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An incremental game, also known as a clicker game, tap game or idle game, is a video game whose gameplay consists of the player performing simple actions such as clicking on the screen repeatedly. This "grinding" earns the player in-game currency which can be used to increase the rate of currency acquisition. [1] In some games, even the clicking becomes unnecessary at some point, as the game plays itself, including in the player's absence. [2]
In an incremental game, players perform simple actions – usually clicking a button or object – which rewards the player with currency. The player may spend the currency to purchase items or abilities that allow the player to earn the currency faster or automatically, without needing to perform the initial action. [3] [4] A common theme is offering the player sources of income displayed as buildings such as factories or farms. These sources increase the currency production rate, but higher tier sources usually have an exponentially higher cost, so upgrading between tiers takes usually about the same time or even increasingly longer.
This mechanism offers a low-pressure experience (one does not have to be constantly playing), no loss condition, and constant growth and feedback, which is ideal for social or mobile play patterns, and often result in a very high player retention. [5] It often relies on exponential growth (or perhaps high-degree polynomial growth), which is countered by diminishing returns.
The rapid growth of cost, power and rewards is what makes incremental games fun and satisfying. They often incorporate very large numbers in their calculation of rewards/power, either using scientific notations (1x1034/10E 34), shorthands (1M, 1T, etc.), shorthand (1a, 1b, 1aa, 1ab), or special naming schemes for very large numbers (e.g. "duoquadragintillion"), which sometimes make recording high scores a problem for the server. [5]
This mechanism, in its core, involves a loop: the player logs in, spends all their currency, and logs out for a few hours. This is similar to (or even derived from) the "energy currency" concept in social games, where a player gets one energy per hour, for example. The difference being that in idle games this mechanism is natural, whereas in other social games, it is a construct intended to constrain the players.
This mechanism may be more palatable to core gamers who dislike social games. It resonates with real world dialog (e.g., "I'm out of cash; I need to come back when I have more.") and gives players more control over their decision.
This mechanism provides moments of joy spread out throughout the gameplay, [5] to counter boredom and grinding feeling. The mechanism could also be tied to the previous mechanism of giving more power/rewards upon achieving a goal or achievement, which lead to optimization decision and meaningful direction.
As a late-game or advanced mechanism, some games feature a reset-based system or "New Game Plus", a term coined by Chrono Trigger (1995), where the player resets the progress of their game and gains another form of currency (prestige). This new currency is normally used to gain global bonuses that do not disappear after a reset, allowing the player to go further than the previous reset, [2] or let the player replay the game with a greater power, often with several choices upon restart. This eventually would create an infinite game replays and various strategy of playing. It creates another layer of loop: players play from the start. Tap Titans (2014, by Game Hive) is a pioneer of the prestige mechanics in mobile games. [5]
This mechanism is mostly optional; player could choose to "prestige" once they feel they hit the wall and felt their progress is getting slower (compared to the cost). This mechanism gives players a sense of a rush of progress, which feels very rewarding. [5] Some games include multiple layers of prestiging, thereby making new content, meta-currencies or gameplay available. Realm Grinder by Divine Games (2015), introduced abdicating, reincarnating, and ascending.[ citation needed ]
Incremental games vary as to whether they have a victory condition: games like Cookie Clicker allow the players to play indefinitely, while games like Candy Box! or Universal Paperclips feature endings that can be reached after a certain amount of progress is made.[ citation needed ]
Pioneered by AdVenture Capitalist, developers may sell premium boost such as instant currency infusion (usually a percentage of current rate of income) or sometimes wrapped as a "time-warp" (instantly gain x-hours of future income), permanent boost multiplier that persist after each prestiging, instant prestige (claiming prestige without starting over), protection against negative events, gacha system (random draws of a character or a permanent bonus), and event currencies. [5]
On the other side, they may also deliver advertisements for players to receive minor rewards, such as short burst of cash, doubling offline earnings, small amount of premium currency, brief powerful boost/medium-length small boost, extra prestige points upon prestiging, relief of a negative status, etc. [5]
According to Anthony Pecorella in his GDC summit talks, [5] the creation of the genre was attributed to Progress Quest (2002) by Eric Fredriksen, which is a parody of the stat and auto-attack systems in MMORPGs. He argued that the gaming website Kongregate was an early breeding ground for the genre, as some people just wanted to use the chat feature rather than actively play a game. The first game of the genre on Kongregate was aptly titled Kongregate Chat (July 24, 2007, by John Cooney), [6] where the game ran by itself, and the players could just talk in the chat section of the game. One of the first visual idle games ("rudimentary RPGs" according to Pecorella) was Ayumilove's HackerStory v1 (2008, by Ayumilove),[ citation needed ] which was a parody of bot grinding in a Maple Story game, a famous MMORPG from Korea at that time.
