Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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