Have there been any recent, good games of this genre?
It seems to have reached a peak with Cookie Clicker, Kittens Game, A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips, others I've tried have been poor in comparison.
It seems to have reached a peak with Cookie Clicker, Kittens Game, A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips, others I've tried have been poor in comparison.
Reactor Incremental takes the concepts from IndustrialCraft 2's nuclear reactors and pushes it far. I think it's the peak of the 2D geometry geometric growth optimizer genre.
https://www.kongregate.com/games/cael/reactor-incremental
I've wanted to make my own for a while but I haven't thought of a way to overcome the what I think is the main issue with the genre: waiting. Instead of running constantly a design could run instantly at the cost of some credits. The better the design the more investment credits you would get in return. Balance would have to heavily favor investment in design changes in between runs to avoid the game switching from an incremental idler to an incremental clicker. Perhaps the player would need to spend a type of credit that you only get from design modification to run a round.
Basically: I want a 2D geometry optimizer incremental game that isn't an idler or a clicker.
There is also a lot of room for creativity in this space. I think the ceiling can be really raised with things like multiblocks. Imagine something like a fusion reactor where you need confinement blocks and heating blocks. There is no prescriptive layout, just some rules needed for it to work and performance would depend on the layout.
It would be interesting to play Factorio on a very small map, with some mechanic where you get to duplicate items you’ve managed to produce - the idea being that you are continuously tearing down older parts of your factory so you can build new production lines, and always being constrained by space.
I couldn’t really get into Reactor Incremental in the time I had today, it took me too long to understand how to get going. I’ll give it another go this weekend.
Reactor games scratch a different itch. It's all about maximizing heat dissipation.
There's always the OG reactor planner (or just industrialcraft2 or gregtech if you have more time).
Wilmot's Warehouse perhaps.
Swarm Simulator ( https://www.swarmsim.com/ ) breed bugs, eat meat, consume universe
I'd also add Candy Box and Candy Box 2/to your list of early influential games.