3221

I know the two prior games were recommended a while ago, but I wanted to post some impressions of them. Just for the heck of it.

From @clay: Egg, Inc.: It’s a clicker. The only real clicker I played before this was Clicker Heroes, and to me it follows the formula pretty religiously. But what more interests me are the design elements of the game. This game has quite an elegant design. What’s the big issue with clickers? To me it’s boredom: you run out of things to do after you get tired of pounding the screen, and you put it away. Egg, Inc, has a lot of small design touches to keep you playing.

With respect to the “regular” gameplay, you can upgrade your chicken coops, your delivery system, and pay for research. There are the normal two paths of upgrading (the linear ‘upgrade your farm to more expensive eggs’, and the vertical upgrade of ‘prestige’, in which you collect “soul eggs” based on your progress, which grant you a permanent bonus, and you restart with the most basic farm again). This mechanic is familiar to anyone who’s played Clicker Heroes.

The clicker part is that you can generate chickens from your eggs. The chickens run from your hatchery into the coops, which generates more static income. There is also a temporary bonus you get by clicking more frantically. The hatchery runs out after a while, and so you have to wait to build it up again (it’s sort of like a stamina bar, to be honest).

In addition to those activities, you get

  • periodic packages/newspapers to click on. You collect currency or premium currency (golden egg). Golden eggs are spent on Epic Research, which doesn’t reset when you restart your farm. Makes sense, when you consider this is the IAP currency.
  • quests (“have 5000 chickens”, “transport 1,000,000 eggs per second”) which give a reward. Then you automatically get another.
  • ads you can optionally watch for rewards
  • daily reward chests you’re given just because you’re special

They do a great job of using these elements to help you discover the game. One of the best examples of this I can think of is a quest that made me think “what? I can do that?”

There’s also IAP, which I always glance at but ignore. But there is one aspect of the IAP which I think is a great design. There’s a piggy bank which you can buy for $2.99. The piggy bank starts out with (I guess) one golden egg in it. You look at that and think “why would I pay $2.99 for one egg when I can pay $4.99 for 100 or $7,00 for 500” - or whatever. So at first glance it seems weird. But… and this is the genius part, I think: every upgrade you make to your farm adds one golden egg to the piggy bank. And that seems to go on forever. I’ve been playing this for way too long, and my piggy bank now has something like 20k golden eggs in it.

I can see that at some point, the piggy bank will have enough golden eggs in it that anyone will say “heck, it’s only $2.99 for eggs. That’s totally worth it.”

This feels like a brilliant mechanic, once you figure it out - it seems like a great balance between desire and thriftiness (i.e., how long can you hold out before you really really really want to buy the piggy bank?). And every action you take shows you the total going up, and up, and up.

So anyway, it’s a clicker, but I think it’s a well-designed game. I like the look and feel of it too.

As for the second game mentioned above by @espressojim, Merchant. This looks like someone took iPhone graphics and upsized them (at least when I’m playing on my iPad). So it’s pretty ugly. But it’s a fun hands-off RPG where you control heroes, send them out on quests, craft their gear, and try to make money by selling stuff. There is a bit of a hump to get over in the beginning (you don’t have enough inventory slots to hold on to all the junk your adventurers bring back and you don’t know what stuff is worth, so you probably try to hold on to a lot of things that you should just sell) but once you get a little bit of cash and hire a second (third…fourth…) hero, things start going a lot faster.

You equip your heroes, send them out, and sit back and collect the loot. So it’s completely hands-off with respect to fighting. It’s also pretty easy - the fights are gated by character level and I feel you’d have to be pretty determined to send a guy on a fight where he could lose.

But there is some sort of visceral glee gained when your Armorsmith crafts a magic pair of boots - or your Weaponsmith makes a rare Axe that changes your fighter’s damage from 64 to 84! Maybe World of Warcraft has conditioned me to react to those colors, I dunno.

It doesn’t have any IAP or ads,

If you can get over the pretty fugly graphics, it’s a relatively fun timewaster. Totally possible to play this while watching TV, as there’s no real time-critical actions going on.

Neither of these games is earth-shattering, but they’re both little diversions that I’ve been using for the past week or so.

3222

While we’re talking about incrementals, I just want to put in my recommendation for The Executive.

At first glance, it looks like a simple fighting game, pitting a horde of werewolves and other monsters against you, a sharply dressed intern in a mining company. As you defeat monsters, you earn money that can be used for upgrades. But the interesting decisions come when you realize you can also invest the money. And your investment keeps making you money, even when you aren’t playing

At the top of the screen, you can see how your investment is doing. At first the returns are piddling, but before long you are literally making a million dollars while you sleep. Then you have to decide whether to buy some special moves for your soon-to-be-promoted intern, or just reinvest. Your choices will indirectly determine the difficulty of the fighting game. If you wait long enough, you can always save up enough money to afford fighting moves that will overwhelm any opponent. But if you get sick of waiting, jump into the fray and fight for more money!