The early pioneers of idle games also saw some games parodying the genre, such as Anti-Idle (2009, by tukkun) [5] which has elements of both active and idle games. The game was extremely complicated, content-rich, and constantly updated, and it helped popularize the genre.[ citation needed ] An idle game in Facebook platform, called Cow Clicker (2010, by Ian Bogost), which according to the author is, "a satire and playable theory of social games circa that era , ... Facebook games distilled to their essence.", was the first to receive mainstream media attention. [7] Another parody of idle games (and parody of capitalism) called AdVenture Capitalist (2015, by Cody Vigue / Hyper Hippo Games) also saw success as a browser game and was subsequently made available in many platforms. It was one of the first games to implement monetization, as well as offline earning which calculates the progress of a player during the time they are offline, unlike previous browser-based idle games which only run when open in a browser window.
Some idle games did not follow the infinite ending, and instead opt for finite ending, more like puzzle-like and exploration based, for example A Dark Room (2013, by Doublespeak Games), and Candy Box! (2013, by aniwey).[ citation needed ]
Incremental games gained popularity in 2013 after the success of Cookie Clicker, [3] although earlier games such as Cow Clicker and Candy Box! were based on the same principles. Make It Rain (2014, by Space Inch) was the first major mobile idle game success, although the idle elements in the game were heavily limited, requiring check-ins to progress. [5] In 2015, the gaming press observed such games proliferating on the Steam distribution platform with titles such as Clicker Heroes (2014, by Playsaurus). [8]
Other idle games that have become classic includes Sandcastle Builder (2013, by Eternal Density) [9] which was based on the xkcd comic 1190: Time, Shark Game (2014, by Cirr), [10] Crank (by FaeDine), [11] and Kittens Game (2014, by Bloodrizer) [12]
During the evolution of the genre, monetization (through ads or other venues), premium contents, and other game mechanics are slowly being added in.
Nathan Grayson of Kotaku attributed the popularity of idle games to their ability to provide unchallenging distractions that fit easily into a person's daily routine, while using themes and aesthetics of more sophisticated games so as to be appealing to a "core gamer" audience. Grayson also noted that the genre allowed for a wide variety of game mechanics and themes, such as fantasy, sci-fi and erotica, to provide sufficient perceived depth to avoid boring players. [13]
IGN's Justin Davis describes the genre as being tuned for a never-ending sense of escalation, as expensive upgrades and items rapidly become available, only to become trivial and replaced by more. This leads to the player feeling powerful and weak at the same time in pursuit of exponential progress. [14]
Julien "Orteil" Thiennot (creator of games such as Cookie Clicker) described his own works as "non-games". [15] In early 2014, Orteil released an early version of Idle Game Maker, a tool allowing customized idle games to be made without coding knowledge. [16]
Commenting on the parodic nature of the genre, Pecorella commented that "[idle games is] a genre that's almost doesn't want to exist; it's a joke, but despite itself, keeps being really successful", [5] and on popular idle-games in general, "a lot of these are just glorified spreadsheet with some really neat mechanics in it." [5]
The idle games genre has in many ways influenced other genres. Pecorella (2015) identified several genres that includes idle elements in their mechanics: [5]
Shooting games, RPGs, and other genres also starts to introduce short prestige loop or mini idle games within, while some introduces offline progress to entice players to return, allowing for genre blends, from idle rhythm games to RPGs, to puzzle and dating sims. [17]
An auto clicker is automation software or a macro that is generally used to automate the clicking (or tapping) process in idle games. A number of idle games employ clicking as a method to gain currency while active (to complement the idle element), and players may sometimes employ an auto clicker to automate this part, thus getting resources/currency much faster. Pecorella, in his 2016 GDC summit talk, argued that auto clickers are considered necessary by any "serious" idle game players, and that it's not cheating, but rather an exploration of an error in design. [18] Auto clickers are now widely used in cryptocurrency games, where users are meant to tap an interface repeatedly in order to earn cryptocurrency tokens. The auto clickers are in the form of bots that the users acquire to click the interface even when they are offline. Some practical cryptocurrency projects include meme coin projects, TapSwap, and Notcoin.
A zero-player game or no-player game is a simulation game that has no sentient players.
Progress Quest is a video game developed by Eric Fredricksen as a parody of EverQuest and other massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It is loosely considered a zero-player game, in the sense that once the player has set up their artificial character, there is no user interaction at all; the game "plays" itself, with the human player as spectator. The game's source code was released in 2011.
In video game culture, grinding is the act of repeating an action or set of actions, to achieve a desired result at a level of certain difficulty, typically for an extended period of time. Grinding may be done to earn experience points, in-game loot and currency, or to improve a character's stats. Grinding is commonly performed in MMORPGs.
Kongregate is an American web gaming portal and video game publisher. Its website features over 124,000 online games and 30+ mobile games available to the public. The company also publishes games for PC, mobile, and home consoles. It was purchased by GameStop Corporation in 2010 before being acquired by Modern Times Group MT AB in 2017.
A hidden object game, also called hidden picture or hidden object puzzle adventure (HOPA), is a subgenre of puzzle video games in which the player must find items from a list that are hidden within a scene. Hidden object games are a popular trend in casual gaming. Time-limited trial versions of these games are usually available for download, although many are free to download on app stores. They primarily make money through in-app purchases and ads. Popular themes include detective crime stories, adventure, gothic romance, and mystery.
