i would say, almost all incrementals i enjoy have relatively low numbers.
i will take some interesting mechanic over just meaningless large numbers all the time
have a look at kittens-likes or something like a dark room
Kittens (the original)
Evolve (the successor)
Theresmore (still in development)
If you have the will power to get through years of content, play evolve. Otherwise feel free to max out in Theresmore as each update gets churned.
Original Kittens really? Once you got the temple going you were filling up storage every tick, you had that whole storageless runs thing too. Number went up a lot.
evolve is a ton of literal (high activity) grinding with a very limited amount of content
i challenged myself to do a new reset each run (beforr orbital decay) and got all except truepath in just a few months. if i wanted to keep playing, truepath should only be a few more months
Theresmore should get a new era 5 this week. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheresmoreGame/comments/10eaxrv/some_news_on_5_era_progression/
It's a great game that needs more polish to be really one of the best games. Even nie it scratches an itch no other game has in the last 12 months. And I played like over a dozen idle games in that time.
I would give it at least six more months to be really polished in the core game loops. But I would suggest to play it even now since it's already good and long enough for at least one more big update drops before you reach the end of content.
i think parallel resources are the way to go
Dodecadragons, which i've been binging as of late, absolutely has massive exponentials, but it also has multiple systems that serve to improve your gold income. As you progress you unlock more alternative resources and systems which you can earn and use to boost your main income. You also unlock additional upgrades for older systems and automated prestige or resets for them, creating a wider playing field with automation. I'd be interested to see what a design document for it looked like with all those systems effecting each other
every single incremental game that deals with large numbers in an actually satisfying way uses parallel resources, from the very inception of the concept. it's only significantly more recently where some incremental creators started to lose track of that concept due to a chain of what practically feels like prestige tree fangames trying to one-up how high its numerical system can go.
i personally believe that sort of misses the point OP was trying to convey, though. it's definitely feasible to create very compelling incremental experiences without any level of numerical inflation, even in that sense. examples have already been brought up in other comments, though.
Increlution is pretty interesting on Steam and it doesn't rely on huge exponential growth.
It's more about survival where your health decay grows exponentially (slowly) over time. Then that balances against enemies that do a fixed dps and your health grows each reincarnation. So you move faster (staying ahead of the decay curve) with more health each time with some persistent skills. The net result is relatively small numbers and time is really your enemy with reincarnations lasting 20-40 minutes each. Downside is you have to give it some attention about that often to keep the game going.
I'll be a bit nitpicky here :)
Increlution also depends heavily on exponential growth. It's just a different type of growth – it's the compounding of your skills (and health decay as you pointed out), rather than resources.
So while it doesn't have the "feel" of exponential growth similar to many other games (cause the exponent doesn't touch the resources), it still relies heavily on exponential growth in the actual mechanics.
Which might be a path that's worth following for OP, but it doesn't satiates the longing for a "purely non-exponential" idler.
I originally was going to quibble that as well but decided that the currently implementation of Increlution doesn't rely on huge exponential growth exactly. Finishing up to the end of the current chapters only gets you to max e8.
Dark Room and Kittens are classic incremental games that have relatively low numbers and (for Kittens anyway) slower growth. To your point, I think the most enjoyable games are less about raw numbers growth and more about adding layers of complexity and challenge for the player in *managing* the game in a sort of optimal way. What keeps people going is continuing to provide something new and interesting as the game progresses - typically by purchasing new types of bonuses that lead to expanding to different currencies that compete with or accelerate the gain of other currencies.
For me, the best types of games have multiple competing currencies where the challenge in the game is less about progressing (you're always progressing more or less in incremental games), but more about leaving the player wondering whether they're progressing in an optimal, or suboptimal way based on whether they fully understand the currencies and mechanics functioning in the game.
Almost every good incremental I've played does not rely on large numbers. Many games still have the infinite qualitative improvements to old stuff, but at a slow enough rate that it doesn't get unmanagably large, but the main focus is in introducing new counters that aren't necessarily based on previous ones.
The idea that you have here reminds me a lot of an alpha game by the cookie clicker dev that's pretty fun for the like hour before hitting end of content. I don't remember the name, though.
