Idle Exotics DevLog (October 2025)

Well, October didn't quite go according to plan. That's not to say that I didn't get anything done - things have moved along, just not as much as I would have hoped. I don't think the next patch is currently in any state to be released yet. So, no patch this time. Let's get into the updates.

I did solve a few known issues, but in this category, the most noticeable one would probably be a bug in the new collection menu. If you open the "stats" tab and then open the "achievements" tab, both menus will display on top of each other. I don't think anyone noticed - if they did, no one said anything. But, when the next patch goes live, that will be fixed.

As far as development on new features goes, a lot more analysis was required than I'd anticipated. I needed to nail down the prestige system upgrades - I needed to know what they were, where to put them on the prestige screen, what prerequisites were required to unlock each upgrade, and how much each would cost. This took much longer than I expected, and I had to use several methods of outlining this system before I was at least reasonably sure of how I wanted things to go. Of course, I know that this might need to change as time goes on, but part of this was also re-balancing a lot of existing numbers in the game.

When there were only 4 species to work with, setting them up the way I did was fine. But, as I followed the pattern I'd established for the wait time and a lot of the costs for things like upgrades, I found out pretty quickly that it was an unsustainable approach. By the time I got to the final species, the base wait time for automatic incubation without upgrades would be approximately 364 days. I know some people who play incremental games can be patient, but I think that might be crossing a line.

So, I took a detour to change that as well. Since the prestige system interacts with the existing upgrades system, I needed to have those mostly figured out before I could actually implement the prestige system as it was. Instead of setting an arbitrary number of upgrades that reduce wait time, I decided to have an exact number of upgrades on wait time before you hit a minimum - .1 seconds for incubation and intern clicks, and 5 seconds for breeding.

Breeding is a little different, since it's important to be able to change species before the bar completely fills up, or to have time to respond to hit the pause button if you want to change the breeding pair. Because I don't plan on there being a way to discard unwanted eggs, it's important to keep the player from loading the queue up with eggs that will be very unlikely to produce the combination they're looking for.

With wait times, costs, and sale price, I completely recalculated everything to be a lot more reasonable, while making sure each subsequent species is slightly more efficient than the last. So, hopefully, that should require minimal changes going forward.

Code-wise, the actual prestige screen is working. The prestige bonuses just aren't set up, though. That's part of the reason why I don't want to release this version. The New Game + functionality is going to be very important to all of this, because I'm sure the load game portion will be similar. I want to make sure that's working before I roll it out in a patch. I also need to add a pop-up that tells you what a perk does, and gives you the option to buy it or not, instead of buying the perk by just clicking the button.

I also did a quick and incomplete title screen, with a new game option and name entry. That was just a small task to clean up because 1) I'll need the title screen eventually, and 2) the name entry was important to the save file.

So, where does that leave us for November?

Well, first thing's first, the goal hasn't changed. The save/load game system is priority 1. But, to get there, there are other tasks that need to be completed. I think I've gotten a good priority list for that, so let's put it down in bullet points:

- Prestige System/New Game+
- Mobile Mode
- Email Menu

2 of those might need a little bit more explanation. I'm working on a mobile mode that is supposed to make the game more user-friendly for mobile players. If you've been following these blogs for a while, you might know that I put in code to detect the player's platform, mobile or desktop. And, unfortunately, due to how itch runs games in the browser, the platform seems to be set permanently to desktop. However, I still want to re-activate that code through an option in the options menu, instead of trying to detect the platform. That way, people can pick which works best for them.

The reason it's becoming a problem is because the prestige screen requires you to navigate through the screen, and there are just better methods for doing this depending on which platform you're on. So I want that option to be available before I fully put the system out there into the wild.

The email menu will hold the tutorials and general information about the game's plot. I was going to save it for last, but keeping track of which email has been received, and whether or not the player has read it, is going to be important for the save state. So, since I'm taking the month of November, I think it'll be worth my time to add it now before the save system is implemented.

It also ties into certain prestige bonuses, so if I'm implementing those, I should probably have this working too.

So, unless I finish my goal early, this is going to be another all-code month. But, thankfully, I think I'm done doing most of the analysis. So I'm hoping that this month will go a little more smoothly, and hopefully I'll be able to get the save system working this time.

If I do finish the save system before the end of November, there are still some other tasks to clean up before we're at 100% code completion.

For starters, I've decided on, generally, how many achievements I plan on implementing, but a lot of them are a little more elaborate than the ones currently in the game.

I also need to re-work the code that abbreviates large numbers. It works fine for the first few abbreviations, but after a certain point, there aren't really good abbreviations that fit neatly into 1 to 2 letters, so it results to some kind of notation I'm not familiar with.

I also think that I want to switch over how sprites are rendered. Right now, I'm just basically applying a color filter to black-and-white sprites, but I'm thinking that I might want to switch to palette swaps like how the backgrounds work on the new upgrade sprites. It gives me a lot more control over the look of each sprite.

There's also some quality of life changes, like adding a queue to see which breeding pair was used so you know what you're hatching and what's coming up. It's a feature I always intended to be there, I just haven't gotten around to implementing it yet.

I'm sure there's a few other tasks to clean up that I didn't think to put here, so I will try to do my best to update the project roadmap as things come to mind. I more use that as a "to-do list," so it should give you a good idea of what needs to be done at any given time. I don't always update it immediately, but you can still get a decent idea of what's going on by checking it:

https://rustyknightgames.itch.io/idle-exotics-alpha/devlog/966213/idle-exotics-d...