First off, some basics about incremental games:
What is an Incremental Game?
It's a family of games that is focused on grinding idly. Usually, you grind in the form of clicking. After a while, some form of "factories" open up, where the manual grinding is replaced by time grinding. A factory will be the equivalent of X amount of manual actions over a certain amount of time. The "goal" of the game is usually to get as high of a level as you can and the relative worth of that level is usually decided by a combination of achievements and an online community that will post their high scores.
History of Incremental Games:
First two examples of this genre are probably Cow Clicker, a parody and commentary on Skinner Box games (such as Farmville) and Candy Box, a novel browser game that introduced a few components that became ubiquitous in the genre (such as gradual unlocking of game features). After these two came the first real Incremental Game, Cookie Clicker. This is the prototype of the genre, the Dune 2 or Quake that all other games are in essence trying to copy and improve upon. Note that Cookie Clicker offers very few novelties over Cow Clicker and Candy Box, it merely distilled the gameplay into something more streamlined.
Tropes:
- Clicking: You start off with having to repeatedly click something.
- Idling: The game keeps running when you shut it off, so in the morning, you will wake up and find that you made progress and earned currency, which you can now spend.
- Gradual unlock: Most games start off offering just the option to click something, it's only after a certain number is reached that it becomes apparent there's more to do. Mature incremental games take the trope very far, where certain core game features will only become visible after months of play.
- Reset: After reaching a seeming wall, where progress becomes slow, the player is offered to reset the game, in return for a small boost in speed. Eventually the game becomes slow again, but at a higher level than previously. Most progress is made this way.
- Reset currency: Reset boosts can be used as a currency to trade for greater boosts in some sort of upgrade shop.
- Cycle: Generally, you'll start to do cycles of resets every X amount of time. These cycles tend to be more or less the same length and this is where the games become repetitive again.
- Grind phase: You are asked to click something repeatedly, while a counter goes up and gradually, more game is revealed
- Idle phase: You are not clicking very much anymore, instead you are buying factories and factory upgrades, eventually resetting the game and starting over a few times
- Cycle phase: Grind phase takes seconds, buying all of the available factories takes minutes. None of these things matter much anymore, the real game has become deciding what to buy and how to optimize the reset currency upgrades
I've seen a lot of players quit in the grind phase. They think these games are about clicking, they are not. In fact, in most games, you stop clicking manually after a few hours and then never again.
Then there's the players that quit in the idle phase, they think the game is one big Skinner Box of ever-unlocking features. A new achievement every minute, but no thinking involved, you are being rewarded for staring at the screen and clicking the reward button every so often. The point is, this is a one time thing that lasts a few days or weeks, before the game settles into the cycle phase, which is for serious players, the actual start of the game.
Time as a currency
So what is the real game here? Where does game design come in? Well, at a core, the real currency here is time. If I play the game and unlock the first factory, I can now shut off the game and after a certain amount of time, when I return to the game, I will have completed it (completed as in reached the final achievement or reaching a high score that's in the same league as top players). Any strategy I use to reduce that time is when I'm actually playing the game. The games are usually exponential at every turn, so time to complete the game with just the first factory is measured in multiples of time taken from big bang to heat death of the universe (no hyperbole). If I get stuck in the idle phase (I'm trying to beat the game by repeatedly upgrading factories), we're probably down to decades. Once you reach the cycle phase, you are doing everything you can to reduce time in an optimal fashion. Completely optimal play will have you complete the final achievement in a few months, even slightly sub-optimal play adds weeks onto that. When players reach that final end game where everything slows down to a final crawl, developers usually release a new update with new material.
I'll go over and review Clicker Heroes specifically in my next post. I'm interested to hear which incremental games you have played, for how long and whether or not there's aspects to them that aren't Skinner Box (meaning, you have a strategy and aren't just idly clicking rewards every so often).