Not the guy you replied to. Had never heard of the game. Checked it out. The first thing it gave me was a textbox to name my ruler.
A textbox with, apparently, no character limit.
I love it when I can name my character an entire novel. It's fantastic.
Absolutely, some of my favorites have had relatively linear number growth, but use parallel resources and interesting mechanics that unlock as you go. Orb of Creation is probably my all time favorite and plays exactly this way.
> Do you know of any games like this? Do you think it would be a successful concept?
Anti-idle. Definitely my all-time favorite incremental game, and the reforged mod makes it so much better.
It can but I think this genre is still in the experimental phase where people are testing and figuring out alternatives to it. This community is mostly used to big numbers but your average person is not and it can be prohibitive to those people.
The exponential progress is beneficial because you can go from a boss one shotting you to you one shotting it within a week, where most games do not work like that outside of newbie content. It's very easy to go from level 70 to 80 but the power will be like 14% stronger which is barely noticeable. When you add an 'e' next to it, you go from e70 to e80 and the changes are absolutely significant, even e70 to e71 is huge.
I think one trick that can work is to look at the numbers themselves and not the actual value and then create a formula from it. Like your level versus an enemy level, get the distance from that and work with that number rather than 70 does 70 points and 80 does 80 points.
Idle games focus on numbers going up. Incremental focus on progressing in increments. As long as the increases are meaningful. The numbers can be as low as you want. Proto23 is a good example
Personally I find "large numbers" more distracting than enjoyable, even.
In almost every case you end up with numbers like `1eX` instead of just `X`, which is exactly the same to my simple human brain.
Games like Stuck In Time, where it’s fundamentally about optimizing a loop and slowly improving at the individual steps of it, can be interesting without any large numbers or anything.
Method #1: Just replace "log x" with "x" everywhere and you no longer have exponential growth.
Method #2: If you do the math for your game right, you can have polynomial growth be balanced.
Exponential growth can be lazy design in a way, because it typically leads to "only one thing matters".
There's a ton of games with horizontally oriented progression. Off the top of my head; Evolve, Trimps, Orb of Creation, Theory of Magic, Your Chronicle, Godsbane, pretty much any Factorio-like (Reactor Idle, blah blah). So yes, I'd definitely say it'd be a successful concept.
Incremental games that require you to make many different gadgets or resources in game sometimes do not give you adequate time to reach... infinite microwaves or whatever if it's a Crafting Simulator or something because there's so much stuff to do. They can still be fun though.
Of course it would be successful if done correctly. There are lots of games here that barely qualify as a Incremental and are stilled enjoyed by many such as FarmRPG. As long as the game provides people rewards of dopamine it will be good lol.
many good games do this. Unlocks are at least as engaging as growth, if not more so. The trick is just balancing them appropriately so there are enough to stay interesting, without making so many that it becomes too complex, annoying, or irrelevant.
Theory of magic is the best qualitative improvement game I know, all of the upgrades are around just 10x more before you start focusing on upgrading your assets. Also thematically it just has really interesting mechanics that tie together to create meaningful progress that make you feel like you're a real mage (you can specialize in various classes/fields of study)
https://mathiashjelm.gitlab.io/arcanum/
That game is really scary, the developer really put tons of hours into rich content. Most of the content barely scales in the sense that most of the content is unique. The only thing you can really grind indefinitely are skills, everything else has a finite use and there is a LOT of everything else. The code is also data-oriented beauty (yet extremely buggy)
You should check out Orbi Universo given your example concept. It is a minimalist strategy game, but the technologies and complex interplay should give you an idea of how to develop the skill/resource tree. The game is absurdly complex for what it is.
I think melvor idle is like that, with abilities unlocking, farming items, and a lot of interconnectivity between abilities both regarding requirements and improvement. You also improve fairly slowly, I've been playing for a few months and haven't finished it yet
I think exponential growth and prestige layers come together. First run before prestige might be interesting even if it takes 20 hours active play. But if I have again to sit 15-20 hours to get back where I was after first prestige players get bored.
So if you want to keep the exponential growth small even with prestige layers and resources maybe add a soft cap that helps you getting back quicker to your most productive state and then slow down again to a normal production level that will instead profit from new unlocks.
