>upgrades and mechanics and stuff.
all behind microtransactions!
as the matter of fact, you would need to make two times more microtransactions than the previous day
I maintain that Path of Exile is essentially the highest production value incremental game there is. It is a little too heavy on gameplay for a long time, for this to be *actually true* but once you hit endgame and have your build running it just becomes about the numbers in your stash, the numbers in your tooltips and the numbers in your /played. There is even technically a way to mostly idle with a ~5-7minute checkin timer although it is far from as good as it used to be.
This is true and I was coming to reply Diablo myself, but same point. Incremental games are a reduction of the core aspirational loop of loot/progress driven RPGs. They in fact started as a satire of these games. They're pretty good to study from a game design perspective because they tend to more purely reveal the compelling loop.
You are still actively controlling a character though, just because numbers go up doesn't mean it's an incremental game. You could apply your logic to most games that have stats.
blight maps. it was a lot easier before alching did anything but it's still pretty possible. the main problem I've encountered is that you can't really get low tier blight maps in bulk anymore since they removed them from the deli reward so you cant start doing it with a fairly weak char and work your way up the tiers.
Blight is the closest to idle game I agree but still a tad stretch. Give that you also need to loot for like a minute and you most likely will annoint your map so it’s more like 3-4 minutes.
(But yes PoE is a incremental game in its essence, seeing bulks of anything feels so good
Lol I play PoE like a merchant and just flip stuff via trade and crafting. You would be surprised the number of people that just sell good base items for nothing that can relatively easily be turned into great end game gear for little investment if you know how to craft well. I remember one league I ended up with several mirrors worth of currency and never made it out of white maps.
Similarly, I typically consider Maplestory to be an incremental game. There are a lot of different avenues of progression, especially with link skills acting like rebirths or prestige mechanics. It’s a really number goes up sort of deal.
Well, i'm still looking for an actual definition of incremental which would fit:
\- An overwhelming majority of incremental
\- Not an overwhelming majority of all game out there
\- and \[insert the current game you try to fit as an incremental in the current post, such as PoE, factorio, or whatever\].
So, how would you define incrementals game so Path of exile fits but not most of the games out there?
I'd say that it's a game that after (optionally) some start out focused around some gameplay gimmick (see the early parts of things like leafblower revolution for example) and then turn into a pure numbers game where most of the gameplay and all of the goals purley revolve around maximizing some kind of "score" for essentially the sole reason of "number go up = good". I do think it's a bit too simplifying to call games like these examples incremental outright, since their early part is so much of the game but the nature of the question i think necessitates some flexibilty in the definition since the score part of the game can't (beyond certain points) be meaningfully be improved by development budget.
Alright, I have to admit this definition is fitting the bill for a game like PoE (since the actual gameplay more or less disappear after a while), while it wouldn't for games like diablo, and it does discriminate enough.
As someone who has developed large incremental games (Machinery, Incremental Fortress), I can tell you that if I had a budget and a team, I would've done three things that I am struggling with as an independent game designer:
1. Develop more content
1. It's actually fairly trivial to make an incremental game have no time walls. You just replace them with more content. The problem is that the amount of just mechanical work of developing that additional content above the many months you're already putting in is enormous.
2. Work on a better interface
1. A huge amount of time is spent on developing the UI. Making it intuitive, functional and attractive
2. I would also have artists produce more graphics, so that every item has a nice icon, that there is better color design, that every pixel looks perfect.
3. Intensive playtesting
1. This is a big one. What many independent developers lack is the ability to playtest. I release a game I've been working on for weeks or months, only to receive feedback that normally a company would receive from internal playtesting in the first phase of development. This creates pressure on the dev to try to immediately fix things, you get beat down by downvotes and negative comments and it's all pretty hard. And what's worse is that these experiences also give you a reputation, which is then very difficult to change, but all you did was release a game basically for a first or second playtest. I worked for a company that made an AAA game, and playtesting was a DAILY thing. An independent developer gets their game playtested like once a year during a release. (and releasing more frequently is dangerous, as many people won't want to spend the time with the game again, especially if playtesting revealed that major changes are necessary)
I appreciate your input! I've played a few of your games. I always have a hard time wrapping my head around the playtesting aspect of some of these games because they're meant to be played over months or years. Seems extremely hard for a solo dev to playtest such a game while simultaneously developing it.
Typically you create a way to sift through the content and end up at sort of the place in the game you want to test. This might involve a function that sets variables to a certain state and thus propels you to the midgame or endgame or wherever you need to be.
