This idea was part of the 2025 game jam ideas project.

The perfect cup of coffee

⭐ One of my favorite ideas from this project.

Tag line: Speed run humanity progress towards coffee.

This is a clicker game like "A Dark Room" and "Universal Paperclips".

The goal of the game is influence and guide the first humans towards the objective of making the perfect cup of coffee. (Goal)

You are not here to help the humans out of the mud. They are a tool to obtain the perfect cup of coffee. We can skip a lot of human culture and history if we have a singular, and specific goal. They gain technology only as a side effect of your singular goal.

We teach them Fire because it heats water. Farming because beans need soil. Exploration because the right climate exists somewhere else. Civilization is merely the collateral damage of our caffeine obsession. (Uncaring God)

Start by nudging them to be curious. 'Click to inspire'. After 10 clicks they are at least a bit curious and start generating 'insight' automatically. (Engine building)

'Insight' can be spent on the tech tree to unlock "skills" needed to progress towards your singular goal, coffee. (Tech tree)

While unlocking skills the humans might spend your hard earned 'insight' on junk skills that don't help with your progress towards coffee. This should be funny and frustrating... Humanity doesn't need 'singing' skill to make coffee damnit. (Humans act on their own)

The game will play itself, gaining skills in junk directions, if you don't nudge it in the right direction towards your goal. (Follows normal history)

Design pillars

  • Absurd Specificity (everything exists for coffee)
  • Humans act in their best interests, you force them towards your goals. (It's unnatural to speed run humanity towards coffee)
  • A huge tech tree of all the required skills to make coffee (we want it to feel like inventing everything from first principles)
  • A huge tech tree of junk skills that don't help with coffee but the humans want to be a more rounded society (selfish human wants and desires)
  • Comedy through friction, you are forcing the humans to advance unnaturally. Over fitting, absurdity, speed running history. They push back from time to time.

Discovery of coffee

The discovery of coffee should happen at the end of the mid game. The coffee is terrible. It's basically burnt beans in water. Even the humans don't understand why they have been mythologizing this magic bean for all known history. (They rebel, 'the great tea' rebellion). The last act of the game is process refinement of the coffee until it's good.

Jokes

As a joke humans keep asking, begging, trying to just drink tea. It's easier. You have to force their will to focus on coffee.

You start a religion, but it keeps splintering into more relaxed and less strict versions. "Coffee but with tea mixed in", "they believe that the beans contain the spirits of their dead loved ones and shouldn't be ground down and drank". You need to keep squashing these dangerous thoughts.

After getting the humans to invent farming: "Congratulations. You invented farming. Still no coffee"

They don't know what coffee is.

They barely know what fire is.

But somehow… they will invent espresso.

They have 5000 words to describe coffee, but none for bread. The word for rain is 'weak coffee from the sky'.

They discovered espresso before they domesticated a cat.

Prior art

Games like A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips are generally referred to as incremental games, also known as idle games or clicker games.