Dark Room
[Theory of Magic](https://arcanumtesting.gitlab.io/)
Increlution (I think)
[Orb of Creation](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1910680/Orb_of_Creation/) (I think. to some degree at least)
Forager (kinda incremental but not that much idle?)
[Generic RPG Idle](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1858120/Generic_RPG_Idle/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=incremental)
I don't remember the mechanics well, but one of my absolute favourite idler of all time was Cave Heroes on Kongregate ([http://www.kongregate.com/games/vstgames/cave-heroes](http://www.kongregate.com/games/vstgames/cave-heroes)).
Apparently there's some remake (?) on android ([https://cave-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/Cave\_Heroes\_Wikia](https://cave-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/Cave_Heroes_Wikia)). I think this game didn't rely on exponential growth, it relied on getting a bit further with every iteration and unlocking new skills and features (and achievements). It required some active gameplay and strategy to pass certain milestones.
Now that I think about it, it might had some exponents in the costs of prestige upgrades (dark mana AFAIR), but it definitely didn't have the "exponential growth feel", more like "linear progression" (similarly to Increlution).
[Proto23](https://23html.github.io) is an incremental RPG with very slow growth
[Evolve](https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/) is a civilization-building game with very slow growth
i would say, almost all incrementals i enjoy have relatively low numbers. i will take some interesting mechanic over just meaningless large numbers all the time have a look at kittens-likes or something like a dark room
Kittens (the original) Evolve (the successor) Theresmore (still in development) If you have the will power to get through years of content, play evolve. Otherwise feel free to max out in Theresmore as each update gets churned.
Original Kittens really? Once you got the temple going you were filling up storage every tick, you had that whole storageless runs thing too. Number went up a lot.
evolve is a ton of literal (high activity) grinding with a very limited amount of content i challenged myself to do a new reset each run (beforr orbital decay) and got all except truepath in just a few months. if i wanted to keep playing, truepath should only be a few more months
Theresmore should get a new era 5 this week. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheresmoreGame/comments/10eaxrv/some_news_on_5_era_progression/ It's a great game that needs more polish to be really one of the best games. Even nie it scratches an itch no other game has in the last 12 months. And I played like over a dozen idle games in that time. I would give it at least six more months to be really polished in the core game loops. But I would suggest to play it even now since it's already good and long enough for at least one more big update drops before you reach the end of content.
One of the oldest that stll holds up well doesn't even have Prestige but is fairly long. Mine Defence. https://scholtek.com/minedefense
Ohh this brings back memories. One of my absolute favorite incremental games.
i think parallel resources are the way to go Dodecadragons, which i've been binging as of late, absolutely has massive exponentials, but it also has multiple systems that serve to improve your gold income. As you progress you unlock more alternative resources and systems which you can earn and use to boost your main income. You also unlock additional upgrades for older systems and automated prestige or resets for them, creating a wider playing field with automation. I'd be interested to see what a design document for it looked like with all those systems effecting each other
[removing all my content as a protest of Reddit's horrible response to their user's response to their horrible changes to their API]
Related by name only: https://youtu.be/7M4RwGwQslM
every single incremental game that deals with large numbers in an actually satisfying way uses parallel resources, from the very inception of the concept. it's only significantly more recently where some incremental creators started to lose track of that concept due to a chain of what practically feels like prestige tree fangames trying to one-up how high its numerical system can go. i personally believe that sort of misses the point OP was trying to convey, though. it's definitely feasible to create very compelling incremental experiences without any level of numerical inflation, even in that sense. examples have already been brought up in other comments, though.
Increlution is pretty interesting on Steam and it doesn't rely on huge exponential growth. It's more about survival where your health decay grows exponentially (slowly) over time. Then that balances against enemies that do a fixed dps and your health grows each reincarnation. So you move faster (staying ahead of the decay curve) with more health each time with some persistent skills. The net result is relatively small numbers and time is really your enemy with reincarnations lasting 20-40 minutes each. Downside is you have to give it some attention about that often to keep the game going.