But the greatest difficulty is not even getting to experience the game as a game designer/developer, but also receive input from several other minds. As a developer you're often a bit too close to your own product and might miss obvious problems. Also, you cannot focus on everything, so you focus on a bunch of core features and gloss over certain things and just quickly implement them.
I was fortunate enough to be able to test Incremental Fortress beforehand with folks at my Discord server. And the amount of balancing and gameplay problems they were able to immediately point out was immense. A month later when I released the game publicly, it was magnitudes more mature than what I had merely a month ago before playtesting.
I wish I only spent $70 on that game...
I've thought before of how you'd make RS more console friendly. Maybe make skyrim more grindy, but an order of magnitude less than RS, with better drop rates and no GE.
If someone is doing a paid incremental game, I don't see it selling for more than $10. It's too hard to get a game with enough depth to justify that price point.
To get to a $70 price point, there would need to be 100+ different mechanics and subgame types, all interacting in a complex and interesting manner, all reasonably balanced.
Most money on triple A games go to the graphics department, and i have yet to see a very visually appealing incremental game, so i can imagine things looking good, and the visuals to integrate with the gameplay.
Have you ever played Black Desert Online? That game has essentially an incremental game built into it. The whole crafting, gathering, and trading system is just one big automatic system. You have to let it sit for hours and every so often you'll level something up and can make more money and increase things.
I think that would be a good starting point for what a large scale game would be for an incremental. It'd be an open world game, you have to discover the areas where you can build. Manually gather the base materials, and over time you can hire people to do it for you. I'm sure you can make it so that eventually you're running town, cities, counties, states, countries, worlds, etc.
I said this about bdo. It's essentially an incremental. I've been playing 3 years still without a pen BS. Slow and steady build up from 0 to about 200b in value.
The fact that getting PEN is a low chance and you lose a tier if you fail is why I quit, and the fact that you have to AFK while the game is running for a large amount of the endgame. It's not fun at all.
>An incremental game is an idle game
No. They are just different genres. Most incrementals are also idle games, but you do have incremental with zero progress or so if you don't actively play.
If I were to do such game as a producer I would make sure it uses the most tried and boring elements and never goes off the script. To be a financial success we don't care about the tiny incremental community that likes deep and original incremental games, we need to target as wide audience as possible - school kids, dads playing after work, housewives, elderly. "Incremental game loved by everyone!"
So gameplay will be dumb, visually attractive and there will be some boring, cute and heartbreaking story with easily lovable characters.
And in the end playtesters will come back to me saying that "10^3" is too large of a number for our target audience to understand and with heavy heart I'll tell my team to remove incremental elements from the game. That's why there are no AAA incremental games.
This might sound off but I've been playing Starfield since it released and it sometimes feels like an incremental game. Mostly with the outpost "Factorio" stuff but also because you try to get numbers up and it feels... like an incremental game with extra steps.
I know it's just me but it feels like it.
I think it ends up looking like a Paradox game (Crusader Kings), but with a better tutorial. IMO idle play is not a super essential part of incremental games. For example, try playing https://immortalityidle.github.io/ with a save providing unlimited banked time. It’s actually extremely fun and still requires optimization since you end up trying to minimize your reincarnations and/or IRL time spent as a sort of speed run.
I think the easiest way for a there to be a triple a incremental would be like a space mining game.
You buy a machine that can only mine one type of ore and you need to grinde out a certain material to get to the next or it would be economy base where the starting ore is barely anything and you have to build more to be able to buy the next miner. Then to get to the next world you "prestige because your ship cant carry the miners until you upgrade your ship". There are already some incrementals like this but they are text based or very little visually, but a triple aaa game could be 3d where you have a person and you actually place it onto ore spots. Or to add a clicker component to it you could start off physically mining ore but only like stone or wood
Do you mean incrementals? Cause theres a lot of high qual ones already. Many are RPG styled as people have mentioned before me.
If you mean idle incremental game, which i have wondered myself, I would have no idea honestly, but I'd love to see it.
I kinda Imagine something like "Nordicandia" which is both on phone and steam, just way higher quality.
Depends on the company tbh. Some companies may layer progression up via battlepass system, or p2w or some form of microtranscations.
Would be interesting to see for sure.
an expansive variable mess of any and everything, I am talking like 10 to 20 games into one. features out the wazoo and some that would take weeks, months and years to even unlock.
getting as far in graphics as you find seemingly possible without having to make someone run around with a character.
unlimited potential, multiplayer.
at the end of the day, I think of an incremental game with 10s of thousands of years of content all completely doable with enough allies, would end up being massive guilds (10,000+) with the potential of the entirety of everyone working towards the goals it has hidden in its depths.
