The Mbin portion of the site is back up again, but the bot doesn't seem to be. It's been a month since the last post; there's probably going to be a lot to catch up on. Same guidelines as last time, with emphasis on the last one - have fun!

I found Our Ascent a few hours back and only stopped playing it recently. It's one of those games where you're under a time limit and you're supposed to accomplish as much as you can, and it relies primarily on RPG mechanics. I like it, although I have some minor nitpicks:

1. It's a bit difficult to tell when adjacent areas can't be crossed (water-to-land and vice versa). I got used to it though.
2. Restarting a run takes slightly more time navigating the UI than is comfortable.
3. The backgrounds in the game are AI-generated. I don't feel too strongly on this one because the dev said they'd replace the art once they got funds to hire artists.
4. You can play as multiple characters, each with their own campaign that provides global boosts to all characters. But the boosts are so minor that I'm not really motivated to play them.
5. You need to do some calculations in order to find out the effective power of percentage-based statistics. Maybe this is intentional, I dunno.

Again, these are minor nitpicks. I really really like the game. I'm not sure why I'm posting some of these nitpicks here, the dev hasn't even heard of this place.

#incremental_games

The title explains most of what's going on.
Here's some additional relevant info that can also be found in the link:

• Submissions will be accepted until 2024-07-20 17:00:00 UTC.
• This jam's theme is "Evasion". What that means is up for interpretation.

If you were planning on submitting an entry, this is a reminder in case you forgot about the jam (although it's a day late). And for the rest of us players, stay tuned for submissions!

A strange downloadable short game I found on itch.io whose first part is an incremental.

It's simple mechanically, but it is in 3D and has sounds which makes it stand out. They really contribute to the experience, and the nearly numberless way of conveying information is really charming.

I have no idea if there's anything after the incremental though besides that part where cubes fall for eternity. It's a strange game, as I said earlier.

!incremental_games@incremental.social https://incremental.social/m/incremental_games (it seems the first link doesn't work, sorry)

This is a community for discussing incremental games, which are games which revolve almost entirely around the process of making numbers bigger (I'm simplifying a bit here - what makes a game incremental is rather vague and has spawned a considerable amount of discussion over the years). The most well-known example of this type of game is probably Cookie Clicker, although its mechanics are considered outdated by current standards. Other notable examples include Universal Paperclips, Antimatter Dimensions, and Kittens Game (these are fairly old too).

Discussions from the viewpoints of players and the viewpoints of developers are both welcome there.

Disclaimer: This community is not exactly new. There was a post in !fediverse@lemmy.ml about the community around half a year ago. However, someone said it would be perfectly okay to make a post here despite that so I posted here. Also I'm not a mod of this community but am fairly involved with it.

A lot of incremental games I see are in perpetual development. They are never truly finished, the developer always promises that another content update is around the corner. And those content updates get released, and the games eventually get really big. They grow to have prestige layers approaching the double digits, or months of content, or twenty-something interconnected systems, or whatever else it is that makes a game big.

Now, I want to like these games. Progress is at the core of incremental games, and appreciating the amount of progress you've made since you started is something I think long-term incrementals can and should excel best at. Unfortunately, I find that most long-term incrementals are not designed such that you can appreciate all the progress you've made. At most, I can only compare myself today to myself a few days ago. It feels like many games would be better served if they were split into smaller games. At some point you're just adding content for its own sake.

I want to know and let other people know possible ways of solving this issue, although I'm ultimately not sure whether it's even possible to solve.

I'll try to help by citing what I believe to be a positive example:

Evolve Idle is a game about growing civilizations. It is a tedious game. A lot of the game is spent repeating the same content over and over again for minuscule boosts. The amount of time you have to wait between actions increases as you progress further in the game. And if you stick to the areas of the game where the intervals get shorter, they eventually get either bored or exhausted with how much you have to monitor the game.

But the game is also really expansive. Each little boost is a tiny bit more progress into allowing your civilizations to perform greater feats. Eventually your civilization gets to ascend to a higher plane of existence. I ended my playthrough there, but that is far from the end. The reason I ended it there was that I thought it was a fitting end. It was the best ending I could think of for a civilization, and much of the content after that was mostly just reaching endings I considered to be worse and then doing them under more difficult conditions. There was also the fact that I had been exposed to third-party automation scripts for the game and the progress I saw late-game people using these scripts ruined my sense of scale.

