Game Design - Incremental Games

[FlowerChild]

Jesus...this is what gaming would be like if Germany won WWII.

[MaxAstro]

That made me completely crack up laughing, Flower. :D

Yeah, I recognize the appeal of these sorts of games - I guess if Kingdom of Loathing qualifies I've even gone there before - but in general I don't feel like they provide a real substance to their gaming experience. All frosting, no meat... not that you usually put frosting on meat... but w/e.

Games like this also tend to be pretty light on challenge. Sure there is the puzzle of figuring out the right strategy, but nothing near my preferred Dark Souls/I Wanna Be the Guy/X-Com Long War levels of "you will earn every victory and you will cry doing it". :P

[Gilberreke]

Jesus...this is what gaming would be like if Germany won WWII.

It's sad, because there is a lot of merit to what they're doing. That's the gist of my post I guess, the genre is interesting, but it's killing itself with these hideous skinner box mechanics. It's like that grandma that keeps giving you money bills at every social gathering. The first few times you're like "this is kickass, she keeps giving me money", but after a while, it starts to grate at you and you realize it's sad and you want to convince her that's she's already a grandma, which is kickass and she needs to stop trying to buy your love.

[FlowerChild]

It's sad, because there is a lot of merit to what they're doing. That's the gist of my post I guess, the genre is interesting, but it's killing itself with these hideous skinner box mechanics. It's like that grandma that keeps giving you money bills at every social gathering. The first few times you're like "this is kickass, she keeps giving me money", but after a while, it starts to grate at you and you realize it's sad and you want to convince her that's she's already a grandma, which is kickass and she needs to stop trying to buy your love.

I just decided to give this a try yesterday, and this is my first game in this genre, so I'm still forming opinions. Yes, there does seem to be something here in terms of gameplay that I haven't seen before. Yes, I agree that whatever it is, it seems to be underdeveloped, as there's not a heck of a lot of meaningful decision making on the part of the player, and not much to advancing other than letting time pass. Aside from spam-clicking during the very beginning portion of the game, the player just doesn't seem to be all that involved.

I didn't read your earlier posts btw, as I was entirely lacking in context. Might return to them later.

[Gilberreke]

I was looking forward to what direction people would take Candy Box, as that game is really really novel and one of my favorite gaming experiences of the last few years. I'm afraid these kinds of games fall dreadfully short. I'm also wondering if there's already novel experiences in this space that I don't know of, I'll have to try playing some of the suggested games here.

I tried replaying Candy Box, but that game or its sequel doesn't have much replay value.

[FlowerChild]

Ah, and glancing over your original posts, I see that I'm still in the "idle" phase, which may explain why I'm perceiving a lack of involvement on the part of the player. Will voice further opinion when I move past that ;)

[Gilberreke]

Ah, and glancing over your original posts, I see that I'm still in the "idle" phase, which may explain why I'm perceiving a lack of involvement on the part of the player. Will voice further opinion when I move past that ;)

There's a definite lack of involvement later on too, but it gets better once you have a few ascensions under your belt. Basically the game really starts when you can get from reset to zone 140 in about an hour.

[DerAlex]

I fell victim to clicker/idle games in the past. my personal poison was "AdVenture Capitalist", which isn't even that good, even as far as idle games are. I avoid this genre like the plague now, since they always leave an empty feeling and a bad "what the hell am I doing with my life" taste. It's not that I can't see the appeal of them, but to me they are just pleasure machines that are too thinly veiled. I don't like the term skinner box games, but fuck me if it isn't accurate. I avoid them like a recovering alcoholic avoids bars.

[Gilberreke]

AdVenture Capitalist is vile. By far the worst example of the genre I've seen :(

Loving that War Games reference :)

[DerAlex]

I agree that AdVenture Capitalist is propably an example of the bad ones, but it still follows genre conventions right down to a t. What I liked about AdCap was that, the further you are along, the less often you have to check on it since it idles even when the game is not running. As soon as I realised that, that I liked not having to "play" that often, I stopped bothering. I even tried a few others to fill the void AdCap left, like clicker heroes and a few others, but I could never shake the feeling that I'm not really playing a "game" as much as I'm merely numberwanking. As far as I know, there is no real chance to "win" in these games, and there is no possibility to lose ether. I'm not saying those are prerequisites for being called a game, what for example TotalBisquit is saying, but this in essence means that there is no challenge involved. These games make you feel like you achieved something without really having done that.

Those reset mechanics prevalent in the genre are not helping this ether. Sure, at first you are having a blast because it's so much faster and you've earned that because you play for so long, but your Sisyphus just rolls the stone a bit faster up the hill that has no end. It's just grinding for the grinds sake. In my mind, a big part of what makes gaming fun, is overcoming challenges the game throws at you, and, in my own case, from "gaming the system" in terms of min-maxing, optimal play the feeling of "being better than the game". In these idle games on the other hand, there is always a very visible hard cap on what you can achieve in what time. (This is sadly seeping out more and more into "normal" games, just as progression systems are, both are trends that I don't enjoy at all, too much gating limits the enjoyment for me)

I do agree, however, that it should be possible to make a good idle game. Somebody mentioned Factorio, with which I'm in love with, which ticks all the boxes apart from a reset mechanic. The core gameplay is make more resource so that you have more resource so that you can make more resource, but here the brain is involved in more activities than just telling the hand where to click. Also there is a clear win state. I would love to see idle games maturing in that direction.

I don't want to shit on a genre you enjoy. It is basically pointless to argue about what games "have a point" and which do not, since gaming as a whole is essentially a big timesink for easy pleasure. Those are just my personal thoughts on idle games, and it's entirely subjective.

