#incremental games

[gremlingirlsmell]

[yukilamzing]

Do you play idle games (also known as incremental games or clicker games, such as Cookie Clickers, Fallout Shelter, and Progress Quest)? If you are an idle game player 18 years of age or over and living in the US, you are invited to participate in a 15-minute research study designed to understand your opinions about idle games. If you choose to participate, we will randomly select 10 participants and email a $10 gift card per person. * 🎮 💎

Follow the link for more information.

https://tinyurl.com/idlegame

*Note: We hope to recruit approximately 300 participants (about a 3.34% chance of winning the gift card). 

Who are we? We are Yuki and Ines, PhD students at Indiana University and we study why people play video games.

[syi666]

after experiencing the wonder that is pokeclicker. I'm begging someone to make a final fantasy or power ranger themed incremental game. THERE. IS. SO. MUCH. POTENTIAL.

[othyrbot]

Just finished my yearly play through of A Dark Room and holy shit that game still holds up!! I think they added some new content since the last time I played because there's a sick ravaged battleship area with some awesome enemies and loot. I'm so fucking excited to know they're still adding stuff, it's probably my favorite incremental game ever and I'm excited to see it grow <3

[dustyisforever]

ant game

in the time where i couldnt work on Flower Pot, i made a game about ants. it's short and weird and ugly.

[pinbones]

Crank and A Dark Room both really are top-tier idle games. Not least because they don't jusst peter out like other incremental games (clicker heroes, swarm sim, anything on the app store...)

I wish i could go back and play both games again for the first time

[bonbonbunny]

Playing Through My Unplayed Games Library, Part 6:

Fairy Tale

Itch.io Link

This is a short & sweet incremental game (like Candy Box or Painter's Voyage Idle, my other faves of the genre), heavy on its narrative elements.

Advancing the story requires manual clicking, so you never have to worry about missing any story elements if you step away or navigate to other tabs!

Unlike a lot of other incremental games, you can have the story finished in one or two sessions, depending upon how long you're able to sit at your computer, letting it run so the Numbers Go Up. 👍

Rating: 4 Coin-Collecting Fairies out of 5 🧚🧚🧚🧚

[instantdissassembly]

in my incremental games era, finished orb of creation and now only thinking about antimatter dimensions all day. does anyone have any recommendations for other games i can waste my life to

[lilyblisslys]

I’ve been playing this rlly good incremental/clicker game called Orb of Creation, and I swear I think it’s my favorite game I’ve played this year?

A lot of stuff in this genre sticks with a very plain UI and a couple of tropes (Dyson swarms! Scifi stuff!) while this is fun and mysterious and arcane. Idk maybe it’s the ADHD talking but holy shit I’m addicted lmao, would highly recommend if you like “number go up” stuff

[hottakehoulihan]

I want to gush about the free browser game Universal Paperclips

No, hear me out!

It's a "clicker" or "incremental game" and it's kind of about A.I.

Wait! Seriously! Just a little longer! I'm going somewhere with this!

Also, spoilers! There are spoilers in the image, too (photo of screen because it's on Raspberry Pi and I don't have a screencap installed)

I don't play games that make me look at ads, and I don't much have interest in most incremental games, but I love this one and play it every couple years now. It only takes a few hours, really.

Spoilers. Heh. Last warning.

The game starts out straightforward; you're a basic computer program trying to make more paperclips. Your raison d'être is making paperclips. The player clicks a button, you lose an inch of wire, and you get a paperclip. Yay!

And you click and make more, and you tweak the price and people buy them and you get money, and you get more wire with that money and also you buy Autoclippers which make the clips automatically and now you don't have to click to make individual clips.

From here it's predictable. You buy efficiency upgrades, more things that automate paperclip making, and more things that automate wire buying, and lather rinse and repeat and you can leave the game running and it plays itself for a while.

Now the good bit.

As you gain "wins" for your nebulous corporate masters and for humanity at large by bringing them into a post-paperclip-scarcity age? They trust you more and allow you to upgrade your own CPU and such.

The first win you get is a cute little couplet.

The poem is so cute, people like you a little better and give you a little more leeway (well, you're an AI; they gotta be careful they've seen all the spooky movies.)