... that's a long example. It would be a longer, but I'm sleepy.

I feel like I've seen this before... (Game: Unnamed Space Idle)

#incremental_games

This thread is dedicated to sharing mechanics or concepts you’ve found in incremental games that you think deserve more use or exploration. I’d prefer if you limited discussions to mechanics you’ve found in only 1 or 2 games, though I have no moderator powers to actually enforce this so if you really feel like sharing something share it :P

I’ll list some of my own discoveries now.

One concept I’ve been thinking about is the separation of games into loosely interconnected systems with different pacings that run simultaneously. The game that put this thought in my head was Matter Dimensions, which uses a simple implementation of this. The game is active, although while inactive the game also lets you accumulate banked time which can be used to speed up the game. However, the banked time can also be used to purchase upgrades which increase banked time generation. Progress in the main game also increases the gain of banked time. The implementation is flawed however, as there are segments of the game where banked time is useless. (I’d imagine Anti-Idle: The Game probably implements a better and more complex version of this, but I haven’t played it yet.)

Another concept I wish I saw more is the implementation of resource caps in Gooboo. In other games with resource caps, production stops when the cap is reached. In Gooboo, reaching the cap divides production by a factor that increases the more resources you generate. You’re also not allowed to spend more of any resource on a single upgrade than the cap. This mechanic breaks immersion a little, but it greatly reduces the compulsion to micromanage the game caused by resource caps. (Gooboo in general has a lot of interesting design decisions. It implements the first concept I stated, although its most active components are idle compared to what I usually play.)

To be more precise, what do you seek to accomplish when you develop a game and release it for the world to see? What is the effect you desire your games to have on their players, and what do you hope to gain from these games?

That’s it. I don’t have any relevant backstory to tell you here.

Finished https://galaxy.click/play/357. I found it unusual that at one point in the game there's no actual need to interact with the content before that point, but that content isn't hidden.

#incremental_games

First off, a definition: I define the “abstractness” of an incremental to be based on how much it is removed from other genres. For example, Kittens Game and Clicker Heroes are not abstract – the first is themed around civilization building while the second one takes mechanics from RPGs. Meanwhile, Prestige Tree is a prime example of an abstract incremental game since its themes and mechanics don’t seem to have any clear origin in other genres. Swarm Simulator would still be abstract, although less so since the game has a semi-realistic theme.

So then, the question - Do you have a preference for more abstract incremental games or for incremental games that incorporate more elements from other genres? What aspects about your preference make you prefer them? And how do you think the group you don’t prefer could improve?

Personally, I like the idea of less abstract incremental games since they seem to provide more of a sense of “doing something” (even when I know this isn’t the case). However, I find myself more often than not rejecting most games of that kind since they don't live up to my expectations. The more abstract incrementals are easier to get into and because of that I find myself playing them more frequently.

It is a sort of tradition among some in the incremental games community to publish joke games every 1st of April. Many are quickly forgotten, some can be legitimately enjoyable, and a select few develop cult followings. This year is no exception.

Here is the list of all April Fools games released this year that I know of:

1. Pauahtan’s Pupils’ Trial of Prayer - Also known as PPToP2. Takes systems from several other incremental games, some of which are also April Fools games. Does not autosave, so remember to save manually before you leave.
2. Infinite Prestige - An active incremental game with infinite minimal prestige layers. You will feel burdened by the lack of QoL. How far will you push before you get tired? The dev's challenge is to reach prestige layer 10. I implore you to go further.
3. galaxy.click counter - Not so much a game as much as a response to Reddit's April Fools event. Who in their right mind would create a button, and then prevent people from clicking it more than once? Horrifying, I say, horrifying! Thankfully the galaxy.click counter has no such limitations on click count, although it does require an online account.
4. Emoji Recycling Center - I don't know if this even is an April Fools game to be honest. I'm legitimately enjoying this, though like PPToP2 it also does not have autosave.

...and that's it! If there are any that I missed, please reply in the comments for all to see. There's apparently an April Fools incremental game jam and I didn't look at the submissions.

P.S. Antimatter Dimensions' Reality update was finally ported to the mobile version of the game this April 1st. It's not a joke, though since it did happen on that day I'm including it here as a side note.