In the past decade, we’ve seen that the simplest ideas can often pave the way for the most compelling games to take shape. Balatro meshed poker (or, more accurately, dai di or Big Two) with roguelike mechanics, while Loop Hero put its own spin on the idle game formula with roguelike elements as well. This year, we have RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike, a game that further supports the thesis that sometimes, simple is best.
I got the opportunity to speak with the folks from Doraccoon this past week. Doraccoon is a three-person game dev studio based in China that recently put out a free playtest for their debut game, RACCOIN, on Steam. I’ve played it. I’ve already lost an embarrassing number of hours of my life to it, despite the game still being in fairly early stages. Yet one question still lingered in my mind: how on Earth does someone come up with a game concept like this one and make it fun?
Doraccoon’s beginnings are as humble and classic game dev story as they come. Founder and RACCOIN designer MK first met game artist Oolong in university. Both of them were studying Game Design at the time and after participating in a game jam session together, they found that they clicked and got on well enough. More importantly, though, their goals were aligned. Both MK and Oolong wanted to pursue game development in the indie space, so even after graduating, they continued working together as a team.
Things only really began to kick off once MK was hit with a bolt of inspiration in an arcade. MK tells me that the inspiration for RACCOIN came to them in early 2024, when she and Oolong visited an arcade. “[Oolong] had been playing coin pushers since childhood thanks to her parents, but I’d never tried one. In fact, I used to think they were boring.” Once in the arcade, however, something changed her mind. MK tells me one machine in particular caught her attention. “This machine combined RPG elements with match-3 mechanics,” MK says. “The goal was to push down tokens of the same color to activate skills and defeat monsters to get coin towers.”
The concept sounded simple enough but in the moment, MK was captivated. “The clattering sound of falling coins, the tension of watching the wheel spin, and the instant thrill of toppling the tower — I was instantly hooked.” This arcade machine would later become one of the key reference points for RACCOIN‘s development. In early 2024, a little game called Balatro was also just emerging and making its mark on the mainstream video game landscape, and then the idea came to MK. “What if we merged the coin pusher game with Balatro‘s mechanics? That’s how RACCOIN was born.”
Balatro was developed by a single person who went by LocalThunk, and it was published by Playstack, an indie game publisher that’s known for being rather selective with their projects. With RACCOIN being partially inspired by Balatro‘s simplicity and dangerous hypnotism, it seemed natural that MK and Oolong would seek them out to help with publishing. Within two weeks, they had developed the first prototype for RACCOIN. Soon after, they received funding from COREBLAZER, an initiative from Chinese game company HYPERGRYPH that was dedicated to supporting budding game developers. And with that, Doraccoon was formed. It wasn’t long before Doraccoon brought on its third member, Joshua, who serves as lead programmer.
“Playstack was one of the first publishers we pitched to,” says MK. “But to be honest, we never really expected to work with them. Playstack only releases a handful of games each year and they’re all high quality, so we were constantly wondering: what could make our game stand out to them?” As fate would have it, though, it didn’t take long at all for the publisher to respond to Doraccoon. It seemed that they, too, saw the potential in RACCOIN and how it could serve as a complementary project to Balatro in their portfolio.
When asked about their experience working with Playstack, MK is nothing but complimentary. “Playstack’s publishing support has been incredibly professional. They came in with a clear marketing strategy and have provided tons of helpful feedback on the game itself.” MK also mentions that Playstack had hired a Mandarin-speaking producer specifically to help with RACCOIN, which allowed both sides to significantly improve their communication efficiency.
With such a small team, MK tells me that even though they have clearly defined roles within Doraccoon, it’s not uncommon for their responsibilities to overlap. MK serves as the game designer, Oolong is the artist, while Joshua is the programmer. But in practice, MK has also taken on UI, VFX, and audio implementation responsibilities while helping to write code, and Joshua has also been responsible for contributing plenty of creative ideas regarding the game’s design. Oolong’s versatility in art and design is on full display in RACCOIN as well, and she’s primarily responsible for creating all of the game’s 3D models and 2D assets.
