Posted June 03, 2024 by TinyTakinTeller
Contents
...and ask the question: How are good proper indie games made?
Currently, I am working on A Dark Forest - a prototype incremental game inspired by "a dark room".
What I've realized in the past five weeks, is that I made some deadly sins along the way...
I have started working on this project with no plan in mind - the scope of the project was never defined.
Every week I am winging it and just developing random parts.
This is fine at the start as I'm still pretty new to game development and learning, but in long term it is not efficient and will lead to bad consequences...
The following video made me reflect on these things.
A picture tells a thousand words...
When developing anything, crucial information is knowing what defines the genre and the standards.
A useful read for the classic incremental games: Math of Idle Games.
As I'm trying to prototype an incremental game, it is time I taste some examples in this genre. I went out and played some incremental games to get a feel of what makes them good.
Here are some interesting game mechanics I found.
Adding max capacity to encourage resource spending and avoid unimaginable numbers seems to be a good thing that was done well by Kittens Game & Trimps.
Another thing done well by both Kittens Game & Trimps is a time display of how long will it take to unlock the highlighted upgrade, a neat quality of life feature.
Interesting mechanic done by Trimps is that it simulates the time spent away when you come back as if you were here all the time. This blends really well with it's idle battle system.
The best prestige system I have seen was done by Exponential Idle, a godly recursion of prestige on top of prestige mechanics ...
The Exponential Idle also implements a thematic story that makes you curious and want to taste more.
A game that seems to never run out of content is NGU Idle. Despite having paint graphics, it is worse than a crack addiction, but in a good way. (Don't do drugs.)
The NGU Idle and most of the games so far have a very basic graphics design, which lets the developers invest more time into new features. The player base of these games seems to enjoy the pure content and not mind the minimalistic looks of the game.
A small but very nice thing that MinuteQuest does is the auto-leveling system that distributes your points upon level up.
A similar thing is present in Flame Forged where you can auto-assign population based on your current ratio of assigments.
What makes MinuteQuest more special, is the sheer amount of different items and their combinations that you can apply to your character, giving you many unique abilities and builds. This has spawned dedicated guides and articles exploring optimal builds and strategies among the player base.
For example, you can specialize your gear for XP farming or Gold farming or Boss slaying, ...
Incremental games come in shapes of idle's and clicker's. Striking a perfect balance between both playstyles makes Clicker Heroes a cult classic.
Visually changing environment based on your progress is a neat gift Boba rewards you with.
Adding even more addiction to an already addicting genre... seems foolproof? Say hello to 100% !
Some more great incremental's that I still want to mention:
It seems IncrementalDB has an active community of incremental game lovers.
As soon as my game was added there, it got a bunch of new visitors!
I guess we will see... next week.
Will I learn from my mistakes, or... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Content
Balance
Quality Of Life
Visual
Bug Fixes
Technical