Artix Entertainment, LLC is an independent video game developer and publisher founded by Adam Bohn in October 2002. It is best known for creating browser-based role-playing video games—including AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, and AdventureQuest Worlds—using Adobe Flash. Following the end of life of Adobe Flash Player in 2021, Artix developed a standalone launcher for personal computers that includes many of the company's popular Flash-based games, most of which continue to receive content updates.
Cow Clicker is an incremental social network game on Facebook developed by video game researcher Ian Bogost. The game serves as a deconstructive satire of social games. The goal of the game is to earn "clicks" by clicking on a sprite of a cow every six hours. The addition of friends' cows to the player's pasture allows the user to also receive "clicks" whenever the player's cow is clicked. A premium currency known as "Mooney" allows the user to purchase different cow designs and skip the six-hour interval between clicks.
Dragon Age Legends was a 2011 freemium Flash game developed by EA2D and published by Electronic Arts (EA) for Facebook and Google+. Set in the Dragon Age universe, Legends was developed as the successor to the 2009 Flash-based browser game Dragon Age Journeys and served as a tie-in to the 2011 main series game Dragon Age II. Released on March 16, 2011, for Facebook and August 11, 2011, for Google+, Dragon Age Legends generated significant media coverage and its promotional campaign attracted substantial "likes" on social media, but the game itself was ultimately not a commercial success. By June 18, 2012, the servers for Legends were decommissioned by EA, although an altered version of the game was made available as a free download for offline play.
Candy Box! is an incremental online text-based role-playing game that runs in web browser. It was developed by a 19-year-old French student using the pseudonym "aniwey" and released in April 2013. Candy Box! uses ASCII art for the visuals.
Cookie Clicker is a 2013 incremental game created by French programmer Julien "Orteil" Thiennot. The user initially clicks on a big cookie on the screen, earning a single cookie per click. They can then use their earned cookies to purchase assets such as "buildings" that automatically produce cookies, as well as upgrades which can improve the efficiency of clicks and buildings. There are also many other mechanics that allow the user to earn cookies in a variety of different ways. The game lacks a conventional ending.
Clicker Heroes is an idle game that was developed by American independent studio Playsaurus. It was originally released for browsers in 2014, for mobile devices in 2015, and for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles in 2017. The game is a spinoff of Playsaurus's earlier game Cloudstone, from which it uses many graphic elements.
AdVenture Capitalist is a free-to-play incremental video game developed and published by Hyper Hippo Productions. It was first released for browsers and Android in 2014, for iOS, Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in 2015, and for PlayStation 4 in 2016. AdVenture Capitalist allows players to live like a capitalist and invest funds into certain products to generate revenue, by starting out with a single lemonade stand. The more revenue generated, the higher the player's cash is. A player can receive an angel bonus when resetting their progress, which provides a boost in all products' revenue for the next progress timeline. New areas of business have been added since the game's release, allowing the purchase of property on the Moon and Mars. A spin-off, AdVenture Communist, was released on Steam as early access on August 10, 2016, with the completed game being released on iOS and Android on November 16, 2017.
Egg, Inc is an idle clicker game developed and published by American studio Auxbrain Inc on Android and iOS devices. The game takes place in a future in which eggs unlock the secrets of the universe. The main objective in the game is to make the most profitable egg farm.
A gacha game is a video game that implements the gachapon machine style mechanics. Similar to loot boxes, gacha games entice players to spend in-game currency to receive a random in-game item. Some in-game currency generally can be gained through game play, and some by purchasing it from the game publisher using real-world funds.
An auto battler, also known as auto chess, is a subgenre of strategy video games that typically feature chess-like elements where players place characters on a grid-shaped battlefield during a preparation phase, who then fight the opposing team's characters without any further direct input from the player. The genre was popularized by Dota Auto Chess in early 2019 and saw other games in the genre released soon after by more established studios, such as Teamfight Tactics, Dota Underlords, and Hearthstone's Battlegrounds.
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a 2018 incremental game based on Dungeons & Dragons for Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Nintendo Switch.
Cell to Singularity is a freemium incremental game developed and published by Computer Lunch. An exploration of evolution, naturalism, and civilization, the game uses idle mechanics to help players learn about science and history.
MultiVersus (MVS) is a free-to-play crossover fighting game developed by Player First Games and published by Warner Bros. Games for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. A platform fighter, the game features content from Warner Bros. franchises, including Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, Game of Thrones, the DC Universe, and Cartoon Network franchises. Officially announced in November 2021 following online rumors and leaks, early access and open beta versions of the game ran from July 2022 to June 2023. The game was fully released on May 28, 2024.
A Soulslike is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high difficulty level and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. It had its origin in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy by FromSoftware, the themes and mechanics of which directly inspired several other games. The "Soulslike" name has been adopted by a number of critics and developers. However, there have also been questions whether it is a true genre or a collection of shared mechanics. A subset of these games, named Soulsborne, refer to most of the Soulslike games developed by FromSoftware.
You can also "ascend" to essentially start over, but you'll unlock more special powers in the process.
Sandcastle Builder is one of the most compelling, rewarding, and unique video games I've ever experienced. It is very close to earning a spot on my favorite games of all time short list.
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