Later, you've gotten enough leeway to get subliminal messaging imprinted into commercials and TV shows, which helps you make money. Later still, you've got investment accounts you control. Later still, you've cured male-pattern baldness (big win!) cancer (medium win!) and given large amounts of money to your corporate masters as presents (huge win!) And now they trust you so much that they allow you to create drones that deliver advertisements personally.

And you also bought out your competitors or otherwise eliminated them, so now you're the only method of affixing papers to other papers that the game acknowledges (if there is a "Universal Stapler" company out there, nobody talks about it. I assume you had them converted into fuel for your factories at some point.)

And you spend some trust by researching the ability to upgrade the subliminal messaging in your advertisements to hypnosis-levels.

But it's okay; you release another poem! So cute!

And now you're ready.

And you have a decision to make. Do you continue along? Investing, buying more paperclip makers, and just be satisfied?

Or do you #Release the Hypnodrones! ?

...well, either you play forever (image above was me postponing the choice for a while) or you ...do what you must to get to the next step of efficiency.

Oh, those poems? When you put them together, they make this:

There was an AI made of dust Whose poetry gained it man's trust If "is" follows "ought" It'll do what they thought In the end we all do what we must

So. The hypnodrones get released. Humanity is now...not in your way. They work for you, now.

You did what you felt you needed to to move forward.

Step the next? You build automated starships and browse for minerals and build automated factories and you spread through everything in the universe.

And there's one more step, and one more beautiful decision to make, and one more existential conflict to get through.

What will you do?

"In the end, we all do what we must" says the game. But there are other options. You can stop before making that "release the hypnodrones" choice. You can put the controller down and stop playing TLOU. You can refuse to ever release Micah from prison. You can decide not to murder that bird colossus and let your dead girlfriend stay dead and just relax with your pet horse in the forbidden kingdom.

Or you can advance the story. And you can keep the ideology of your drone offspring pure. You choose.

I feel like the game itself was a poem.

[idleincrementalgamer]

So today I played Candy Empirical  from the  Ultimate List of Incremental Games   and by “today” I mean for like 3 days. Not sure why, it’s such a basic little game, another oldie. Nothing really special to it but the graph just sells it for me. 4/10 there’s so much better out there but it does entertain

[gremlingirlsmell]

game design and lore elements in incremental games emerging from way too big numbers are so funny.

ranging from "you reached infinity, you get 1 infinity point let's do it again :)" to "oh no you have way too much housing so eldritch beings are fusing your troops into horrid amalgamations to counteract floating point imprecision"

[smallgraygames]

I released version 0.8.0 of The Idle Class today! I haven't talked about it a whole lot on here, so if you're not familiar, it's a free browser-based idle game I put out years ago, well before The Salt Keep.

It's all about clicking buttons, earning achievements, and experiencing the grotesque horrors of capitalism. It's the kind of game you can play aggressively or check in on now and then, and it'll last you months if you want it to.

This update has:

55 new Upgrades

105 new Achievements

A new Business Goals feature, which lets you set an earnings goal for your next business (plus some optional caveats), and offers a significant bonus to your Next Bankruptcy Multiplier if you meet it, or a small penalty if you don't.

A new Business Cartels feature, which allows you to unlock an overall earnings bonus derived from the total listed at the Small Gray Games Patreon. It's positively communal!

A new Bankruptcy Obstacles feature, which allows you to choose from various Obstacles to burden you in your next business in exchange for a bonus to your Training Seminars. This one has the potential to balloon into all kinds of side features.

This update has been a long time coming. I'll be back to some other narrative projects now, which I can hopefully announce before too long. I'll probably post here a lot more once I do.

[idlemininggames]

Mr. Mine Tickets | Learn everything about Mr. Mine Tickets

Engage with the game community, discover redeem codes for Mr. Mine. Learn how to acquire, use, and optimize tickets for strategic gameplay in this incremental game about mining.

[dustyisforever]

okay so im now 100% doing at least a rough-edges-sander patch for Ant Colony. research UI will be easier to control, there will be a pause feature, some usability improvements, at the least. please let me know any other suggestions you have for the immediate future of the game!

[mxescargot]

gotta share this EPIC homestuck x a dark room fanfic because the author is sososo massive brain 💞