I’ve noticed a certain lack about incrementals and like to invite you to collect and discuss them. I have a good collection of save games and am always on the hunt for anything that makes “number go up”.
What’s an incremental?
Y’all have probably seen or heard Cookie Clicker from ᶜʰᵉᶜᵏˢ ⁿᵒᵗᵉˢ 2013. The game is still in some form of development. The appeal is pretty simple, as in shortcutting the positive feedback loop: you click the cookie, you have a cookie and enough cookies net you automation tool, you produce more cookies and produce more. Number go up.
Who in their right mind came up with that?
Cookie Clicker is not even the first of its category, but certainly the most popular and polished. Before that there was a good amount of incremental/idle games on Newgrounds on Kongregate which started exploring games as “anti-games”. Resist the urge to interact with the game and every time you intervened, you may have gotten more efficient means to produce the games currency but it will also reset your current progress. Idle Games never really took off beyond the platform because of the inherent punishment. On the scene arrived another strain of those “games” that were flash applets that automated themselves. And yes, that means you can mostly watch the “game” to automate itself.
I think my first contact with what eventually became incrementals was either Lemonda Tycoon or Insaniquarium. Insaniquarium lets you purchase fish that drop gold to purchase more fish to drop more gold.
Lemonade Tycoon is probably a very early variant of the stripped management game (probably due to production?) that emulate the other “Tycoon” games of the 2000s with focusing only on the number aspect and slight day-to-day optimizations. It’s probably a predecessor of what Kairosoft became, which then inspired Game Dev Tycoon, bringing at least the Tycoon name full circle.
The Incremental “Skeleton”
Most incrementals feature follow a simple structure and implement most of these:
- a primary game currency that starts off with a bit of manual labor
- an automation of gaining the currency
- multiple affectors to multiply the net gain
- a general tendency to let numbers go past sensible limits
- idle mechanics where you’re waiting to pass certain thesholds
- reset mechanics that promise to make the next run faster
The general incremental playthrough usually starts off slow, picks up the pace in the mid-game and then lets you optimize the midgame to reach the final stages in the endgame. Some games are so full of this tiered content, that you may unlock new reset mechanics that speed up progress that you made over the last months. I’m not kidding, some of these are very long form games that you nurture through your time with it.
Now, where do we start?
I’m thinking about this question in particular, because there are a good amount of variety and many games tap into the same lizard brain region that are not primarily an incremental but cause the same addicition to it. I’d like the thread to focus on incremental games and mechanics, but games that feature incremental itches are very welcome.
I think the most game-y one is Forager. It starts you off a small island and you optimize in the span of a couple of hours your farming progress, encountering enemies, quests and dungeons to do. It’s very much on the “game with incremental aspects” side, but as an introduction into my addiction of limit testing my mouse, it’s a pretty good start:
Otherwise I’ll recommend on the other extreme one of the most purest incrementals: Swarmsim
The gist is that you’re an ant-queen and the damn hive has to grow beyond the limits of existence. I think I’ve finished swarmsim in the span of 3-4 months and I’m sure I’ve spent my first evening well into the night trying to make the number to go up further. And then it transformed into a long form game experience where I’ve done my few clicks every day and transcended the hive to its full potential.
Note on the skewed focus
My personal flavor are (mostly) web browser only games that take some good time to complete. That’s mostly because I’m playing these over time and inbetween work and what not while moving between multiple PCs and just store the savegames on a NAS. I personally don’t engage with long-ish idler games on Steam, when I’m directly playing games, I’d like to engage with them and their systems. So my recommendations here are likely some dumb browser game that takes days or weeks to “complete”.
Side note on the “scene”
Incrementals are primarily a grass-roots thing. Some of the players are developers and just cook up a game in their free time or on competitions/game jams and then you end up with a lot of “unfinished” never updated games that are just another interesting spin on incrementals.
Incrementals are (mostly?) not a financially viable business. You have Forager and similar games, which are a game first and then borrow from incrementals, then you have Melvor Idle and Cookie Clicker that have patreons with no direct bonuses and then you have a ton of (mostly) mobile gacha games that play the same tricks on you like incrementals do, but give you the option to skip timers by paying for it.
Numbers are not supposed to go up like that but yet they do.
