whenever scrolled to either end of the list. The real cause took three passes to actually nail down: it was neither a RectMask2D clipping bug nor a draw-order bug (both genuine, both fixed along the way, neither was the actual culprit) — it was the dropdown panel's own background sitting at 98% opacity instead of 100%, letting the grid underneath show through as faint but legible ghost text. Both dropdowns are now rebuilt from scratch on a dedicated always-on-top overlay Canvas with the background opacity baked in as fully opaque at author time rather than patched at runtime, so it can't silently drift again.

0.4.8 was a hotfix for a regression 0.4.7 introduced. The pause menu was dead in the Android build — PauseMenuOverlay had been left inactive in Assets/_ScenesAndroid/MainMenu.unity. Because PauseMenuController is a persistent singleton whose Awake() sets Instance and wires every button, and every pause button in the game is a PauseButtonTrigger calling PauseMenuController.Instance?.Show(), an inactive root means Awake() never runs, Instance stays null, and every pause button in the game silently does nothing. Desktop builds were unaffected. A full active-state diff across all 13 desktop/Android scene pairs confirmed this was the only divergence, and structural component counts now match the pre-regression commit exactly.

What 0.4.7 fixes is worth stating plainly, because it was a real bug with a real cause. UI elements shifted position whenever the screen resolution changed. Every screen's CanvasScaler was set to matchWidthOrHeight = 0.5, a blend of width- and height-matching, which means that on any aspect ratio other than the 16:9 reference the canvas changes size in both dimensions at once. On a modern phone in landscape that made the coordinate space up to 114 units shorter than it was authored against, dragging top- and bottom-anchored elements toward each other while left/right ones spread apart. Nothing was anchored wrongly — the coordinate space itself was moving. Switching to matchWidthOrHeight = 1.0 (match height) makes the canvas exactly 1080 units tall on every device, so vertical layout is now invariant and a wider phone simply gets more horizontal room. Measured vertical drift across seven real device aspect ratios went from −148…+167 units to exactly zero.

Four screens — Skill Tree (both canvases), Save Slots and New Game Setup — had never received the responsive controller at all, and the Skill Tree was still carrying a portrait reference resolution on a landscape-locked game. All four are fixed. The Android versionCode was also still 1 after four Android releases, which would have caused Google Play to reject the first store submission outright; it now increments properly.

Also built since 0.4.1, not yet its own version bump: a real 3-slot save system — New Game walks you through a translation and starting-book choice, each of the 3 slots is independently save/load/delete/copy-able and shows its own completion summary (active book, level, % complete) from the slot picker.

This is an active work-in-progress being built in public as part of a development portfolio — see Bug Tracker for a transparent, running log of what's broken and what's been fixed.

Download

Platform	Download	Minimum version
🪟 Windows	ClickerGenesis-Windows-v0.4.9.zip	Windows 10 64-bit or later
🍎 macOS	ClickerGenesis-Mac-v0.4.9.zip	macOS 12.0 (Monterey) or later
🐧 Linux	ClickerGenesis-Linux-v0.4.9.zip	Most 64-bit distros with a modern GL/Vulkan driver
🤖 Android	ClickerGenesis-Android-v0.4.9.apk	Android 8.0 (Oreo, API 26) or later

All four platforms now ship together on every release, per the project's standing release-process rule — no more platform-lag between Windows and the rest.

• Windows: unzip and run ClickerGenesis.exe.
• macOS: unzip, then right-click ClickerGenesis.app → Open the first time (the build is unsigned/unnotarized — no Apple Developer account in this pipeline yet — so Gatekeeper blocks a plain double-click on first launch; this is expected for an indie unsigned build, not broken packaging).
• Linux: unzip, chmod +x ClickerGenesis.x86_64, then run it.
• Android: download the .apk directly to your device and install it (you'll need to allow installs from this source in Android settings — this is a test build, not distributed via the Play Store). Orientation is locked to landscape as of 0.4.6; expect some remaining rough edges on touch input.

All releases (including older versions and full changelogs) are on the Releases page.

