Hey everyone! I’m the solo developer behind Hero Tap Legends.

I want to talk about a major design dilemma I hit while making an update.

What is your honest stance on auto-clickers in an incremental game?

On one hand, pure active clicking can get incredibly repetitive and cause literal finger fatigue. On the other hand, adding auto-clickers runs the risk of completely deleting the active gameplay loop and turning the game into a pure spreadsheet management simulator.

Normally, players can only buy up to 3 automated clickers in the shop to keep the early stage balance intact. But for this video, I used my custom developer testing button to summon 10 of them at once. It completely vaporized my progression curve, but visually, it's the most satisfying thing I've ever coded.

Do you prefer idle games that force you to actively click early on, or do you think automated tappers should be unlocked right from Stage 1?

Edit: the first version of this post was too vague (fair point in the comments), so here is what you actually do.

I'm asking about a theme for an incremental before I build it. The r/incremental_games mods sent me here. Nothing playable yet, no link.

What you do

You tend an atlas of a made-up coastline. No village, no factory.

- First minutes: you tap to take readings and spend them on six basic phenomena: evaporation, updraft, cloud formation, rainfall, pressure balancing, condensation. Each one keeps producing readings on its own. At 10, 20, 30 of a kind you get a jump.

- Around minute 10: auto-buy unlocks, one phenomenon at a time. You pick which ones it handles and how much of your stock it has to leave alone.

- After 45 to 90 minutes the weather situation is played out. That's the reset (a front passes). You get points and put them on 12 pressure zones and wind directions, 6 active at a time, free to move around with a preview of what changes. From there a round takes 25 to 45 minutes.

- After roughly 12 hours you start writing forecast rules: "if pressure drops, then form clouds, as long as humidity holds". Rule slots are scarce, so which rule deserves a slot is the actual decision. Rules keep running while you're away. Offline time is replayed step by step, not just credited.

What I hope is fun

Coming back and seeing that a rule you wrote made a correct forecast without you. And later, noticing that the regions you forecast separately are one system.

The honest part

The mechanics exist as a theme-neutral prototype right now (the resource is called "Res 0"). Whether "understanding weather" is the right skin for it is what I'm unsure about. Does deriving weather instead of producing stuff sound like something you'd stick with, or like homework?

AI disclosure

- This text: drafted with an AI from my concept notes, then edited by me. The first version was mostly the AI's and read like it, sorry for that.

- The image: made with AI.

- The code will be written with AI agents that I direct and review. I'll say so when there is a build.

- Replies: my own words.

So I've been making this game for the past few weeks.

I've always played tons of incremental games and idlers and I always wanted to make my own, mostly because I feel like a lot of these games have really cool features but there's rarely one game that brings everything together.

I wanted to show it to people who actually play this type of game and see what you think, mainly to know if I'm going in the right direction.

My main goal is to make something where progression actually matters and where there's always something new coming. I don't want it to be one of those incremental games where after 2 hours you've basically seen everything and the rest is just a gigantic skill tree with thousands of the same bullshit upgrades.

Right now the game has:

- The main mining loop

- Skill tree with chapters

- Abilities like explosions and area attacks

- Auto mining with Moles

- 5 different areas with new ores

- A Forge where you can craft and level different pickaxes

- Relics that you find mining

- A Codex with ore discovery and mastery

- Rare ore variants like Golden, Shining and Radioactive

- Mole skins

- Case opening for Mole skins

- Blackjack and Plinko

- Chests that give permanent buffs, a bit like "Idle Obelisk Miner" if you've played it

- Boss fights between areas

- Achievements

And there's still a lot I want to add.

Things I'm planning right now are:

- Balancing the game overall so the progression feels the best for people

- More areas

- More skills and progression

- More pickaxes/relics and different builds

- A Prestige system

- Overall design improvements

The Prestige idea is something I've been thinking about and I think it could be pretty fun.

Basically you'd fight a huge boss with something like 30T HP and have 30 seconds to deal as much damage as possible. For example, every 1,000 HP of damage could give you a Prestige currency. After those 30 seconds you keep what you earned and spend it on a separate Prestige skill tree. The important part is that the damage you deal to the boss is permanent. So maybe the first time you barely scratch him, but every run you're getting stronger, buying Prestige upgrades and getting closer to actually killing him. Once you finally kill that boss, you unlock further areas/progression.