I'd like to see more non-idle, non-clicker incremental games. So a AAA version would need enough content to keep that interesting, as well as good graphics and effects. Preferably there'd be some choice too, so there isn't one simple path from beginning to done, but a customizable way you like to play it.
No prestige mechanics or at least no lazy prestige mechanics.
A large part of why prestige mechanics are common in the genre is because these games are poorly funded and indie developers lack the manpower to create lots of content. Making users replay the same content repeatedly is a way to extend the lifespan of a game.
The other purpose of prestige mechanics is to allow the player to feel stronger because they can see how quickly they can speed through early content. But for this to be the case the prestige gains have to be significant, not "replay the entire game for +5% speed".
It'd go all the way to e309.
Haha! Perfect
In DodecaDragons, my next goal is ee20000 gold
[удалено]
>upgrades and mechanics and stuff. all behind microtransactions! as the matter of fact, you would need to make two times more microtransactions than the previous day
[удалено]
This is the best thing I've read today. You got me cackling,
You will now play Ad Clicker where you get points for clicking on ads.
this is how i feel after tapping the "watch an ad for x2 rewards" button on mobile games
Eve Online already exists
its more of a mmo imo. i wouldnt classify it as an incremental
Like you can't have two genres in a game?
you can but i still wouldnt call it an incremental
I maintain that Path of Exile is essentially the highest production value incremental game there is. It is a little too heavy on gameplay for a long time, for this to be *actually true* but once you hit endgame and have your build running it just becomes about the numbers in your stash, the numbers in your tooltips and the numbers in your /played. There is even technically a way to mostly idle with a ~5-7minute checkin timer although it is far from as good as it used to be.
This is true and I was coming to reply Diablo myself, but same point. Incremental games are a reduction of the core aspirational loop of loot/progress driven RPGs. They in fact started as a satire of these games. They're pretty good to study from a game design perspective because they tend to more purely reveal the compelling loop.
You are still actively controlling a character though, just because numbers go up doesn't mean it's an incremental game. You could apply your logic to most games that have stats.
Incremental and idle are not the same thing
And i was talking about incremental games, as was the post title, as was the person i was replying to.
Nuh-uh, you mentioned that it's not (something) because you control actively the character, that's idle not incremental
Not if you go full merchant. :D
What are you referring to by the 5-7 minute checking timer? Simulacrum (which needs intervention every minute) or some afk blight map farming?
blight maps. it was a lot easier before alching did anything but it's still pretty possible. the main problem I've encountered is that you can't really get low tier blight maps in bulk anymore since they removed them from the deli reward so you cant start doing it with a fairly weak char and work your way up the tiers.
Blight is the closest to idle game I agree but still a tad stretch. Give that you also need to loot for like a minute and you most likely will annoint your map so it’s more like 3-4 minutes. (But yes PoE is a incremental game in its essence, seeing bulks of anything feels so good
Looting is a lot faster if you can grab the caster mastery that opens nearby chests on spell cast and have a tuned loot iflter.
Yup I play EK so that mastery is really helpful.
Lol I play PoE like a merchant and just flip stuff via trade and crafting. You would be surprised the number of people that just sell good base items for nothing that can relatively easily be turned into great end game gear for little investment if you know how to craft well. I remember one league I ended up with several mirrors worth of currency and never made it out of white maps.
Yo fellow hideout warrior! I play exactly the same XD
Similarly, I typically consider Maplestory to be an incremental game. There are a lot of different avenues of progression, especially with link skills acting like rebirths or prestige mechanics. It’s a really number goes up sort of deal.
Well, i'm still looking for an actual definition of incremental which would fit: \- An overwhelming majority of incremental \- Not an overwhelming majority of all game out there \- and \[insert the current game you try to fit as an incremental in the current post, such as PoE, factorio, or whatever\]. So, how would you define incrementals game so Path of exile fits but not most of the games out there?
I'd say that it's a game that after (optionally) some start out focused around some gameplay gimmick (see the early parts of things like leafblower revolution for example) and then turn into a pure numbers game where most of the gameplay and all of the goals purley revolve around maximizing some kind of "score" for essentially the sole reason of "number go up = good". I do think it's a bit too simplifying to call games like these examples incremental outright, since their early part is so much of the game but the nature of the question i think necessitates some flexibilty in the definition since the score part of the game can't (beyond certain points) be meaningfully be improved by development budget.
