Re: what exactly are incremental games?
Hi,
An incremental game primarily has the simple feature of something, well, increasing, and then upgrading.
It's a bit more complex though.
If you've played through A Dark Room, you might know about some of these complexities. If not, whether that's due to you not having an iPhone or some other reason, well, suffice it to say I don't want to spoil it here. What I can just say is that A Dark Room can only be experienced once in it's purest state: that is: do not read spoilers, go in, and come out the other side. Even if you were to replay, you would not get the same experience purely because your mind already knows how it works.
Some other incremental games just work because they play out a premise to it's natural conclusion, or sometimes take it to crazy heights.
I haven't done this yet, so I might as well put this here, but I had an idea for an incremental game in the style of clickpocalypse whereby it's about battling enemies mostly automaticly. It'd be great if this could work in audio where you could hear things. You'd start out with a sword or dagger or something and maybe some basic rats, perhaps the odd goblin. But then you'd rescue someone and that person might have a bow, and then could fire that bow at enemies, but that bowman might be slower than the sword swinging person but could hit further. Of course different enemies might start showing up. You might be in a forest with some animals. Or you might find a castle with orcs. Of course, this is fantasy, so you will probably eventually find a dragon. As you progress, you could upgrade things as you see fit: do you upgrade the damage of the sword person, or do you upgrade their hitting speed, do you upgrade the bow person's firing speed? Of course later on you might unlock a mage who can do spells and such. But do you? Or do you just have your two sword and bowman/archer double team, going on some adventure? Or do you try to gather an army who will make good at ridding the land of evil? Or heck, do you just go it alone, with an upgraded sword of damaging doom and health, ready to battle that dragon?
There could have, even, a bit more going on. You might unlock towns which let you go on quests. What if you do a game prestige (a.k.a reset perhaps with perks depending on how far you got), and then if you are in a town's tavern, you can view past runs in the style of a sarga. The legends continue. You might end up, later on, perhaps after unlocking a few characters and battling your way through several locations, perhaps doing something crazy: finding a time machine. Now, do you continue looking for that dragon, or do you go for the time machine and change your goal entirely? Is it time to explore time? This is where incrementals come into their own. What started out as a simple fantasy adventure, has now changed. Imagine the line of text that, if a person didn't know what was coming, suddenly discovered. Now for us, if someone were to code this in, we'd know what's coming but we might not know, exactly, how. I'd love if someone went this far and coded something.
Perhaps that time machine could let you find out about that world's lore a bit more in the past, but how would you get there? Do you use those crystals you found to help upgrade your weapons, or do you incert some of your crystals into the machine? But then perhaps it could go crazier: what if you could go back to the age of the dinosaurs, or forward to our time with modern weaponry and modern enemies, and perhaps, beyond, to the future and space travel, and then being able to jump back and fourth between those times? But what happens then? Where in the fantasy time you might find gold, perhaps in the dinosaur time you could find different loot. Maybe eggs? WHat would you do with those? In our time you might find dollars. Fuel, but could that fuel be used to power a car you just bought, or do you use it for a plane, or do you power that spaceship in the future? This is where complexity comes in, and this is the joy of incremental games. What started out as a fantasy adventure, could be a fantasy adventure as you could stay in your normal time of the game. Or, you could start to explore time. So, are you going through history? Are you going on an adventure with dinos? What happens if you end up going through time, and bringing a t-rex as a companion, and going to the zone where the dragon is? What happens then? What happens if you take the t-rex to the future and put it on a space ship? You might land on a planet where the inhabitants might be able to just penetrate the t-rex's rmour. But then, you'd just upgrade him and come back later. Or you'd find something else that could help you stop those inhabitants.
Or you might not land on a planet at all. That space ship you found could be a whole new way to play. Time to just have a life among the stars. Blast some ships, or maybe just upgrade and trade with them. Maybe you just want to see how far you could fly. What you might be realizing here, is I'm describing what seems like a mishmash of games, and that's exactly what it is. I'll say it again, what started out as a fantasy adventure has now completely changed. IT can either stay changed, or you can do whatever. Do you reset with a perk that not only gives you upgrades in the fantasy areas and lets you run through quicker, but perhaps a perk that lets you remember your ancestor's locations (i.e: previous travel points)? Does your ancestor leave a map to that time machine so you can go there quicker, or do you perhaps get a supply of crystals so that when you find the machine, you won't have to spend as much time gathering crystals to power it? Or do you become a fantasy explorer again, using your crystals to upgrade your weapons and completely ignore the time machine?
That's the thing. The goal is yours as a player, and it's up to you as a developer to come up with what you might want an incremental to be. Do you want something complex with a genre mishmash like I described, or do you want to make something where players can live out a bite-sized adventure that potentially never ends but always has mechanics like getting to a certain point where you'd prestige and get more bonuses?
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