Not a Trolley Problem. JAM
A dark-humor idle clicker where you drag people onto a runaway trolley's tracks. Every splat pays out.
You're not a philosopher. You're a hand. The trolley keeps coming, and your job is to feed it. Pluck people off the sidewalk, drop them on the rails, pull the lever, watch the coins pile up. Buy auto-grabbers, faster trolleys, stickier fingers. Five locations, five boss fights each, a deep upgrade tree, and ten absurd trolley dilemmas as you climb the ranks.
Made for Gamedev.js Jam 2026. Theme: Machines. The trolley is the machine, you're the meat-input pipeline, and your upgrades are machines that grab on your behalf while you sip coffee.
How to play
- Drag people onto the rails.
- Pull the lever (in the center of the arena) to send the trolley.
- Upgrade. Buy more hands, faster trolleys, stickier fingers. Repeat at scale.
Reset save: Settings (gear, top-right), hold the red Reset button for 5 seconds.
Features
- 🌳 Deep upgrade tree across branching paths
- âš¡ Pull the lever to send the trolley charging through
- 🎴 Ten absurd trolley dilemmas. Pick a side at every rank-up.
- 🤖 Auto-grabbers that play idle while you don't
- 🚋 Five worlds. The boss doesn't die the first time.
Credits
- Music: First Day in A by Nicolas Jeudy / Dark Fantasy Studio (Archives Vol. 3, The Joke, premium licence)
- Lever SFX: Joel Steudler, Grand Adventure Music Mega-Pack
- Other SFX: synthesised in-browser via WebAudio
- Emoji: Google Noto Emoji (OFL-1.1)
- Code, art, design: d954mas / Neotolis
Submitted to the Deploy to Wavedash Challenge. Also playable on Wavedash: wavedash.com/games/not-a-trolley-problem-jam
Want to see this finished?
I'm hoping to keep working on this past the jam. If you'd like to follow along, here's the Steam page:
👉 store.steampowered.com/app/4654990/Not_a_Trolley_Problem
Comments
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quick and fun game
Veeery fun game! didnt liked the AI visuals tho but the fun more than makes up for it. Congrats
Very pretty looking game, played to the end, there is a gap after level 7 when all bosses are defeated and no upgrades left, overall like d this game very much. It even has localization, which is always great, gonna rate it
played it, good game gets a bit tedious towards the end as I have all the ugprade but damage still doesnt seem decent enough. as I basically had maxed everything when I was around level 3. so lots of plain waiting for bosses to be slowly killed.
like max damage is like 33k but bosses have like 20 million health at the end.
Made it to the end, sucks that you basically have to replay the whole game just to see both outcomes of the final choice!
also when I clicked on replay on the final screen, I got this mess of an error screen:
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access denied.</Message>
<Details>
Anonymous caller does not have storage.objects.get access to the Google Cloud Storage object. Permission 'storage.objects.get' denied on resource (or it may not exist).
</Details>
</Error>
This was really great fun, thank you :D
Hilarious fun!
Awesome game! It does take a while to complete in the later stages with the bosses, but the rest of it was pretty fun.
Thanks:) You played a bad balance version. I will update game today. It will be much easy. For jam version you will need about 20-25 minutes to finish it