Tennis Tycoon launches on iOS — built entirely with Claude Code

Atkinson draws on his own career for the game's depth. “The reality of going from hotel to hotel, navigating injuries in a foreign country, finding coaches that balance well with you and doing all of this on a tight financial budget is hard,” he told MobileGamer.biz, adding that those are the unseen elements he wanted to surface. In play, that shows up as decisions like choosing coaches for young players, repairing a court versus hiring a scout, and balancing training surfaces before tournaments. The design intentionally avoids action tennis mechanics; Atkinson said those struggle to capture the sport’s movement, so the simulation route handles the sport’s off-court complexity instead.

Atkinson credits Claude Code with making the project possible. He said hiring a developer “was out of the question” economically for a solo passion project and that many tennis-specific details would have been lost in translation to an external developer. He also described the development learning curve: building several smaller apps taught him how to close the gap between a working prototype and a production-ready app, a gap he calls “massive” and one he bridged through trial and error across multiple projects. The game follows a recent string of amateur-made sports titles built on Claude, including Deniz Sancar’s football drafting game 38-0-0 and Josh Pavey’s 38-0, which Atkinson and the wider mobile community have noticed.

Tennis Tycoon is priced at $2.99 with optional in-app purchases that are not required to progress; Atkinson deliberately avoided ads and pay-to-progress timers because he didn’t want the game to feel “cheap.” Marketing so far has relied on sharing the game within the tennis community and among pockets of mobile players who enjoy management and sim titles. An Android release is planned but Atkinson has not given a date.