I heard you like incremental games...
April 16, 2015 12:15 PM   Subscribe

 
The player just sits around doing nothing while making money. Which is exactly what the game's developer is now doing! How meta.

The reviewer doesn't mention it, but there's a feature where if you watch a thirty second ad you can get double productivity for four hours. Of course, there's no point in not doing it - double productivity is a big deal! So you actually ask to watch an advertisement, then can't really ignore it because, what, are you going to go do something else for thirty seconds? It's pretty effective.
posted by papayaninja at 12:23 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


This Kongregate game requires the Unity3D plugin. It is free, and takes only a few minutes to install.

I don't know how many hours of my life this one little sentence has saved me, but it's enough that I continue to pass on installing it.
posted by phunniemee at 12:24 PM on April 16, 2015 [33 favorites]


This Kongregate game requires the Unity3D plugin. It is free, and takes only a few minutes to install.

Heads up: chrome dropped support for the Unity3D plugin this week (along with Java and the rest of NPAPI), so if you install it use Firefox. (Thankfully Unity3d is going to webGL for it's webplayer)
posted by hellojed at 12:42 PM on April 16, 2015


No thanks. I have yet to forgive Metafilter for getting me into Economies of Scale back in 2012.
posted by Iridic at 12:44 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


AdCap is okay but it struggles with balance -- for instance, the new Moon location is horribly tilted in favor of two commodity types and there are gigantic plateaus in which you do nothing but grind to a point and reset.

Also, if you try it on Chrome and it fails to load, dig around in the deep Chrome settings and reenable NPAPI.
posted by delfin at 12:50 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I have yet to forgive Metafilter for getting me into Economies of Scale back in 2012.

I just opened that one back up a few weeks ago! I'm making rubber duckies, quality 0!
posted by mittens at 12:54 PM on April 16, 2015


Oh wow, that's still going? I remember when a bunch of SA goons exploited the (pretty broken) economy mechanics and then the developer just started randomly taking things away and giving things to players and it pretty quickly became unfun. Has he fixed any of it?
posted by backseatpilot at 12:56 PM on April 16, 2015


Before I realized this post was about a game, the FPP text led me to think of something like Erowid Recruiter (previously).
posted by exogenous at 12:59 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I have been playing this and Clicker Heroes pretty much every day for the last six months. I'm doing it right now in the other tabs. And no, AdCap hasn't become any more fun, probably less with the stupid moon thing actually, but apparently I'm a total sucker and have nothing better going on in my life right now. I haven't watched any ads or paid any money to anyone though, so I guess that's a start.
posted by shelleycat at 1:10 PM on April 16, 2015


I've got this on my phone & am a quattuorquadragintillionaire, so I've got that going for me. I have no idea what the actual appeal of this game is, and yet every once in a while I'll check on it, watch the numbers go up, and buy a few donut shops or sacrifice some angels.
posted by zempf at 1:22 PM on April 16, 2015


papaya- I think the ad for speedup is on mobile only. Or at least hidden by my adblock.
posted by Jacen at 1:35 PM on April 16, 2015


I've been playing this game on Kongregate for quite some time.

I've considered creating my own idle game—it's not hard, and it's a good excuse to play around with certain JavaScript libraries that I want to learn better. But I have actual moral reservations about putting another one of these things out into the world: they really are little more than Skinner boxes, and I can't say that my life is better for having played so many of them.

A few years ago, I played some kind of web-based RPG which resembled an Excel spreadsheet. It was an RPG stripped of all narrative and imagery: just tables of numbers and buttons. As you clicked on buttons, numbers would respond, and part of the "game" was figuring out how everything interrelated. I think you could unlock new sections of the "spreadsheet" as you progressed. Thanks to incredibly minimalist whiffs of suggestion, you'd start thinking of these numbers over here as "monsters", or those numbers over there as "armor class", or what-have-you. Does anyone remember what that was? I probably saw it here.

The point is, that game is similar to incremental games, in that it strips gaming down to a skeletal, minimalist core. Yet it's a qualitatively different kind of game: it models the same kinds of complex systems that you see in "real" games, just with a radically simplified interface. Whereas incremental games are just...compulsive.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:36 PM on April 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


I've been playing AdCap for a while, and the new Moon area blows. I'm straight up cheating at it and it still blows. Literally using CheatEngine to cheat my way to a more fun experience and the plateaus are so large that even with a speed hack it still feels slow.

Although I'm still playing it, so take from that what you will.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 1:39 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks to incredibly minimalist whiffs of suggestion, you'd start thinking of these numbers over here as "monsters", or those numbers over there as "armor class", or what-have-you. Does anyone remember what that was? I probably saw it here.

