Progress Quest: The original idle game | Hacker News Reader

Progress Quest: The original idle game

progressquest.com

73 pointschr15m56 comments

If you are an idle game enjoyer like myself, I cannot recommend Antimatter Dimensions highly enough. This game makes you do math, has deep lore, somehow, and is just generally an ode to game design. The core mechanic is based on 1.8e308 being infinity, too.

Here's a link, enjoy a mild, time-gated addiction: https://ivark.github.io/AntimatterDimensions/

I kind of feel like there’s little to do except press more buttons? Like, I get that it’s an idle game, but even cookie clicker at least looks entertaining.

Cookie Clicker just has so many little surprises which keeps it engaging. I don't generally like idle games but I love Cookie Clicker.

Yes, it does seem that way at first. A minor spoiler: this game has its own DSL to script things, eventually.

The game goes through several phase changes as you progress.

That's good to hear, because right now I'm playing it by placing something heavy on the M key.

This is probably the best of the genre. I think the main weakness is that it's slow even by idle/incremental genre standards, and there will be times when the right action is to leave it alone for hours or days.

Yeah, I'm in Cel7 right now, and I'm checking in twice a day. Love it.

Quick question: is there more to this than just putting a heavy weight down on the "M" key and watching number-go-up?

Vastly more. It starts out simple, and then you're writing code in the game's DSL and cursing Effarig.

I don't know if I'll get there. I'll probably just fire up Factorio.

I played an idle game on IRC called "idlerpg" around the year 2000 that was way less polished than this.

I'm pretty sure that the first idle games were just event hooks on IRC that made periodic, random dice rolls for each person who had been in the channel. Initially it was just XP for not saying anything, and subsequently you'd randomly find things that boosted some stats that didn't really do anything.

I remember thinking that idle games on IRC were a pun on the fact that you have dozens or hundreds of people who never say anything because their clients are perpetually detached because they obtained a life and never returned. So while your friend stop responding, you reward them for their quietude.

This game seems a lot more polished; a game that plays itself while you do nothing.

Much deserving of the title idle game, but perhaps only the original to some.

In the early 1990s, there was ZenMOO: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.mud.lp/c/GAFQ8FJIm5A/m...

You connect, sit around with all the other players -- and not say anything. The high score was for staying connected and idle the longest.

Occasionally, the mud will say something. Resist the urge to reply; it'll lower your score, and if you type too often/much, you get kicked off.

Every so often, though, it'll ask you something. If you don't respond within a time limit, you get kicked off.

Its website, where you can download a copy of the database under a LambdaMOO server: https://web.archive.org/web/19971011224937/http://www.zennet...

The best part of idlerpg was that if you disconnected or heaven's forbid accidentally typed something into the channel you would be punished.

So it became a game of bouncer stability and remembering not to leave that channel focused.

I have four attempts in my ~/projects folder to recreate this for Slack or Discord, in a variety of languages using a variety of approaches, and none of them felt quite right. One day, though!

Just use IRC with ii (irc it), that would work from anywhere to anywhere.

But I want additional features; I don't want to just port it over.

I remember all the patches I had for idlerpg that took me forever to figure out what order to apply them in.

I'm (slowly) building an ~idle game with a twist! Here's the code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants

The idea is you're given a simulation of an ant colony that grows autonomously 24/7. You define a window of time each day in which you're allowed to make adjustments to the colony's strategy to help them live more optimally. This is paired with mental health exercises like breathwork and journaling.

The intent is to get people being more consistent with self-care by being motivated to care for a digital pet, but to not make it such an involved endeavor as to be time consuming like a traditional game.

I'm going to pair it with some chill lo-fi music so you can hang out and watch your ants do their thing when you need a moment to feel less frazzled while at your desk job :)

Still a long long ways to go before I have anything really tangible and useful, but feel free to follow along with the code or ask questions!

Nice to see you're still working on it! I've used it a couple of times since I first saw it a few months ago (albeit only for short amounts of time) - I'm looking forward to the future updates based on your Github and lore doc.

Yeah, it's still nowhere near a point where I use it. I got the basics of a "top-down" perspective with pheromone trails going somewhat recently. Now I'm trying to learn how to design more engaging game mechanics, but it's really challenging to know when I'm going in a good direction or just inventing convoluted ideas.

Thanks for the words of encouragement though, I appreciate it.

I'll happily send you feedback if you message me when you release any updates on the web version, search my username in your gmail inbox for my email.

Thank you! I appreciate it. I see your email :)

If user is expected to do nothing, I'd prefer some type of simulation over a fantasy / D&D themed game.

Need not be anything special as long as result looks interesting. Simulated ant heap, aquarium, predator vs. prey populations, cellular automata, folding a protein molecule, etc etc.

Right, that's my feelings exactly.

I was playing RimWorld one evening, had everything running smoothly, put the game on 1x speed, zoomed out, and was like, "Wow. This is nice. Some chill music playing, all my pawns moving around doing their thing, me emotionally vested in the outcome but not needing to contribute right now. At some point I'll need to provide input, but right now I can just observe and relax." and then decided to try and build out something similar, but that runs in-browser and on a longer timescale.

For anyone who is a fan of idle games, I highly commend Cell: Idle Factory Incremental (CIFI). There's a lot of content to unlock and it always feels like you're making progress toward something.

https://octocubegames.com/cifi

Just like work! I'm never quite convinced I am, though.

