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Progress Quest

progressquest.com

15 pointshyperific11 comments

This is the first true idle/incremental game.

The whole genre sits on a spectrum between this and cookie-clicker bookending the other end of the incremental genre (CC is a very active game by modern standards, assuming you don't "cheat" by scripting the clicks).

( There are more involved/complex/active games than CC of course, but if we're picking influential games I don't think many have been as influential as these.)

Anyway, if you enjoy Progress Quest, then a halfway between Progress Quest and a "real" game is "Melvor Idle", which introduces very light inventory management into an otherwise still rather idle game with few decisions other than picking what your idling time is spent doing. It's obviously Runescape influenced, without actually having control of a character.

That said, despite enjoying a lot of the incremental genre, it sits uncomfortably between parody and not.

Progress quest is more obviously a parody. It was good fun back in the day trolling people about the graphical version easter egg.

Is there a game in this genre where you script your character? As a kid I made a few RuneScape bots and found that getting the logic right like "the world is in this state, what actions do you perform?" was the fun part about that.

I also never got the random events automated so I just read a book while it ran and killed it whenever one of those popped up.

If you want a game where you effectively script/program the entire gameplay, check out Bitburner: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812820/Bitburner/

Most scripting games aren't really incremental games as such, although they do exist most notably in the form of a game called BitBurner.

However, it's more along the lines of HackMud, than a scriptable RPG, so it's not got the fantasy theming that progress quest / OSRS have.

There's another game which is more of a scriptable story driven RPG, although I can't remember the name of it now. It might be "While Heart.Break()" but off the top of my head I have a feeling that's more of a computer themed story driven isometric RPG than a scriptable isometric story-driven RPG, and there's another game which is, but I honestly can't remember right now, and this is my work account so I can't dig too deeply around the steam archive.

> it sits uncomfortably between parody and not

Yeah that's a thought I've had too, and the vast majority of idle games are just putting a new theme on top of the same crappy formula. But the ones that try something new are usually pretty interesting.

I would highly recommend Melvor Idle's "Ancient Relics" mode, from the AoD expansion. It turns a relatively simple idle game into something that requires genuine planning and strategy, simply by gating skill cap increases behind clearing a new dungeon.

The gnorp apologue demonstrated there is a lot of interesting design space left in the genre. I’m excited to see what comes of games made by folks who were inspired by it.

As far as incremental games go, I find Antimatter Dimensions [1] to be one of the most extensive and polished ones.

[1] https://ivark.github.io/AntimatterDimensions/

IdleRPG in IRC was also great fun.

I've tried writing my own version, with significantly more ambition, but got hung up on two issues every time:

1. Overly ambitious! I wanted it to be a general API, so that you could hook up Slack, IRC or Discord to it.

2. I wanted users to give their idle avatars goals, or be able to interact with the game despite it being mostly idle (e.g., "go this way", "be aggressive against everyone you meet", "try to avoid danger", etc.), but didn't have a great way of processing those instructions in a way that meshed with the "tick"-based processing of everything else going on with the game.

Some prior discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28193680 [Aug 2021]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40141350 [Apr 2024]

Haven't played much yet but Antimatter Dimensions is pretty solid. https://ivark.github.io/AntimatterDimensions/

I had a spell where I played a bunch of Progress Knight Reborn, which like a lot of modern idle games (the D&D Idle Champions) involves doing a run, getting some far, then gaining power for the next run. Pretty fun dynamic somehow, lots of stuff coming together cutely. https://camerongott.github.io/progress-knight/

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

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