A reverse-engineered reimagining of the arcade classic Tapper. Play as a bartending frog in a dive bar with very thirsty customers — serve drinks, manage five bars, and don't let anyone reach the end of the bar.

Available on itch.io: https://harborviewgames.itch.io/tapped-out

PC and mobile builds coming soon.

The core challenge was a behavior state system for NPC customers — thirsty, waiting, drinking, and drunk. Each state didn't just affect the individual NPC, it affected the environment and every other customer in the bar. The chair reset system was the key insight: each customer takes their chair with them as they advance, then the chair resets to its origin after the NPC is deleted — creating a rotating cycle of new customers without spawning new objects constantly.

This was also my first deep dive into 2D tilemapping and sorting layers, which clicked once I started thinking about depth in 3D terms — which object is closest to the camera, which is farthest.

Unity

C#

2D Tilemap System

NPC behavior state machine

Object pooling

Bar cycling — players should loop through bars rather than backtrack constantly

Add a fetch mechanic to catch empty bottles before they slide off

Difficulty scaling tied more directly to player performance

Full breakdown of the technical decisions and retrospective: https://verbatimaura64.github.io/tapped-out.html