[Gilberreke]

I don't want to shit on a genre you enjoy. It is basically pointless to argue about what games "have a point" and which do not, since gaming as a whole is essentially a big timesink for easy pleasure. Those are just my personal thoughts on idle games, and it's entirely subjective.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I enjoy the genre. I always applaud innovation in design, including game design. There seems to be something new here that I haven't seen yet and I'm trying to figure out what it is and how to remove the cruft and get at the essence.

I think we've mentioned a few times now that other games, including BTW, exhibit some or most of these characteristics, except the reset idea, so maybe that's the novelty? I disagree with you that resets make the game worse. I think that the reset idea is basically an extension of New Game+ mechanics in other games, a generalization of that idea. I already described a potential way to add resets to BTW (that's not to say I want that, just trying to adapt the general idea to more gamey games as an exercise).

The innovation here seems to be that New Game+ acts outside of the game, it offers a novel experience to a player that wants to replay the game. It's itself an extension of old arcadey games like DOOM with multiple difficulty levels, that are so hard, only veterans can handle them. Difficulty levels in a lot of games just offer players a scale at which to attempt the game, trying to entice in people that want an easier time. This usually results in a worse play experience (the reason BTW doesn't have difficulty scaling anymore). What DOOM does instead is offer a few game modes that aren't meant to be played by first-time players, it's simply an unfair option for people that became too good at the game. New Game+ extends this idea by creating (in the best examples) a new, designed game mode based on the default.

Resets seem to be a mechanic where you tie New Game+ into the game mechanics. There's an in-game mechanical reason for wanting to start over and a mechanic to do that. The problem is one of difficulty. In AdVenture Capitalist, the game doesn't become harder after reset, the numbers just go up faster. In Clicker Heroes, the complexity goes up after resets, which gives a semblance of difficulty, but there's no real player agency, besides really high level strategy, so it's meaningless in a way.

[DerAlex]

I'm not saying a reset mechanic makes a game worse, I'm saying that it doesn't make it better, while making it seem that it does. It gives a semblance of meta progression in a game purely about progression. When your progression slows down and your internal achievement sensors stop getting stimulated and you're craving that next fix, just reset and you get a big load of "I'm doing something"-s at once. Yo dawg I heard you like progression systems, so we put a progression system in your progression system, so you can progress while you progress!

To refer back to my reference of Sisyphus, it doesn't matter how fast you are rolling the Stone up the hill if the hill has no top. It doesn't really change the difficulty of the game, the game is designed in a way so that you have to reset in order to progress. It doesn't offer additional difficulty or challenge, it just increases the longevity of the game to infinity, which is why I disagree with the idea that resetting in incremental games and New Game+ or even conventional difficulty levels are compareable. (Keep in mind I never reached the reset-stage of clicker heroes, it might be that I'm missing something here)

I see idle/clicker games as a pinnacle of game design. FC joked about this type of game being what we would all play if Germany would've won WWII, and without going too much goodwin's law on this thread, there is some truth to that, at least if you beleave in the stereotype of the very efficient Germany where no fun is allowed. It pushes all the human buttons without requiring any skill or strategy. All the increasing progress bars, all the decreasing health bars, all the rising numbers make you feel like you are doing something, but you aren't. Mix this with a big amount of sunk cost fallacy (where time is the resource you spent), and you've got the perfect addicting game.

[Gilberreke]

It doesn't really change the difficulty of the game, the game is designed in a way so that you have to reset in order to progress. It doesn't offer additional difficulty or challenge, it just increases the longevity of the game to infinity

In Clicker Heroes, all player agency is contained in reset currency. You reset, you get Hero Souls and then you have to decide how to spend those. Will you optimize gold and damage, which pushes you to higher and higher zones, or will you optimize hero souls, which makes cycles shorter and shorter for a higher gain? This is the actual game you're playing. If you haven't played Clicker Heroes enough to get to zone 1000, you really can't judge the design. As far as I could tell, that agency simply wasn't there in AdVenture Capitalist, every upgrade is just making numbers bigger, there's no choice involved, you simply pick the one that's most optimal.

So yeah, I do think that resets in Clicker Heroes make the game difficult and complex, there's just not enough agency to make it a good game.

[jakerman999]

I'm going to plug Sandcastle Builder again, just because that seems to be where this is all headed(from my vantage point at least). It's an incremental game that has strategic diversity, meaningful choices, an "end" (although that's a bar that keeps getting raised) and the sense of meta progression isn't in resets, it's in paradigm shifts. It also can be said to get more difficult the further into it you get, as deeper currencies require more effort to obtain. In the Sisyphus metaphor, you get all the way to the top of the hill, only to realize to actually just climbed a mole hill, and the real hill is just over there. and then that happens again. And again.

The interface definitely takes some work to understand though. I recommend the subreddit as it has guides for how most of the more complex things work.

[DerAlex]

If you haven't played Clicker Heroes enough to get to zone 1000, you really can't judge the design.

That is propably true. I wasn't talking about Clicker Heroes, more about incremental games in general. It may very well be that I only played the bottom of the barrel stuff, or that the genre moved on since I last played any kind of clicker game.

As a recovering clickoholic, I got the itch now... wanna know what all the fuss with Clicker Heroes is about :D

[Gilberreke]

As a recovering clickoholic, I got the itch now... wanna know what all the fuss with Clicker Heroes is about :D

Oh god, please no, I built up expectations about this mediocre game? :/

The interface definitely takes some work to understand though. I recommend the subreddit as it has guides for how most of the more complex things work.

I tried playing it, but the UI frustrates me to no end and and I can't stand staring at it :/. Then I keep clicking, but nothing happens and I start clicking other things hoping they will make stuff happen and it doesn't. Then I look up a guide, turns out I was doing the right thing, so I dunno. I'll give it another go some time.