Hacker News Reader

Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

RIP to the productivity all the people discovering this for the first time today.

I played it first a few years ago and was totally engrossed. A few months ago, I remembered it and thought "well maybe I'll find it again and play for a few minutes"... and then I did nothing else for the rest of the day.

It has excellent replay value.

It has basically no replay value, compared to games like Kittens or Evolve. Every playthrough is basically the same. There are no substantially different strategies, and only at the very end is there a single decision that determines which of two endings (and fairly simple boosts) you get. After one playthrough you have seen 99.9% of the content, after two you have seen 100%

The writing and the story is pretty damn good though.

The new version has a multiverse map you have to traverse through to collect some really sick upgrades

It's an absolute grind, but once you pick up some 500% productivity multipliers it gets much easier

Oh shit. Gotta nope out of that as long as I'm still playing Evolve.

It sucked up several weeks of my time. Got about halfway through the map before my save file got corrupted.

Honestly kinda ruined it, I don't know if I can play the game again knowing I lost a couple hundred hours of progress

Yet somehow over the last so many years I have played this game 3 or 4 times and had fun each time.

It has non traditional replay value, because you are absolutely correct in your detailing of playthrough similarity, yet it appears few if any of us are able to ignore its siren song.

If anybody needs links to Evolve & Kittens, here you go:

- Kittens: https://kittensgame.com/web/

- Evolve: https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/

This is an entire genre now called clicker games. For whatever reason, people are entranced by watching numbers get bigger. It's the same thing with RPGs.

IMO, it's not just the numbers. It's the constant strategizing to make the numbers go bigger, and the changing strategy as the game progresses.

There are plenty of really crappy clickers that don't do anything for me. And there are some that are too complex to be really fun (Kittens), but the ones in the middle, like this one, really feel good.

Crank is a pretty similar-feeling one imo, if you're looking for your next fix :) It is unfortunately not mobile friendly (or even functional) though.

https://faedine.com/games/crank/b39/

Loved that one enough to play it twice, after a while. Thanks for the reminder!

I've had to institute a blanket "no clicker game" policy for myself because I find them way too addicting. The frustrating thing about most (but not all) clicker games is that for me, they usually don't even feel good (e.g., relaxing, mentally stimulating, satisfying). They just make me feel like I'm an addict that needs my dopamine drip. There are definitely non-clicker games that hit the same spot for me, but almost every clicker game I've tried manages to completely suck me in.

I would put Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room as exceptions though in the sense that they're still fully engrossing, but there's a little bit more depth and discovery than just "click the thing until you have enough clicks to get the next thing".

Spaceplan (which apparently just had a free remaster released) is also well worth checking out. My rule of thumb with these kinds of games is I will only pick them up if they have an "end".

And yet I've seen no algorithmic approach for optimizing speedruns for this kind of game. Most have a very large state space, so MILP solvers are not applicable.

I once got quite into https://www.swarmsim.com/#/

It's about as barebones as you can get - it's literally just "numbers go up" with a few simple names attached to them. It turns out that even that is enough to get me addicted for a bit.

Antimatter Dimensions is a good mobile one - the numbers get REALLY big and there's some tricky challenges to complete.

The opposite.

Universal Paperclips was a latecomer to the clicker genre. It starts off making you think its a simple clicker game, but then it turns out that Universal Paperclips has an ending.

Once you achieve the ending, you then have permission to turn off the Universal Paperclips (in fact, its an explicit option), and it installs a cookie or something that prevents the game from starting up again.

Its this "anti-clicker" mindset, despite looking like a simple clicker game, that makes me... ironically... come back to Universal Paperclips over the years.

I think I still have javascript commandlets to auto-play phases of this game. That brought a whole other level of enjoyment to it.

One of the best ways to expand an incremental game’s gameplay is to gradually automate one layer, while introducing new mechanics in a higher layer. So one’s focus for optimization gradually shifts from older and better-understood mechanics to a higher level, where the gameplay is to manipulate the lower layer’s mechanics to make it run as quickly as a basic action did at the start.

a couple years ago a friend of mine got into botting Diablo II, which seemed like a whole game in itself, which made me think, how neat would that be, a game where you start off doing regular gameplay stuff, and then you eventually automate/optimize that gameplay at increasingly more meta levels of play. still think there's something to that idea...

There are a few games where the point is basically to write a bot to play for you. Off the top of my head are Screeps and Adventure Land

That sounds like the concept of Factorio: the abstraction level we play at rises with time. Most of the achievements are about skipping manual labor at various points in time.

Did Factorio have blueprints? That seemed like one of the greatest advances in Dyson Sphere Program, when you could lay down a whole factory unit at once; emphasised the move to greater levels of abstraction.

Mind you, I'd have liked a lite version that reduced the tech tree by maybe a third but still enabled you to get all the advancements without devoting your whole life to it ;o)

Factorio had blueprints wayyyyy before DSP.

Not only that (and I can't tell if that's what you meant originally), but Factorio had blueprints _before Dyson Space Program came out_.

Factorio is unplayable without blueprints. It's such an integral part of the game that it's like asking if Quake has guns.

All factory and automation games build on that concept. It's a huge genre with a lot of good titles.

You should absolutely not check out bitburner then if you cannot afford a distraction, especially if you like programming and green crt hacker aesthetic

well... shit.

ComputerCraft/EduCraft which was a Minecraft mod with Lua programmable robots that you could craft and set to work for you, gradually. Sounds similar to what you're going for here.

I wonder what other examples there are?

OMG Productivity.

I thought I had won the game with full automation.

There is an entire new level.

Every time this comes up I lose at least 2 hours

I think my first run years ago was ~24 hours

Reply on news.ycombinator.com