The Bot We Built for Testing Made the Game Run Forever
Today's developer note is not a boast. It is closer to a hilarious confession.
When developing puzzle games, creators often build test cheats or automation tools. Number Pop features a 6-column, 8-row board with 48 numbered tiles. Having a human repeatedly drag lines across 48 tiles to test edge cases is both exhausting and slow.
So we built a secret weapon: an auto-play feature unlocked exclusively via admin authentication.
Machines Do Not Get Tired, and They Show No Mercy
The mechanism behind this auto-play bot is straightforward. It continuously analyzes the 48 tiles on the board, computes the longest legal path starting from 1, and clears numbers one by one just like a player.
We added 1x normal speed, 2x fast, and even a 5x turbo mode. We secured it so nobody could run it without admin privileges, and isolated it completely from public leaderboards.
Up to this point, life was peaceful. I sat back with a hot cup of coffee, comfortably watching the computer clear puzzle after puzzle on its own.
The breakdown happened the moment we launched Score Challenge mode.
Past 226 Points, Yet the 90-Second Clock Never Drops?
Score Challenge mode gives players a base limit of 90 seconds. It also includes an exhilarating rule designed to reward quick thinking:
Connecting longer number chains refills bonus time proportional to the combo length. Popping a 4-tile sequence awards 4 points alongside a +0.9-second time refill.
For humans, this creates a tense tug of war. Finding paths takes a couple of seconds, dragging takes another second, and the clock gradually winds down toward an adrenaline-filled finish.
The computer, however, played by entirely different rules.
The computer required zero thinking time. The instant new tiles dropped, it instantly locked onto the longest 4-tile or 5-tile paths and popped them multiple times per second.
The result was absurd.
Bonus time was being refilled five times faster than the clock could physically tick down.
The screenshot above captures that exact crime scene.
The score has passed 226 points. The game reached LV.5 Master difficulty. 23 hints piled up. Yet looking at the top-right timer tells the whole story:
It is still sitting at exactly 90 seconds. It did not drop by even 0.1 seconds, locked in an eternal state of overflowing time.
Seeing Is Believing: Actual Video of the Infinite Loop
Words alone do not do it justice. Take a look at the recorded gameplay.
Watch how every pop adds time back so quickly that the 90-second bar cannot drain, rocketing the score upward without end.
As shown in the video, the timer never gets a chance to breathe.
The score keeps climbing past 200 and 300, tiles burst constantly, and the clock remains pinned at 90 seconds. Left alone, the bot would have happily reached 100,000 points and crashed the browser tab memory.
In the end, I had to frantically hit the red Stop button at the top to put an end to the endless loop.
What This Bug Taught Us
A convenience tool built for testing ended up saving us from a critical design flaw before launch.
What if a player with superhuman reflexes appeared down the line? A player who could snap 5-tile combos every second, hijacking the leaderboard and playing until the server melted? Just imagining that gives developers chills.
Because of this test incident, we designed core safeguards for Score Challenge mode:
- Time refill diminishing returns: As a run continues, the time bonus gained from the same combo gradually decreases to prevent runaway games.
- Hard cap on bonus time per round: Establish a realistic ceiling on the total accumulated bonus seconds a single game can yield.
- Rewarding skill without infinite loops: Keep the thrill of extending play for skilled players while making perpetual motion physically impossible.
Building a developer cheat tool ended up teaching us a vital lesson about engine balance.
In our next developer note, we will share the math and patch notes behind fixing this infinite loop. The indie game journey continues!