Core loop

1. Tap on the Clicker screen to earn Ink (the game's currency).
2. Buy scribes — passive Ink/sec generators, themed per book (Genesis: Reed Pen → Papyrus Scroll → Stone Tablet → Oil Lamp → Ark's Manifest → Covenant Seal → Jacob's Ladder → Joseph's Storehouse), each unlocking further as you progress through the book's verses.
3. Switch to the Buy Verse screen and spend Ink to unlock the next verse in canonical order — reading it reveals the verse text and reference. Verses can also be bought in bulk per chapter at a 25% discount.
4. Level up from XP earned on verse/chapter/book completion. Crossing a level threshold makes prestige available.
5. Prestige via the Grace Skill Tree — a free path (keeps everything, grants Grace only) or an opt-in reset (wipes Ink/Click Power/scribes/level for 2.5x the Grace, plus permanent post-reset bonuses). Grace buys permanent upgrades across 8 economy branches and a Book Progression branch that unlocks the next book — nothing already-unlocked (verses, ranks) is ever re-locked by either path.
6. Switch books once unlocked (Books tab, appears after your first prestige) — each book keeps its own independent progress, so switching to a newly-unlocked book never touches what you've already read in an earlier one.

Features implemented so far

• Tap-to-earn Ink with a purchasable Click Power upgrade (smooth per-purchase growth + milestone multiplier breakpoints at 10/25/50/100 owned, shared with scribe scaling)
• 19-tier Genesis scribe roster (Reed Pen through Silver Cup) with named managers (Adam through Benjamin) gated on their real first-mention verse in scripture, plus a working submanager system — minor characters (Seth, Methuselah, Hagar, Melchizedek, and 15 others) hireable under a manager for a scribe-cost discount or an output-bonus boost, each with their own real verse gate. An auto-buy toggle with a spendable-Ink reserve floor covers the whole scribe list.
• Full Genesis KJV text (50 chapters, 1,533 verses) plus all 38 remaining Old Testament books staged and switchable, sequential verse unlocking with a scrollable, referenced ("Genesis 1:1") verse list
• Chapter bulk-buy ("Buy Next Chapter") with a documented 25% discount vs. buying verses individually, split into a free "Unlock Chapter" gate + a paid "Complete Chapter" bulk-buy
• Bulk-buy multipliers (1x/5x/10x/20x, and up to 100x for Click Power) on both verse and click-power purchases
• XP/leveling system driven entirely by content-completion (verse/chapter/book), not combat — feeding prestige eligibility
• Prestige system: a 105-node Grace Skill Tree (radial layout, 8 economy branches + a Book Progression outer ring) reached via a dedicated Skill Tree screen, gated behind a central "Core" hub node. Free prestige (Grace only, nothing lost) vs. opt-in Reset-Prestige (2.5x Grace, wipes numeric progress only, never unlocked verses/skill ranks) — resetting grants permanent stacking Ink/sec and book-completion-multiplier bonuses, plus raised post-reset XP rates
• Books tab: switch your active book once unlocked via the Grace tree, enforcing "finish book N before starting book N+1" — each book tracks its own independent verse/chapter progress
• Stats screen (Pause Menu): lifetime Ink earned/spent, Grace earned/spent, prestige counts, skills/managers bought, verses/chapters/books completed
• Multi-scene navigation (Main Menu → Clicker Screen ↔ Buy Verse Screen ↔ Skill Tree, Settings) with persistent cross-scene game state
• Parchment/ink/gold "warm, legible, mobile-fast" base art direction, with a reserved stained-glass accent style for reward moments (not yet built)
• Every screen re-themed with a shared stone-textured backdrop instead of flat color, giving the UI real depth