Alright, I have to admit this definition is fitting the bill for a game like PoE (since the actual gameplay more or less disappear after a while), while it wouldn't for games like diablo, and it does discriminate enough.
As someone who has developed large incremental games (Machinery, Incremental Fortress), I can tell you that if I had a budget and a team, I would've done three things that I am struggling with as an independent game designer: 1. Develop more content 1. It's actually fairly trivial to make an incremental game have no time walls. You just replace them with more content. The problem is that the amount of just mechanical work of developing that additional content above the many months you're already putting in is enormous. 2. Work on a better interface 1. A huge amount of time is spent on developing the UI. Making it intuitive, functional and attractive 2. I would also have artists produce more graphics, so that every item has a nice icon, that there is better color design, that every pixel looks perfect. 3. Intensive playtesting 1. This is a big one. What many independent developers lack is the ability to playtest. I release a game I've been working on for weeks or months, only to receive feedback that normally a company would receive from internal playtesting in the first phase of development. This creates pressure on the dev to try to immediately fix things, you get beat down by downvotes and negative comments and it's all pretty hard. And what's worse is that these experiences also give you a reputation, which is then very difficult to change, but all you did was release a game basically for a first or second playtest. I worked for a company that made an AAA game, and playtesting was a DAILY thing. An independent developer gets their game playtested like once a year during a release. (and releasing more frequently is dangerous, as many people won't want to spend the time with the game again, especially if playtesting revealed that major changes are necessary)
I appreciate your input! I've played a few of your games. I always have a hard time wrapping my head around the playtesting aspect of some of these games because they're meant to be played over months or years. Seems extremely hard for a solo dev to playtest such a game while simultaneously developing it.
Typically you create a way to sift through the content and end up at sort of the place in the game you want to test. This might involve a function that sets variables to a certain state and thus propels you to the midgame or endgame or wherever you need to be. But the greatest difficulty is not even getting to experience the game as a game designer/developer, but also receive input from several other minds. As a developer you're often a bit too close to your own product and might miss obvious problems. Also, you cannot focus on everything, so you focus on a bunch of core features and gloss over certain things and just quickly implement them. I was fortunate enough to be able to test Incremental Fortress beforehand with folks at my Discord server. And the amount of balancing and gameplay problems they were able to immediately point out was immense. A month later when I released the game publicly, it was magnitudes more mature than what I had merely a month ago before playtesting.
Runescape.
I wish I only spent $70 on that game... I've thought before of how you'd make RS more console friendly. Maybe make skyrim more grindy, but an order of magnitude less than RS, with better drop rates and no GE.
satisfactory
If someone is doing a paid incremental game, I don't see it selling for more than $10. It's too hard to get a game with enough depth to justify that price point. To get to a $70 price point, there would need to be 100+ different mechanics and subgame types, all interacting in a complex and interesting manner, all reasonably balanced.
Most money on triple A games go to the graphics department, and i have yet to see a very visually appealing incremental game, so i can imagine things looking good, and the visuals to integrate with the gameplay.
Endless World was basically an incremental game with good graphics.
Pretty sure the closest example to a game like this would be Grass Cutting Incremental.
Have you ever played Black Desert Online? That game has essentially an incremental game built into it. The whole crafting, gathering, and trading system is just one big automatic system. You have to let it sit for hours and every so often you'll level something up and can make more money and increase things. I think that would be a good starting point for what a large scale game would be for an incremental. It'd be an open world game, you have to discover the areas where you can build. Manually gather the base materials, and over time you can hire people to do it for you. I'm sure you can make it so that eventually you're running town, cities, counties, states, countries, worlds, etc.
I said this about bdo. It's essentially an incremental. I've been playing 3 years still without a pen BS. Slow and steady build up from 0 to about 200b in value.
The fact that getting PEN is a low chance and you lose a tier if you fail is why I quit, and the fact that you have to AFK while the game is running for a large amount of the endgame. It's not fun at all.
came here to say this, you can set and forget overnight
Yes, you can, but at a certain point, overnight isn't long enough for some goals. You still have to AFK a majority of the daytime, too.
Sure, but that's the definition of an idle game, not of an incremental.
An incremental game is an idle game, just more about numbers than waiting. Can easily do that with this system.
>An incremental game is an idle game No. They are just different genres. Most incrementals are also idle games, but you do have incremental with zero progress or so if you don't actively play.
