Four months ago I just wanted to understand how a real backend works. Not a course, not a tutorial, something alive I could break and fix. I ended up building a game instead of studying. Today I'm showing it openly for the first time.
It's HippoTap, a clicker game inside Telegram. I know how that sounds: another tap game. But from day one I had one rule. Build something with a real economy and an honest server, not an empty shell. Here is what came out of it.
The core is simple. You tap a hippo and coins come in. The part that makes you stay is what comes next. You spend coins building a Mine: 46 upgrade cards across six categories (crypto, social, jurisdictions, infrastructure, Web3, and a garage of cars). Every card pays passive income, even while you are offline. Level a card up and your hourly income grows. The classic loop of earn, reinvest, earn more, and it is hard to put down.
On top of that sit 10 leagues, from Bronze to Lord. Your league multiplies all of your income, from x1 to x4, and it is decided by how much you have earned in total. There is a daily Fortune Wheel: most slices drop coins, some give a rare skin, and one slice in a thousand pays the jackpot. Plus 50 hippo skins, earned with coins, login streaks, or Telegram Stars.
Now the part I am most proud of, and it is the part nobody sees. I do not trust the client at all. Balance, taps, upgrades, purchases, all of it is calculated and verified by the server on FastAPI. The anti-cheat catches bots by rhythm: a real person is jittery, the timing wobbles, a script taps perfectly evenly. Tap too evenly and too fast and suspicion builds until you get banned. Payments are real Telegram Stars, confirmed server side too. I wanted a league spot to actually mean something instead of a number you can fake.
The last few weeks went into the look. I rewrote the loading screen, because the old coin flattened into a thin line as it turned and looked cheap, so now it is proper 3D with weight and a moving glint. I added the garage: you spend your earnings on cars from a Toyota to a Bugatti, each one a flex that also pays income. I reworked the interface so it stops looking like a template.
I am building all of this alone: code, balance, art, copy. Some of it is probably rough. That is exactly why I am going public. I will post the process, the updates, and the failures here, almost every day. If you have made games or just lost hours to a clicker, I could really use your outside eye.
Next up: a leaderboard, clans, and daily combos. Stick around, this gets interesting.