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2026

Idle Pollo Tycoon – El Gallo Dorado

Idle tycoon game for iPhone

An idle tycoon game for iPhone with dry, dark humour: a grill stand on a desert car park grows into a chicken chain with many branches. In the basement, a fictional «Blue Special Seasoning» is made in secret, and the branches have to launder the takings. Nine chapters run as pure data on one shared game engine. Built in SwiftUI with no game engine and no third-party packages.

  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • Python
  • iOS

Screenshots

  • El Gallo Dorado: start screen with logo and a chicken restaurant in the desert
  • El Gallo Dorado: the camper chapter, characters mix, cook and sell at a truck stop
  • El Gallo Dorado: the basement lab with vats and two characters in protective suits
  • El Gallo Dorado: restaurant dining room with guests and a hygiene inspection under way
  • El Gallo Dorado: chapter map as a road from the grill stand via the camper to the restaurant
  • El Gallo Dorado: kitchen with breading, frying and drinks during a power cut

The game

  • From a grill stand on a car park to a chain with many branches.
  • A dual economy of clean and sticky money, plus suspicion («heat»), raids and a prestige system.
  • Offline earnings, daily rewards and trophies.
  • A fair monetisation concept with no loot boxes and no tracking.

How the game engine works

  • Nine chapters, all pure data on one shared, generic game engine. No chapter has code of its own.
  • Each chapter is balanced beforehand in a Python simulation that uses the same formulas as the engine.

Tuned for battery and heat

  • Characters as pre-rendered sprites instead of being drawn live.
  • A 10 Hz game tick, a 4 Hz display and an automatic power-saving mode.
  • Measured with Instruments: CPU load dropped from 75 to 20 percent.

Stack

  • Swift 5 and SwiftUI. All graphics are vector illustration, with no game engine.
  • AVAudioEngine with synthesised sound effects, Core Haptics and local notifications.
  • iOS 27, iPhone only, String Catalog in English and German (Switzerland).
  • Python for the balancing simulations.
  • No third-party packages, around 90 Swift files with roughly 16,700 lines.

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A neon arcade game for iPhone built on the agar.io idea: eat what is smaller, run from what is bigger. It adds auto-fire combat, bosses, a battle royale mode and upgrades by slot machine. Open source, native Swift with no third-party packages. No in-app purchases, coins are earned only by playing.

  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
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