3223

Some terrific ports this week. Really loving a guild of Dungeoneering (something, something, never fearing) so far (though it has some minor rough edges with the he interface). Also, Snakebird is on iOS now and I had thought of grabbing it on Steam multiple times (extremely challenging/charming logic puzzler)

3224

I liked the PC version, so I gave the iOS one a try out of curiosity: the control scheme, so brilliantly efficient on the computer, is a total nightmare of exhausting swipes and crazy button taps. At least the game is free to try so everybody can check for themselves if it works for them…

I grabbed Xenoshyft, a straight port of the deckbuilding game, because I am very influencable and I read all the praise from the Neumanium. While the game seems very interesting, the interface is very glitchy, with unresponsive taps (my guess is the game is often confused by its own decision to let you hold to zoom on card, and simple selections), and I ran into a reproducible bug where a wave 3 enemy type will just lock your run, preventing you from playing any further. Quite infuriating, looking at the obvious work that went into the game otherwise.

3225

Re: Merchant - sounds like something I’d enjoy. But you said:

but when I look at the description in the App Store it shows a LOT of iap?

3226

EGG, INC. kinda hooked me last night. As usual with idle games, I can’t explain why. We’ll see how long it lasts.

3227

Yeah, there’s definitely IAP though it’s not in your face. Looks like you can buy boosters and stuff like that. I played it for a bit yesterday but lost interest a bit after hitting the second area.

3228

I have the card board version and thought my sons and I would love a tower type defense board game. But it was extremely hard and took very long to play. I was wondering if it is more fun as a solo digital game?

3229

I only played with a single board so far (you can manage up to 4), so the game is expectedly not very long - about 20 minutes - and you don’t have to argue with yourself too ;)
So far in my limited experience (without expansions), the game seems to be very difficult at the start, but getting easier and easier the longer you survive. My enjoyment of the digital version of Xenoshyft is made definitly harder because of the bugs (missclicks withstanding - and there has been a lot of those -, I just ran into yet another glitch: I discarded a weapon to activate an extra ability, but the game forgot about the ability altogether… which basically lead to me being overrun promptly). There seems to be a good game in there, in dire need of fixes.

3230

And that’s considering Neumann said it had gotten so much better since launch.

3231

I was talking about the game Merchant not having any IAP. The Egg game definitely has IAP.

3232

Merchant also has IAP.

FWIW, the Executive has no IAP.

3233

I finally did find the IAP in Merchant. It’s so unobtrusive that I overlooked it multiple times.

3234

Misguided:
Snakebird is on iOS now

Left_Empty

I liked the PC version, so I gave the iOS one a try out of curiosity: the control scheme, so brilliantly efficient on the computer, is a total nightmare of exhausting swipes and crazy button taps. At least the game is free to try so everybody can check for themselves if it works for them…

Seems great to me, maybe because it’s the only version I’ve played. It is a lot of swiping, but the controls are very accurate. Having to tap the back button twenty times could be more efficient for sure. Maybe having a save state you could snap back to or something.

3235

The Sentinels of the Multiverse iPad version is now universal (and there is a sale to go with it).
I was doubting the viability of the project, but it turns out to be so much better than I expected it to ever be. I find it absolutely playable - even if it involves a bit of swiping with some characters.
Between the flawless (as far as I can tell) implementation of the rules and the absolute stability that were already features of the big screen version, what an awesome job from the people at Handelabra.

3236

Recent stuff I tried roundup:

Imbroglio – Excellent weird turn based tactical thing. Worth the few bucks, still on my phone a month later.

Egg, Inc – Highly polished incremental. Kept it around a couple weeks, until the achievements crumbled in my mind like dry sand.

That merchant thing I forgot the name of – Wants to be incremental, short timers require active play. Constantly having my inventory full of junk, cycling from screen to screen to screen to screen then waiting 3 minutes. Deleted after a few days.

Guild Of Dungeoneering – Reply hazy, try again later.

3237

Imbroglio is also a very dangerous addiction if you are the sort of people to pay attention to scores and you got others around you that do too. It’s been the craziest hiscore chase I have had for the last few months here, with weekly back and forth amongst the characters.
It’s an amazing game, on a lot of levels.

3238

Was that Merchant … sounds like it to me.

I’ve been mostly playing Reigns on my iPad these days. It’s a fun diversion, and you can easily do it while also watching tv. The one single thing I hate most about it is that it won’t rotate to the orientation I want on my iPad… it only supports a landscape mode with the power button on the right (“landscape right”), and I like to hold it with the power button on the left (“landscape left”). With the power button on the right my cover hinge is on the bottom so the cover constantly tries to flop down. I don’t know why developers don’t just implement all rotation angles. :/

3239

Yeah, I fell off Merchant pretty hard. It’s very grindy, which would be fine if you weren’t grinding simply to do the same thing all over again. I was hoping for something more Recettear-like. And there doesn’t really seem to be any way/need to strategise around party composition and gear. It’s just a question of throwing levels at enemies.

3240

I had no idea this was coming to iOS! It dropped today.

Qt3 thread