All three members bring something a little different to the table too. Oolong is known as the big Souls-like fan on the team and is especially fond of Elden Ring. MK tells me that she enjoys paying attention to artistic details, then figuring out how to incorporate those inspirations into RACCOIN’s art direction. Joshua is a fan of strategy and roguelike games, which allows him to come up with plenty of creative ideas to help improve RACCOIN. Meanwhile, MK describes herself as a “dedicated Nintendo player” who’s consistently inspired by Nintendo’s game design. With all that in mind, it’s easy to see how these inspirations and preferences feed into the design of RACCOIN. The visual design is striking and the gameplay is simple, but deceptively hard to master.
There were, of course, plenty of challenges that came with being such a small team. For instance, there were no shader experts on the team and MK says they had to rely on plugins from an asset store to help bring RACCOIN‘s pixel art rendering style to life. For other easier tasks, the team would rely on tutorials and pick things up as they went along.
If you check out the RACCOIN playtest today, you’ll see that while the game features a whole ton of unique items, some of them are locked behind specific characters. This wasn’t always the case, though. Before April 2025, MK says that all of the items were mixed together, which resulted in RACCOIN becoming a very chaotic experience. “Players struggled to achieve their ideal builds,” she says, “and we felt restricted while designing new items due to potential conflicts.”
With the introduction of characters, MK says they’re now able to design more freely. “We usually pre-define several play styles for each character, and then design items around them.” As you continue playing the game, you’ll unlock more characters and more new coins along with them.
The team also faced a fair amount of balancing issues and MK tells me there was one coin in particular that had to be adjusted repeatedly before the playtest. In the prototype, this coin would allow you to gain Tickets equal to how much your score exceeded the target. If you’ve played any amount of RACCOIN, however, you can see how this can become very problematic very quickly. With the right strategy, you can exceed the target score by a ton and potentially gain an obscene amount of Tickets that way.
Later on, the team added a cap to the amount of Tickets you could earn through this method, but found that it was still ridiculously overpowered. MK says they’d spent quite a bit of time iterating and reiterating on this one coin, but eventually found that the coin’s description had gotten too complicated. Finally, MK completely rewrote the coin’s description and vastly simplified and streamlined how it worked. “When everyone sees this item in the 1.0 version, they’ll never guess how much it went through.”
RACCOIN is still in its early stages, but it’s already garnered quite a bit of interest from the video game community. When I asked the team about their favorite character to play as, MK stated that they preferred the Biologist, a cute little bunny mascot that studies flora and fauna. “Its visual impact is stronger,” says MK, “and its coins are just cuter, especially compared to the Manager.” The Manager is, of course, a ratty-looking lil’ raccoon that gives major Tom Nook energy.
MK also tells me that the team has been surprised by the strategies that players have discovered within just a few days of playing, strategies that the developers themselves never imagined would be possible. For instance, players have already figured out how to plant and grow trees infinitely. Normally, players would need to merge a Seed Coin and a Water Coin to get a money tree, which gives you a pretty nice boost. With the ability to just keep planting trees, however, you’ll be looking at some seriously big numbers you might not have thought possible to reach. That being said, MK encourages players to keep experimenting, and also mentions that dropping an Ally Coin into a pile of Bonus Coins will result in an effect that won’t disappoint players.
There’s still a ways to go before we see RACCOIN‘s 1.0 release, but there are already plenty of things about the game for the team to be proud of. MK says they’re most proud of the game’s beautiful art style and the unique ways the coins can interact with each other.
That being said, much like Balatro, RACCOIN is a roguelike that’s been designed to keep you hooked. It wants you to ditch work and school just so you can have one more turn at the coin pushing machine. So it didn’t surprise me when I asked MK what the team hoped would be the players’ main takeaway from the game, and she simply said, “I hope players find RACCOIN utterly addictive — a real dopamine extractor.”
Now that’s a team after my own heart.
RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike is now available on Steam via an early playtest.