• Managers auto-purchase their own scribe tier once bought, on top of their existing output bonus, and their tab row now shows only their name and actual active bonus (no flavor text)
• Scribes / Managers / Support three-tab layout: Managers show every unmet unlock requirement (scribe tier, character's own verse, level) as its own color-coded line — green when satisfied, red when not — with the buy button showing only the real cost, never lock-reason text. Submanagers moved into their own dedicated Support tab, same requirement-line pattern, decluttering the Managers list
• Run-in-background toggle (Settings) so idle Ink income keeps ticking while the window is unfocused
• Shared passive "progress multiplier": every 5 verses bought adds +0.1 to a multiplier applied across all scribe output, and it doubles outright on every chapter completed
• Real hover/press visual feedback on every button in the game, plus tooltips throughout
• Managers are correctly locked until their own scribe tier is unlocked by verse progress, not just by player level — and that gating stays keyed to Genesis' progress specifically, so switching to a different active book never re-locks already-unlocked scribes/managers
• Full Old Testament, all 39 books playable: every book from Genesis through Malachi has its own real scribe/manager/submanager roster (408 tiers total), computed against its real KJV verse positions, switchable via the Books tab in canonical order
• All 27 New Testament books' data imported (276 more tiers — Matthew through Revelation, each Gospel's Jesus independently authored per book) but intentionally not switchable in-game yet — a "New Testament — Coming Soon" row shows in the Books tab instead, until the Old Testament experience is polished
• Save/load persistence: local JSON save files, atomic temp-file-then-rename writes with a .bak fallback, light obfuscation, and graceful corruption recovery (falls back primary → backup → fresh save on any read failure). Built out into a full 3-slot system: New Game walks through a translation and starting-book choice, each slot is independently save/load/delete/copy-able, and the slot picker shows a real summary (active book, level, completion %) per slot without loading it.
• Achievement system: 740 real achievements generated from the game's own live data, not hand-typed — 25 hand-authored headline milestones, 66 per-book completion achievements (39 OT + 27 NT), 10 section-grouping/"ultimate" achievements (e.g. completing the Pentateuch, the Four Gospels, the full Bible), 386 per-manager unlock achievements, 168 per-manager "household complete" achievements (hire every submanager under a given manager), and 85 gameplay-stat ladders (lifetime Ink earned/spent, taps, and more). Browsable via a tabbed card grid (category tabs + live search) with bronze/silver/gold difficulty-tier diamond frames, real category icon art, and shader-driven card materials that recolor by category and lighten once unlocked. Spoiler-hidden achievements show "Hidden Achievement" until earned so discovering a new named character stays a surprise. Global persistence, independent of save slots, so progress is visible no matter which slot is active.
• Sound & Audio System: a real AudioMixer-driven Master/SFX/Music/Voice volume stack with independent mute, music that crossfades per screen zone (Menu/Core Gameplay/Skill Tree/Achievements), and SFX hooks already wired at verse/chapter/book/achievement-unlock call sites. No audio clips exist yet, so it's currently silent but fully functional — ready for content.
• Desktop auto-update: an opt-in "Check for Updates" / "Install" control in Settings (Velopack-based) — nothing downloads or installs without an explicit click.
• Credits and Stats each have their own standalone, scrollable screen (promoted from small Pause Menu popups) for real readability at scale.