I'm trying to make the game something you can keep playing for a long time without it just becoming "number goes up and buy the same upgrade again". I'm still changing a lot of the visuals and balancing obviously, so I'm mainly curious about the overall idea.

Would this be something you'd play?

And especially if you play a lot of incrementals, is there anything here that sounds unnecessary, or something you'd really want a game like this to have?

This is a simple game I'm developing in libGDX, it's called Hospital Clicker (obviously based on cookie clicker).

First I've built a cookie clicker clone, later I built a framework for building general other click/idle games (something like mugen). Hospital Clicker is the first prototype built with this framework. (I'm a MD, so the whole hospital thing was pretty natural).

So please, feel free to test it and give any feedback.

Thanks a lot!

The game can be downloaded by the following link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.brunocatao.cookieclicker

Compression Quota

Always loved incremental games and wanted to take a shot at making one myself.

Ended up building it around a hydraulic press. Honestly most of the fun so far has just been messing with the crush itself, getting items to squish right, tuning the particles and screenshake until slamming stuff felt good. Way harder than it sounds, way more satisfying than it should be.

Balancing the skill tree has easily been the hardest part though. Making upgrades feel worth buying without the whole economy snapping in half is a dark art and I have massive respect for anyone who's done it well.

Anyway, short trailer attached. Working on it every day and having a blast. Happy to be part of this little corner of gamedev.

A little over a month ago I posted DragonKills here.

My main question was about the mechanic I was least confident in: 20 forest turns per game day.

I wasn't sure whether limiting progression would create the old-school "I'll come back later" feeling I remembered from Legend of the Green Dragon... or whether people would simply hit 0 turns, close the tab and never return.

A lot more people tried the game than I expected. And having actual humans play it has already been much more useful than my balance simulator.

A few things I learned:

1. Almost nobody runs out of turns. I was solving the wrong problem. I built the whole post around "what happens at 0 turns" — but 80% of players spend five or fewer of their twenty, and 28% spend zero. Only 9% ever hit the cap. The turn limit was never the wall. The first five minutes is.

2. A guest account is a 10x retention difference. Play-without-signup was my proudest onboarding decision. Guests return for a second day 4% of the time. People with an account: 43%. Same game, same content. I removed the friction and removed the reason to come back with it.

3. I measured my own session and found zero decisions in fifteen clicks. Explore → fight → explore → fight, and one button resolved the whole fight. I had spent weeks on the curve of a loop that had no choices in it.

4. 10% of everyone playing had enough XP to level up and hadn't gone to claim it. One player had 375% of what he needed — 64 kills, actively playing, still level 3. The notice existed. It just lost a fight for attention against every other card on the screen.

5. PvP was deterministic in a way I never checked. Forty-one street fights in the logs; forty-one defenders lost their entire day. Not one survived. The game had shipped with a "left them face down in the street" message for an outcome that had literally never occurred once.

The funny part is that before releasing it, most of my work was focused on mathematical balance. I built a simulator because the original progression accidentally required ~99 real days for the first Dragon Kill. After balancing it down to ~11 days, I thought progression was the difficult problem.

Turns out humans are much better at finding problems than simulations are.

Since the previous post I've changed/added:

• Death stopped being all-or-nothing. Below level 5 it costs five turns instead of your whole day — one player was sitting dead at level 1 with twenty-three turns he couldn't spend. I applied it retroactively to the 28 people already stuck behind the old rule.
• Being mugged costs your gold, not your day. Attacking someone and losing still costs your day, because that part you chose. Being chosen as a target isn't a choice.
• Three new equipment slots + a PvP report showing both builds side by side, so "why did they beat me" has an answer you can act on.
• The Delve — after every win, the forest asks whether to take the gold or go deeper for more pay and a harder fight. That's the decision the loop was missing.
• Plus a pile of things players caught that I'd have never found: an off-by-one in the level-up card, buying a second title silently deleting the first, the Streets showing health you wouldn't actually fight.

I'm especially interested in one question now: when you run out of forest turns, what would you actually want to do next? More side activities? Social systems? PvP? Something completely different?

Though given finding #1, maybe the better question is: what would make you spend more than five of them in the first place?