Nethack?
posted by sebastienbailard at 1:48 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Parameters by NEKOGAMES.
posted by breath at 1:51 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


> ... dig around in the deep Chrome settings and reenable NPAPI.

Enabled!

(Oh, you said NPAPI, not Big Papi.)
posted by benito.strauss at 2:13 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


No thanks. I have yet to forgive Metafilter for getting me into Economies of Scale back in 2012.

If it's any comfort, I haven't really forgiven myself for that post or the months I spent with it either.

Oh wow, that's still going?

Apparently! I just logged back in for the first time in at least a couple years, and J. Quaff Arabica is still sitting there as a disinvested coffee business retiree, just sitting on his $1.22 billion in cash.
posted by cortex at 2:38 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think the moment Clicker Heroes bugged out on me and deleted my save is the moment I was forever freed from incremental games. Unfortunately I have no low-maintenance skinner box replacement, leaving a skinner box-shaped hole in my life.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:55 PM on April 16, 2015


Minecraft Clicker has some interesting ideas but will probably vanish as soon as Microsoft notices it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:29 PM on April 16, 2015


SwarmSim has been stealing my life force for a while. I am earning 492.833 quinquadecillion meat per second, which are produced by my 3.86288 quattuordecillion drones which are spawned by my 55.3093 undecillion queens.

Do I know how big those numbers are?? Not really! But they sure sound big!
posted by BungaDunga at 3:33 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I dunno man I'm already playing this incremental where I produce lazy one-liners and generic Marxist platitudes in order to watch a counter labeled "favorites" slowly tick upwards, and frankly even that is taking up way too much of my time.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:18 PM on April 16, 2015 [22 favorites]


come on tick up dammit that was a good one...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:22 PM on April 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


I heard they're making an extension, AdVenture Capitalist: 2008, where you wake up one morning and your income is chopped to a fourth what it was, and then immediately restored if you buy the Too Big To Fail upgrade.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 4:40 PM on April 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


we knocked the server offline: (How I lost My Soul )Error 503 Service Unavailable
posted by pjmoy at 5:13 PM on April 16, 2015


Heads up: chrome dropped support for the Unity3D plugin this week (along with Java and the rest of NPAPI)

Chrome doing this caused me a gigantic headache at work yesterday.

fuck you google
posted by emptythought at 8:02 PM on April 16, 2015


Why am I playing this. It's an idle game like every other idle game I've ever played. It's flashier than most but I think it's maybe a little less charming than Cookie Clicker; 40s-clipart styled Happy White Guys lost their subtle allure for me about twenty years back.

The in-app purchases are a nice touch, and I'm surprised nobody's done it yet.

And oh man the review sounds familiar. It kinda sounds like this is the first idle incrementor this reviewer's played, and captures that fucked-up little OCD hook these games have.
posted by egypturnash at 8:49 PM on April 16, 2015


Okay there are no more partially-filled orange bars beneath any items now. I can quit playing this thing forever; my OCD has been satisfied.
posted by egypturnash at 11:11 PM on April 16, 2015


I check in on swarmsim every week or so.

Maybe someone can answer me this: It's not worth it to buy the "twin" upgrades once you're no longer buying the creature directly, eh? "Faster" is obviously worthwhile, but, for example, I have 30 drone "twin" upgrades lying around, but I don't buy anything that far down the chain because there's more bang for the buck upstairs, as it were.
posted by maxwelton at 11:50 PM on April 16, 2015


Maybe someone can answer me this: It's not worth it to buy the "twin" upgrades once you're no longer buying the creature directly, eh? "Faster" is obviously worthwhile, but, for example, I have 30 drone "twin" upgrades lying around, but I don't buy anything that far down the chain because there's more bang for the buck upstairs, as it were.

Almost certainly not worth it after a certain point. Right now I have 169 unpurchased twin upgrades for my drones, which is a ton, but I already own 16 unseptuagintillion (which I've just looked up and is 10^216) drones and the most I can purchase given my larvae is an undecillion, which is just 10^36, so that math is never, ever going to work out. I just pay attention to the top end of the scale and whatever of the Faster upgrades won't actually cut into my overall production.

Also, man, the numbers in Swarmsim are huge. Is there anything that a septuagintillion could even be used to measure?
posted by Copronymus at 12:40 PM on April 17, 2015


The mass of the observed universe, excluding dark matter, is ~ 10^53 kg.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:48 PM on April 17, 2015


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