As a big fan of the genre I do NOT recommend cifi. It has nice polish and a neat general design, but also has strong incentives for leaving the game open and your screen on (for engagement farming) and a whole lot of purchasable (real money) upgrades. and I do mean a lot.

I think those things are true. I did buy a couple inexpensive upgrades myself, but it's possible to make progress without them.

Maybe similar in spirit as idle games: I used to enjoy BoxCar2D where you just sit back and watch cars evolve using genetic algorithm. The original version[1] requires Flash, but looks like someone ported it to HTML5[2]:

[1] http://boxcar2d.com/

[2] https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/

Terminal version:

https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli

I had the desktop version of this installed on my Windows XP machine. So, to me this is the original idle game. But is it? What came before? Surely nobody created something so perfect from nothing.

> What came before?

It's the original idle game, but it's also a parody on RPG-grind. So the originals are MMORPGs, CRPGs, D&D, and so on, and PQ just replaced the human and their predictable behavior in a gated setting and flavored it with some humor.

Yep this. PQ is a huge satire of the grind RPG games do and the low-quality writing and such, especially in quests. Look at the things it says at the bottom "Fighting teenage werewolf" or "Fighting giant mini rat" etc. Its entirely satirical from top to bottom.

Its a huge criticism of the WoW/Ultima/Bard's Tale/MUD era. Thankfully, since about Dragon Age and Mass Effect, that stuff is less common and those works showed us that you can have RPG mechanics without the "kill a rat" grind or "fetch me my long lost magical object" grind stuff. In retrospect playing older games or MMOs feels so infantilizing and lazy writing. Its incredible how long we considered that acceptable.

I feel like they took off with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker , which was a satire that people unironically found hugely enjoyable. But that was much later in 2010. Everything has to start somewhere; maybe Progress Quest was the first idle game?

Cow Clicker and Cookie Clicker are not idle games. You have to interact with them constantly and the less you do the slower you progress.

Idlerpg for IRC is the opposite. If you act you are punished.

Progress Quest is totally idle. It has a bunch of internals that just increment numbers and pretend things happen. It’s an app you start and then don’t do anything at all with.

All the clicker games, and the weird unfolding games like A Dark Room, Candy Box, Paperclips, are kinda fun but not in the spirit of Progress Quest.

Yep, while you often do a lot of idling in the latter games, they're not really idle games. That's why the newer term, Incremental games, fits better.

I'm not sure how much to trust the Wikipedia dates for these - it claims Cookie Clicker was 2013, but I'm sure there was a flash version of it before 2007, while I was in highschool.

https://cookieclicker.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie_Clicker_Wiki

> Cookie Clicker is a Javascript game released by Orteil on August 8, 2013.

And as for not an idle game, yep.

> It is an "incrementer" game, as proclaimed by Orteil.

You must misremember, because it was really released in 2013. Maybe you remember a different game?

I feel like the _release_ of cookie clicker might only be because it was a webpage before?

Edit: Never mind, that release was only a few years ago. Apparently memory gets wonky as you get older.

My best guess is a copy or remake, like how Angry Birds was basically a reskin of the really common cannon-firing flash games.

Progress Quest is the first one that I had ever heard of. It was a pretty big uproar at the time because of how well-done it was. While I'm sure there was something before it, nothing was popular before it.

Progress Quest is great. Learned about it on a MUD many, many years ago, ran it on and off for a few years as a kind of screensaver.

https://trimps.github.io/ is my favourite contemporary idle:ish game, it requires very little activity and has a neat story.

The original idle RPG was sitting on a character creation screen re-rolling your stats for hours if not days on end. I'm pretty sure I played the character creation bit of MegaTraveller more than the actual game.

Did dicerolls in character creation exist in any game outside of Traveller? I vaguely remember a possibility of dying before the first game session. And character ability generally growing with age, so you'd either play a seasoned veteran or a young but clueless rookie. Not surprising at all that the game always struggled, very surprising that it made it through so many iterations nonetheless. (mine was TNE, but never really had a group)

It's a core part of the early editions of D&D: Roll 3d6 for each stat. Or maybe 4d6 and drop the lowest. What class/species would those numbers work best with? Make up or randomly roll more details.

Traveller was infamous for the ability to have your character die before starting the game, but pretty much every early RPG followed D&D's lead in generating a character's basic stats, and possibly more details, with dice.

I will admit I only played the computer game, but yes you could die one of several ways, in action, of old age or sometimes having risky surgery to fix an injury. Obviously games from the D&D lineage had similar, but were largely limited to just trying to get the biggest stats possible. The Elder Scrolls series let you choose a class based on a series of life experiences but that was optional and not quite as rich.

I think when you play with veterans that do not care about their personal power, but about the story itself, traveler can be great fun.

infinity engine games - baldurs gate, torment, icewind dale

I've played some idle games just like this, though the name escapes me at the moment. I enjoy the checking in and seeing what's happening with these kind of games.

I made a container image to run the cli version, this way I can keep it isolated and also deploy it remotely.

PR: https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli/pull/25 Fork: https://github.com/BnJam/pq-cli/tree/main

Beware the kittens. Stay far away from the kittens.

I love this, "game", in part because it's one of the few idle games where gameplay truly requires zero interaction, save for opening and starting it.

A term was coined for this called ZPGs (Zero Player Games).

The same amount of interaction as in Monopoly

If you think about it, PQ it's like Snakes and Ladders.

Not sure if snakes are involved. I left it on open browser and went to sleep. Next day started work at 9 and realised I got lvl 30

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