Tech stack

• Engine: Unity 6.5, URP 3D Core template
• Language: C#, ScriptableObject-driven config (pricing curves, XP constants, scribe rosters — nothing gameplay-numeric is hardcoded, so it can be rebalanced after playtesting without touching code)
• UI: TextMeshPro, Ibarra Real Nova (openly licensed, replacing an earlier Georgia font asset that was flagged as a licensing risk for a shipped build)
• Tooling: Unity-MCP for AI-assisted Editor/scene/Play-mode workflows during development
• Auto-update: Velopack (opt-in, desktop only)
• Source control: Git + Git LFS

Project structure

Assets/
  _Scripts/
    Core/           GameLoopController (persistent singleton), screen UI controllers, scene nav
    Economy/        Ink wallet, scribe system, milestone curve
    Progression/    XP/leveling, Prestige/Grace Skill Tree system
    Achievements/   Achievement data model + runtime system
    Save/           Save-slot storage, migration, achievement persistence
    Data/           Verse database, pricing config, per-book progress, canonical book order
    Editor/         Editor-only tooling (Skill Tree content generation, etc.)
  _Config/          ScriptableObject assets (XpConfig, per-book scribe rosters, achievement sets, pricing curves, Grace Skill Tree)
  _Scenes/          MainMenu, ClickerScreen, BuyVerseScreen, PrestigeScreen, SettingsScreen, AchievementScreen,
                    StatsScreen, CreditsScreen, SaveSlotScreen, NewGameSetupScreen, CoreLoopTest (dev/smoke-test)
  _Audio/           Audio mixer
  _Fonts/           Ibarra Real Nova (openly licensed)
  _Prefabs/, _UI/, _Settings/     Prefabs, generated/UI-only sprites, render-pipeline settings
  _ThirdParty/      All imported art/UI asset packs, one subfolder per pack
  Resources/
    Bible/          Canonical KJV outline (all 66 books, chapter/verse counts)
    Verses/         Loaded verse text by book (all 39 Old Testament books staged)
  Plugins/          Native/managed plugin DLLs (Velopack, etc.) — Unity-reserved folder name

Resources/, Plugins/, Editor/ (nested), TextMesh Pro/, and AddressableAssetsData/ keep their exact Unity-required names; everything else lives under an underscore-prefixed category folder so the Project window sorts real project content above imported packages and package-managed folders.

Getting started

1. Clone with LFS: git lfs install && git clone https://github.com/neogentrics/Clicker-Genesis.git
2. Open in Unity 6.5 (URP).
3. Open Assets/_Scenes/MainMenu.unity and press Play — this is the real production entry point (not CoreLoopTest.unity, which is a standalone dev/smoke-test scene for the core tap→buy loop only).

Bug tracker / known issues

Every reported bug is tracked with an increasing number across two columns — Open (not yet confirmed fixed) and Fixed (explicitly confirmed by real playtesting, not just by the code changing). Bugs only move to Fixed once they've been verified in an actual Play session — not from a screenshot or a script check alone.

Full tracker (kept in sync, includes fix descriptions and root causes): see the project's Notion Bug Tracker page (private), or the live GitHub Issues list — every bug here has a matching Issue, closed once confirmed fixed. Open a new Issue for anything new you find.

Versioning

X.Y.Z:

• X — official release marker (0 = pre-release)
• Y — feature/update bump. Only increases once the current feature set has been confirmed genuinely playable end-to-end through real testing — not just when a feature-shaped chunk of code lands.
• Z — patch/bugfix only

Open questions / roadmap

• Whether Psalms should be a starter-book option or gated behind prestige (needs real per-chapter verse-count analysis — already gathered, decision deferred)
• Real narrative-accurate scribe/manager unlock thresholds beyond the current placeholder mechanism-testing values
• NIV/Amplified translations (on hold — confirmed no legally usable public-domain edition exists for either); ASV, WEB, RV1909 (Spanish), and the Webster Bible are already extracted and validated as legally clear alternatives, not yet wired into gameplay
• Real audio content — purchase-click SFX are wired in as of 0.4.6 (Scribe/Manager/Support/Verse/Chapter buy buttons); music and voice clips still don't exist yet
• Real mobile-device responsive layout — as of 0.4.6 the app locks to landscape orientation at the OS level (portrait/live-rotation was built and verified working, but Unity's CanvasScaler can't correctly serve one layout in both orientations at once) — this resolves the worst of the earlier portrait-layout bugs by removing portrait entirely rather than continuing to chase per-orientation fixes; the Skill Tree's own zoom baseline (Bug #58) is still open
• New Testament content (27 books' worth of scribe/manager data, already imported and validated) is intentionally not switchable in-game yet — a real OT→NT transition system (separate skill tree, separate currency) is designed but not built, gated behind polishing the Old Testament experience first
• A full Geneva Bible 1560 + Ethiopian Bible data layer (231 books' worth of scribe/manager content indexed alongside KJV's — extracted, validated, not yet wired into gameplay)
• The desktop auto-update system hasn't yet been exercised through a real packaged install/update cycle — infrastructure compiles clean and is wired, but not click-tested end to end

Guiding principle

Scripture text is never altered, paraphrased, or reinterpreted. Only unedited, recognized translations are used. This constraint overrides convenience in any implementation decision — it's the one rule in this project that doesn't get relaxed for the sake of shipping faster.