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KaBob799 | | 06/21/18 03:44 am - Last edited 06/22/18 05:27 am by KaBob799 | Filter |
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Dual Master
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Posts: 1027
| Recently, I've become inspired to create idle games. If you don't know what an idle game is, the two I've played the most are Cookie Clicker and Realm Grinder. The games can pretty much be boiled down to "make the number(s) bigger, the game" but I've found that they can pretty fun and addicting and want to try my own hand at them. To this end, I am working on a variety of idle game ideas and I hope to release more than one this year. I plan on making a generic base engine which I can then customize into unique idle games. The games I am currently planning are as follows:
Proti Corp
This is what inspired everything, based off a tech demo I made called Proti Clicker it was originally just a cookie clicker clone. Since playing Realm Grinder and Spaceplan though, I've realized the vast potential of idle games and completely reinvented the idea behind the game. At it's core, it will share some of it's basic progression mechanics with Realm Grinder but it will feature new ideas pulled from my ideas of integrating the Pyco Mundi world with a clicker.
OrbScape Adventures
This is just a working title but essentially this will be my attempt to take the idea of RuneScape and merge it with an idle game. Jagex already tried this themselves but they made the mistake of having the company behind AdVenture Capitalist (a popular idle game, though it's the worst of the 4 I've played by far) make it so it sucked and then they gave up and turned the servers off which despite it being a single player game killed it forever.
Game Plague
I don't have a name for this clicker yet but I do have the basic game idea. Instead of working towards infinite numbers, you'd be working towards a set goal. This goal would be the worlds population, which you are trying to get 100% addicted to a game. It would take many attempts to get enough funding to design a game that good though, so you'd keep starting over with new ones that would get more and more players. There'd also be the potential for synergies, where progress in my other idle games may unlock tiny bonuses within this one. I call this idea "Scoping out the competition" I'm a bit undecided on the end game for this one, whether it would just end once you hit 100% or if it would keep going in some other way.
Idle Forums
An idle game based around running a forum, may or may not include gameplay that actually benefits from being active on this forum. This idea isn't very fleshed out, it just seems like something I could do interesting things with.
The Daily Grind
This idea is extremely unfleshed out but I'd love to make a game that actually benefits from only being played maybe 5 minutes a day. A lot of idle games, despite the genres name, actually motivate you to be very active in your play and I'd like to make a game that avoids that entirely by rewarding you for not playing too much. The big key to the game would probably be that you'd want to avoid missing days if at all possible.
So that's the main ideas I've currently got floating around in my head. In terms of monetization, I really don't want to do microtransactions like Realm Grinder or AdVenture Capitalist but I definitely also don't see myself charging money for these. If nothing else, because you can't really put a webpage on steam. My hope is that ads could be enough, potentially combined with small bonuses for people with Pyco Donation points (will be renamed in the future, I'm getting rid of the paypal donation button and replacing it with a patreon). The main thing though is that I never plan to release a game with unlimited microtransactions like you see in mobile games these days. As financially nice as it would be to have rich people repeatedly pay $80 for packs of "Proti Gems" or something, it's just plain evil.
One of the other big things that affects idle games is autoclickers, I think I'll not try too hard to fight them but I will employ 2 things to prevent them from being too powerful. First, I'll limit the amount of clicks per second to something like 30 but then I'll also limit the clicks per hour to something like 50,000 (which averages out to 13.8 clicks per second). These are just initial concepts on the numbers, in-game testing will potentially find a lower limit that I can enable.
So now you know the basic plan, I'll be posting new topics in this section in the near future once I have more to discuss or hopefully have an alpha/beta in need of testing.
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KaBob799 | |
Group: Admin
| I've never really made any real progress on these projects in the past 5 years but they do pop into my mind every once in a while. It's just the long task of building the basic engine that's stopping me. Plus it would be easy to make in Game Maker but I want to make it in HTML5 for easy phone support so that's been a big hurdle in getting the motivation to start. Plus I kind of burned out on Cookie Clicker and Realm Grinder so idle games haven't been as much on my mind recently.
All of that said, reading through this topic again today I think the old The Daily Grind idea is exactly the kind of small web game project that I've been desperately needing over the past year. I just didn't remember coming up with it. The big question now is theming... originally I had intended it to just be its own thing but I think perhaps it could be set in the Pyco Mundi universe. I'll be putting more thought into this idea now and hopefully start development on it soon. |
The Idle Empire