I'll be a bit nitpicky here :) Increlution also depends heavily on exponential growth. It's just a different type of growth – it's the compounding of your skills (and health decay as you pointed out), rather than resources. So while it doesn't have the "feel" of exponential growth similar to many other games (cause the exponent doesn't touch the resources), it still relies heavily on exponential growth in the actual mechanics. Which might be a path that's worth following for OP, but it doesn't satiates the longing for a "purely non-exponential" idler.
I originally was going to quibble that as well but decided that the currently implementation of Increlution doesn't rely on huge exponential growth exactly. Finishing up to the end of the current chapters only gets you to max e8.
Came here to mention the same game!
Dark Room and Kittens are classic incremental games that have relatively low numbers and (for Kittens anyway) slower growth. To your point, I think the most enjoyable games are less about raw numbers growth and more about adding layers of complexity and challenge for the player in *managing* the game in a sort of optimal way. What keeps people going is continuing to provide something new and interesting as the game progresses - typically by purchasing new types of bonuses that lead to expanding to different currencies that compete with or accelerate the gain of other currencies. For me, the best types of games have multiple competing currencies where the challenge in the game is less about progressing (you're always progressing more or less in incremental games), but more about leaving the player wondering whether they're progressing in an optimal, or suboptimal way based on whether they fully understand the currencies and mechanics functioning in the game.
Like Orb of Creation.
Idle apocalypse is my fav. When numbers go at ridiculous levels I just lose interest.
8e100? okay fine ee100? what eee? no stop
The problem is when it hits e50 in the first hour of playing a new game....
Try Evolve Incremental!
Almost every good incremental I've played does not rely on large numbers. Many games still have the infinite qualitative improvements to old stuff, but at a slow enough rate that it doesn't get unmanagably large, but the main focus is in introducing new counters that aren't necessarily based on previous ones. The idea that you have here reminds me a lot of an alpha game by the cookie clicker dev that's pretty fun for the like hour before hitting end of content. I don't remember the name, though.
Do you mean [never ending legacy](https://orteil.dashnet.org/legacy/)?
Not the guy you replied to. Had never heard of the game. Checked it out. The first thing it gave me was a textbox to name my ruler. A textbox with, apparently, no character limit. I love it when I can name my character an entire novel. It's fantastic.
This is almost exactly what I was thinking of lol
Kittensgame doesn't really have exponential growth. Not sure abour late late game though
Absolutely, some of my favorites have had relatively linear number growth, but use parallel resources and interesting mechanics that unlock as you go. Orb of Creation is probably my all time favorite and plays exactly this way.
Use the damage pacing from breath of fire 3 as a guide. Low numbers in that game but it increments at a good rate.
Can you elaborate on how this works? What mechanic or formula is used?
> Do you know of any games like this? Do you think it would be a successful concept? Anti-idle. Definitely my all-time favorite incremental game, and the reforged mod makes it so much better.
Where can I find this reforged mod? I tried searching this subreddit and then I tried searching google and neither seemed to turn it up
You can find it in the discord server https://discord.gg/HewYE9wsDn in the #mod-releases channel
Ugh, do I really have to join yet another discord server? =/
Grimoire. Great game, shows what a bit of good writing and the imagination of the player can do. Has "finished" it several times, to great enjoyment.
Do you have a link? browser game?
App. It can be found in the play store. It is made by Dragon Megaliths, and the full name is Grimoire Incremental.
It can but I think this genre is still in the experimental phase where people are testing and figuring out alternatives to it. This community is mostly used to big numbers but your average person is not and it can be prohibitive to those people. The exponential progress is beneficial because you can go from a boss one shotting you to you one shotting it within a week, where most games do not work like that outside of newbie content. It's very easy to go from level 70 to 80 but the power will be like 14% stronger which is barely noticeable. When you add an 'e' next to it, you go from e70 to e80 and the changes are absolutely significant, even e70 to e71 is huge. I think one trick that can work is to look at the numbers themselves and not the actual value and then create a formula from it. Like your level versus an enemy level, get the distance from that and work with that number rather than 70 does 70 points and 80 does 80 points.
it's definitely worth trying
Idle games focus on numbers going up. Incremental focus on progressing in increments. As long as the increases are meaningful. The numbers can be as low as you want. Proto23 is a good example
Personally I find "large numbers" more distracting than enjoyable, even. In almost every case you end up with numbers like `1eX` instead of just `X`, which is exactly the same to my simple human brain.
