itch.io

Man,

I'd [REDACTED] a [REDACTED] to make two conveyors cross over each other.

"Will you embrace evil?"

No, I don't think I will. *Continues to play the game without it*

As it stands this game shouldn't be tagged "Idle"

if you let it run you either die in the dungeon and gain nothing or stare at a slot machine. Automatically pulling slots is overridden by increasing the payout.

There's no automation.

Review:

At first this game feels like low quality shlock. It is!

But it's GOOD low quality schlock.

The Dark Souls of gacha and surprise tech tree mechanics will have you flipping a table when an expensive "quest" or "upgrade" turns out to gimp you harder than a shotgun blast to the kneecaps, but you'll crawl through the pain until you find a doctor to strap that shotgun into your evacuated joint.

Then you'll really hit your stride a few hours later in New Game Plus, when you remember that the shotgun exists and make preparations to smash through the trap instead of play by its crippling rules.

4/5

My wife asked me why I was playing a game where Stephen Hawking in a tank-tread-laden wheelchair collects coins to the tune of midi running in the 90's. My son told her it was obvious why, duh.

Then the people with the key to the straight jacket told me that the voices aren't real.

Looks like OP (@Aidar-1) is new to Unity and was testing a prototype that builds for HTML5. I'd not give this a rating at all instead of giving it the worst rating. It's not intended to be truly playable but proof that OP can do the thing.

That said, OP (@Aidar-1) you shouldn't give your thing the Idle tag if it has no elements based on real-world time, even if it's just a prototype. That would be grounds for removing the project from itch.io under normal circumstances. I suggest pulling the Idle tag off until you've added something time-based.

I've been playing city idle for the last 3 days. Wonderful game so far! You work lightning quick, by the way. Just saw you add the artwork for the farms under the management research a few hours ago.

Not sure where to put this, but I do have a bug to report. With the most recent update when I scroll downward on the research and achievements pages the little icons become "unglued" from their locations. Here's two images for reference:

Ah man, I remember playing this one 8 years ago, on Kongregate.

An oldie but a goodie.

@grestgames I suspect you'll be re-uploading Factory Idle as well? Quite slow to unfold, the both of them (especially Factory Idle going from kilo>mega), but they unfold beautifully.

Always wondered how far you could stretch the concept. Given the order of magnitude progression and scale limitations due to the static number of spots to place elements I bet you could have done a single-caveman-to-space-civilization kind of epic.

"For example coal and nuclear plants will pollute a lot throughout the game so you want to avoid them"

I'd just like to point out that nuclear technology has evolved a bunch in the last 30 years, to the point where it is now less polluting than hydroelectric in the real world. Nuclear waste used to be a major problem in early reactor designs but modern breeder reactors - specifically thorium - can actually burn their own waste. I think the only major country that doesn't consider nuclear a green technology is Germany for political reasons.

The IRL problem with nuclear is that a clean nuclear reactor design costs a lot more to build than the other technologies, and takes much more time to get running. If you want to more realistically balance nuclear you should make it cost and produce 5 times as much and, importantly, add a lead time of 4 years over which the player is unable to destroy the building and the building produces nothing. It will also add an interesting mechanical hump that players would need to plan around if they choose to invest in nuclear: When and how much nuclear is worth building to reach the objective in the allotted time frame?

Just curious, what made you continue playing the game despite the slog you went through after the early game?

Due to the "Dimensional Remnants" teasing its future unlock on the right-hand side of the universe list I knew there was more content to discover but dreaded repeating a near-identical experience to the previous several hours multiple times to get there. I looked through the game images on the center-right side of the game's itch.io page to see what content I would be missing if I called it quits. The last image has some of the equations from "Modify formulas" and my mind flashed back to an old Flash-based incremental game that I did enjoy playing to completion: Learn to Fly 3.

In that game you were a penguin trying to reach the moon by building elaborate rocketry. It delivered new content through the core gameplay loop (which lasted just a minute or two) by having each iteration reward you with currency used to purchase better parts, which in turn interacted with the environment and the player differently. After the game was beaten there was a New-Game-Plus currency which, like your Dimensional Remnants, altered the equations. I had sunk nearly 100 hours into that game, well beyond its 10 hour single playthrough-time, because I enjoyed the core loop enough to do it one more time and see how much the gameplay had changed. I noticed that the obstacles which the player would struggle to avoid in their first playthrough became practically unnoticeable as you smashed through them with ease after a few wise New-Game-Plus purchases, and there was this feeling of having mastered or overcome a meta-challenge the game was posing: Trivialize the things that were an issue for you earlier. Another good example is in the first Dark Souls, where a demon is a major boss early on in the game, then a standard unit later in the game, and the player gets a feeling of having grown so strong that this previous titan is now beneath them.

Before shutting down Helixteus 3 for good I played just a little bit more into the second universe... just enough to see that, instead of delving into caves, I could simply use a pickaxe and dig deep enough to find a minimal amount of the material required to progress then purchase as much of that material as I needed using dollars - completely skipping over the cave mechanic like it was the obstacles in Learn to Fly 3. I looked back at the image of the equations that the Dimension Remnants could alter, realizing that even if the content was completely identical my power-level relative to the content could change rapidly, and there was a feeling of accomplishment after having "cleared" or "broken" what was a challenge in the previous iteration with ease. I might be able to "break" other mechanics using the equations, I thought, and that promise kept me going though the rest of the early game.

(Granted that promise was eventually rewarded, but I had no way of knowing whether it would be possible in the end-game back when I decided to continue soldiering on.)

After putting several dozen hours into this game I'd like to give my opinion on what makes this game enjoyable and how it can be improved.

The early game is amazing while you're first learning about what systems exist and you feel the scope stretch outwards as you grow. There is a curious "I wonder what gets unlocked next" which carries through your mind and keeps you going.

The early-mid game when you are nearing the end of your first universe and start bumping up against the limit of expansion is a bit of a let-down. There isn't much of a reason to scale into clusters and superclusters as the lack of any structures that can be built on those scales makes progress there tedious.

The mid game when you're first creating new universes but have not yet gotten enough dimension remnants to justify creating a new dimension can feel like a slog. The only time you get to experiment with new content is between universes, and that's several hours between. Even when you're able to alter fundamental properties you're really suffering for probe points and I can imagine some players feeling like it's not worth repeating until they unlock dimensions.

The mid-late game when you've finally gotten enough dimension remnants to create a new dimension can be heaps of fun. The players who stick with the game to this point and get the curtain pulled back on the math can see a distant future where they can break this game's mechanics over their knee. If they invest poorly and get stuck repeating the mid game, I can imagine a lot of people quitting here, but those who are able to find an expanding niche to exploit... oh-boy...

The post-late game, when you have invested hundreds of thousands of dimension remnants, are able to complete universes in less than an hour, and can reap exponential amounts of remnants every time you create a new dimension is when this game reaches 10/10 territory. Does having 10000+ universe value (after having reduced the cost of it to the floor) feel broken? Yes. But when you've spent days struggling against the grind the ability to drop so many dimension remnants that you can minimize the building cost down to almost nothing, or make the probe point cost of time speed insanely cheap (zoooom!) or pump pickaxe speed up so high that you can crack a planet in half within the first 5 minutes of a new universe is, in my opinion, where this game really hits its stride. Incremental games like these live or die on whether you're able and how enjoyable they are to break. And this game feels insanely fun to break.