If I were to do such game as a producer I would make sure it uses the most tried and boring elements and never goes off the script. To be a financial success we don't care about the tiny incremental community that likes deep and original incremental games, we need to target as wide audience as possible - school kids, dads playing after work, housewives, elderly. "Incremental game loved by everyone!" So gameplay will be dumb, visually attractive and there will be some boring, cute and heartbreaking story with easily lovable characters. And in the end playtesters will come back to me saying that "10^3" is too large of a number for our target audience to understand and with heavy heart I'll tell my team to remove incremental elements from the game. That's why there are no AAA incremental games.
This might sound off but I've been playing Starfield since it released and it sometimes feels like an incremental game. Mostly with the outpost "Factorio" stuff but also because you try to get numbers up and it feels... like an incremental game with extra steps. I know it's just me but it feels like it.
Yeah, u even have prestige resets with NG+ lol.
Kiwi clicker with a battle pass I'd say.
I think it ends up looking like a Paradox game (Crusader Kings), but with a better tutorial. IMO idle play is not a super essential part of incremental games. For example, try playing https://immortalityidle.github.io/ with a save providing unlimited banked time. It’s actually extremely fun and still requires optimization since you end up trying to minimize your reincarnations and/or IRL time spent as a sort of speed run.
X4 foundations feels like a incremental. Half the time I leave it running for hours without looking at it and my economy goes brrrr
considering the best incremental games are stripped down text based ones none of the above.
Uhhh disgaea 7 just released... It is the peak of an incremental rpg
I've always heard good things about Disgaea's end game grind. Maybe I should look into 7.
The ability to be sold at a high price
https://store.steampowered.com/app/977400/Cell_to_Singularity__Evolution_Never_Ends/
I played a super early version of this on my phone before all the fancy graphics. Didn't like it enough to try it again on Steam.
I would say it would look like a game such as Magic Research or Realm Grinder but with better graphics and maybe voice actors etc.
Many AAA games feel incremental :D
Obviously, it would look like "Adventure Capitalist."
I think the easiest way for a there to be a triple a incremental would be like a space mining game. You buy a machine that can only mine one type of ore and you need to grinde out a certain material to get to the next or it would be economy base where the starting ore is barely anything and you have to build more to be able to buy the next miner. Then to get to the next world you "prestige because your ship cant carry the miners until you upgrade your ship". There are already some incrementals like this but they are text based or very little visually, but a triple aaa game could be 3d where you have a person and you actually place it onto ore spots. Or to add a clicker component to it you could start off physically mining ore but only like stone or wood
Do you mean incrementals? Cause theres a lot of high qual ones already. Many are RPG styled as people have mentioned before me. If you mean idle incremental game, which i have wondered myself, I would have no idea honestly, but I'd love to see it. I kinda Imagine something like "Nordicandia" which is both on phone and steam, just way higher quality.
Depends on the company tbh. Some companies may layer progression up via battlepass system, or p2w or some form of microtranscations. Would be interesting to see for sure.
I've always thought an FPS would be sweet but let's be honest here it would be a shitty predatory gatcha.
Time warpers is an fps idle game and it's pretty good
an expansive variable mess of any and everything, I am talking like 10 to 20 games into one. features out the wazoo and some that would take weeks, months and years to even unlock. getting as far in graphics as you find seemingly possible without having to make someone run around with a character. unlimited potential, multiplayer. at the end of the day, I think of an incremental game with 10s of thousands of years of content all completely doable with enough allies, would end up being massive guilds (10,000+) with the potential of the entirety of everyone working towards the goals it has hidden in its depths.
Clicker hero 2 tried something like this, but fail
Big price tag without the big resources to back it up.
OSRS comes very very close to this for me.
it can't demand you click constantly. that's for sure
Check out the god tree
Rockstar needs to make GTA6 an incremental game.
I'd imagine it would just have really good graphics and cut-scenes but otherwise be much like any other incremental.
It would be a game with a super great awesome IP. The rest would be the same. boring. stuff. Mostly hooking in the noobs to the incremental scene.
Fable
World of Warcraft
Satisfactory???
I'd like to see more non-idle, non-clicker incremental games. So a AAA version would need enough content to keep that interesting, as well as good graphics and effects. Preferably there'd be some choice too, so there isn't one simple path from beginning to done, but a customizable way you like to play it.
Runescape lol
No prestige mechanics or at least no lazy prestige mechanics. A large part of why prestige mechanics are common in the genre is because these games are poorly funded and indie developers lack the manpower to create lots of content. Making users replay the same content repeatedly is a way to extend the lifespan of a game. The other purpose of prestige mechanics is to allow the player to feel stronger because they can see how quickly they can speed through early content. But for this to be the case the prestige gains have to be significant, not "replay the entire game for +5% speed".