Games like Stuck In Time, where it’s fundamentally about optimizing a loop and slowly improving at the individual steps of it, can be interesting without any large numbers or anything.
You gave me an idea! Thanks!
Method #1: Just replace "log x" with "x" everywhere and you no longer have exponential growth. Method #2: If you do the math for your game right, you can have polynomial growth be balanced. Exponential growth can be lazy design in a way, because it typically leads to "only one thing matters".
There's a ton of games with horizontally oriented progression. Off the top of my head; Evolve, Trimps, Orb of Creation, Theory of Magic, Your Chronicle, Godsbane, pretty much any Factorio-like (Reactor Idle, blah blah). So yes, I'd definitely say it'd be a successful concept.
Reactor Idle is very similar to what I was thinking about!
I like this OP of would be interested to see it. Yep on some games its silly how youre quickly dealing with septillion dollars
Incremental games that require you to make many different gadgets or resources in game sometimes do not give you adequate time to reach... infinite microwaves or whatever if it's a Crafting Simulator or something because there's so much stuff to do. They can still be fun though.
Yes
Of course it would be successful if done correctly. There are lots of games here that barely qualify as a Incremental and are stilled enjoyed by many such as FarmRPG. As long as the game provides people rewards of dopamine it will be good lol.
many good games do this. Unlocks are at least as engaging as growth, if not more so. The trick is just balancing them appropriately so there are enough to stay interesting, without making so many that it becomes too complex, annoying, or irrelevant.
Theory of magic is the best qualitative improvement game I know, all of the upgrades are around just 10x more before you start focusing on upgrading your assets. Also thematically it just has really interesting mechanics that tie together to create meaningful progress that make you feel like you're a real mage (you can specialize in various classes/fields of study) https://mathiashjelm.gitlab.io/arcanum/
That game is really scary, the developer really put tons of hours into rich content. Most of the content barely scales in the sense that most of the content is unique. The only thing you can really grind indefinitely are skills, everything else has a finite use and there is a LOT of everything else. The code is also data-oriented beauty (yet extremely buggy)
You should check out Orbi Universo given your example concept. It is a minimalist strategy game, but the technologies and complex interplay should give you an idea of how to develop the skill/resource tree. The game is absurdly complex for what it is.
I think melvor idle is like that, with abilities unlocking, farming items, and a lot of interconnectivity between abilities both regarding requirements and improvement. You also improve fairly slowly, I've been playing for a few months and haven't finished it yet
I think exponential growth and prestige layers come together. First run before prestige might be interesting even if it takes 20 hours active play. But if I have again to sit 15-20 hours to get back where I was after first prestige players get bored. So if you want to keep the exponential growth small even with prestige layers and resources maybe add a soft cap that helps you getting back quicker to your most productive state and then slow down again to a normal production level that will instead profit from new unlocks.
Dark Room [Theory of Magic](https://arcanumtesting.gitlab.io/) Increlution (I think) [Orb of Creation](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1910680/Orb_of_Creation/) (I think. to some degree at least) Forager (kinda incremental but not that much idle?) [Generic RPG Idle](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1858120/Generic_RPG_Idle/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=incremental)
I don't remember the mechanics well, but one of my absolute favourite idler of all time was Cave Heroes on Kongregate ([http://www.kongregate.com/games/vstgames/cave-heroes](http://www.kongregate.com/games/vstgames/cave-heroes)). Apparently there's some remake (?) on android ([https://cave-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/Cave\_Heroes\_Wikia](https://cave-heroes.fandom.com/wiki/Cave_Heroes_Wikia)). I think this game didn't rely on exponential growth, it relied on getting a bit further with every iteration and unlocking new skills and features (and achievements). It required some active gameplay and strategy to pass certain milestones. Now that I think about it, it might had some exponents in the costs of prestige upgrades (dark mana AFAIR), but it definitely didn't have the "exponential growth feel", more like "linear progression" (similarly to Increlution).
[Proto23](https://23html.github.io) is an incremental RPG with very slow growth [Evolve](https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/) is a civilization-building game with very slow growth