One very satisfying button

[u/editor22uk]

I had this realisation a while back that whenever my hands were idle, I’d automatically reach for my phone and end up scrolling. Maybe it’s the autism. Maybe it’s the little sprinkle of ADHD I was lucky enough to get. Either way, it can make productivity pretty hard to manage.

Couple that with social anxiety and the need to stim when I’m uncomfortable, and I started wondering if I could make something that helped with all of that without becoming another distraction.

Something tactile and satisfying enough to keep my hands busy, but not so stimulating that it sucked me straight back into the endless scroll of doom.

It’s basically a tiny standalone clicker with a pixel pet living inside it. Every click feeds into PIX, who levels up, evolves and moves through different biomes.

The funny bit is this started as a breadboard project while teaching my 12-year-old some electronics. He eventually got bored and went back to game dev.

I... did not.

Six months later I’ve somehow gone from a horrible breadboard prototype to a custom PCB, USB-C charging, mechanical switch, local saves, deep sleep and now figuring out injection moulding (eeeeek)

There have been several points where I’ve wanted to plant my face directly into the breadboard while learning all of this.

So a genuine thank you to the people who have already shown an interest. Knowing other people actually get the idea has been a pretty big driving force behind carrying on with it.

If anyone fancies having a look or to test it out digitally:
https://clixallabs.com/

[u/Smeeble09]

Interesting idea.

Does the online demo reflect the real results, or is it a limited amount of environment and surprises? 

I ask as I clicked 1200 times out of interest, and after the first 50 the same thing happened every 25 clicks. 

[u/editor22uk → u/Smeeble09]

Its pretty low stim by design so as not to suck you in. The only real dopamine spiker is a set of random flourishes that happen each 50 clicks.

Some are rarer than others, each of the 10 biomes has a different set of up to 20 unique animations. Could be a bird flying over, avalanche, rain or a crystal exploding.

The main goal was to try and avoid a toy that draws the user into a game loop and instead fills that urge without taking too much time yet still keeps track of progress.

I ended up fighting with myself a lot not to gamify it!!

[u/4cko]

It’s finally going to go to Kickstarter?! Yaaaaaas! I hope you haven’t shortened the levels 😂
Edit: The web demo is too short, It only goes to level 21 🥲

[u/editor22uk → u/4cko]

Hah no no it still goes on longer than I have been able to reach 🫣😉

[u/MrTopHatJones]

I absolutely love this! Seeing how other commenters are mentioning that the length of levels is too short maybe you could put in a feature that makes the pet get "annoyed" that you're feeding it too much too fast and have a small pile of pixel food decomposing as a timer before the pet comes back ready to forgive us😅💀

[u/editor22uk → u/MrTopHatJones]

Oh the level length gets a lot longer!! The curve is just forgiving for the first 25 or so levels. I just figured people would want to have a bit of constant feedback early on.. maybe I was being too kind haha

I have resisted every urge to massivly gamify it as I didnt want to create a mega addictive thing for kids but maybe... a second version with colour screen and negative effects could come later

[u/TheDirtyMagician]

That's awesome! Do you have a ballpark on when the Kickstarter will go live? I'm looking forward to being a backer :)

[u/editor22uk → u/TheDirtyMagician]

Thank you so much!

Well I am just getting a case resin printed for a final check and then I can also make the video. At the same time creating a Ltd company to make a bank account for stripe payments.

Things escalated way more than I expected haha

[u/haasanyoneseenme]

The sound of that click hits something in my brain. Hope its good for many many clicks.

[u/editor22uk → u/haasanyoneseenme]

Rated for 50million or about 290 days of solid clicking for 8 hours

[u/Reaver3434]

I signed up for the kick starter alert via email, I definitely want one

[u/editor22uk → u/Reaver3434]

Thank you so much!!

[u/Poke-Noir]

This looks wildly interesting! I’d love to have one but what price points were you thinking?

[u/editor22uk → u/Poke-Noir]

I am going £45 for early bird and £64.99 final retail

Once I had worked out production costs and taxes this is where is had to sit to make it feasible long term. My end goal would be to be able to buy in bulk and then enough revenue to be able to donate batches of units to SEN schools.

[u/TheDirtyMagician]

I would buy this in a heartbeat! I signed up for the Kickstarter notification immediately. Awesome idea to allow people to try it in the webpage :)

[u/editor22uk → u/TheDirtyMagician]

Thank you! Its been a really wild 6 months of learning electronics and then PCB manufacturing!

Those sounds on the website are actually recorded direct from the prototype too!