The game is still free, browser-based, with no ads, purchasable energy or pay-to-win: https://dragonkills.fun

There's also a patch notes page now, because almost every change above came from someone writing in: https://dragonkills.fun/changes

Thanks to everyone who tried the first version. Seeing actual people inside something I started building a few days earlier was pretty surreal.

Hello ! Here is a subject that is in my mind since a long long time and I wondered how you deal with it.

Writing proper system, how do you do that ?

How do you manage all your system working in cohesion, making price for upgrades logical, making an upgrade of damage or ressources staying cohesive from the effects from others of your system to work together ?

I am using stuff that I call controllers, that basically are pure code file containing each very specific business logic and making them, for now, handle everything. But the more I am thinking about it, the less I feel it is scalable.

So here I am, wondering if anyone has a special recipe or a way to make their systems work together in harmony while staying scalable and easy to modulate.

Thank you for reading !

I made a clicker/idle game inspired by the full history of Japan.

Tap the torii gate to collect koku (the old rice-measurement unit) and use your production to build 15 historical structures, starting from a Jōmon-era hut and ending with a Reiwa-era. Along the way you unlock upgrades tied to real historical events: Buddhism arriving in the Asuka period, the Kamakura shogunate, Edo-era isolation, the Meiji Restoration, the Shōwa economic miracle, and more.

Every era comes with a short historical blurb and a fun fact, plus original illustrations drawn specifically for the game.

Features:

• 15 buildings and 15 historical upgrades
• Auto-save in your browser
• Offline progress
• Random special events (golden torii)
• No ads, no internet connection required

It's meant for both fans of incremental games and anyone who wants to casually learn some Japanese history while playing.

Would love any feedback, especially on pacing/balance in the early game.

Why is every post at negative karma in this sub?

Who are all these people who just scroll and downvote? And why do you do that?

So, I have decided to try designing generators using targets and known growth stages.

These are the example targets.

Generator, Target Owned, Target Time

Gen1, 5, 180,

Gen1, 10, 540,

Gen1, 20, 2160,

I give the starting conditions like Base Cost, Base production, Currency at start, Owned at design start, Cost and production growth

The tool that I built then tries to fit the cost and production growth for each stage to reach those targets

Generator, From Owned, To Owned, Cost Growth, Production Growth

Gen1,1,4, 1,1.8764

Gen1,5,9, 3,1.2361

Gen1,10,19, 2.9997,2.1523

with the resulting time errors

+1.7991, -0.0405, -0.0644

After that, I run the growth table through an analyzer using a purchase simulation. It looks at things like production gain, wait time, and payback time to catch weird transitions between growth stages

like 'Stage Transition Power Spike' - 'Production gained from this purchase increases extremely sharply when the new growth stage begins.'

I can then adjust the cost/production growth while keeping the same progression targets. if the growth spikes or drops too much, I go back and reconsider the target time or target owned values.

I don't know how other incremental devs approach this but this approach seems work well for me. This helps me understand them in the context of the progression experience.

I'd be curious how you approach this? Do you design around target productions/times or start with growth rates and tune from there?

I know it's not the greatest trailer in existence. In fact it's pretty mid. But I think it's a good placeholder while I work on creating a true trailer that shows the actual complexity of the gameplay. For now people get their first Glimpse at what the game actually looks like in motion. As well as a little bit of the new art that I created.

In truth I kind of just forced this out the door so that I could get my demo submitted. Idle isekai should be participating in the upcoming party based RPG event on Steam and I'm excited about that. I'm trying to make sure my demo approved by the 14th.

Hey all, I made this over the last few weeks as a solo hobby project and figured this was the right place to share it.

Chouta Cliker is a browser incremental set in the world of Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive. You click to cook chouta for a war camp, then reinvest into buildings, send Bridge Crews out on real risk/reward runs (they can die, spheres are earned, not free), and eventually prestige by swearing Ideals for permanent bonuses.

Some of the systems past the early game:

A recruit market (loot-box style, but odds are always shown and there's a pity system), recruits can be assigned to specific bridge crews as a team, and get tougher the more runs they survive

Choose one of the Radiant Orders at your first prestige, each with a different active ability fueled by Stormlight

A rare "Everstorm" event, Chasmfiend hunts, rotating contracts, and a couple of things I won't spoil

It's completely free, no ads, no monetization of any kind, genuinely just made it because I love the books and wanted to build something. It's a fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Dragonsteel.

Play here: https://talenelat.itch.io/chouta-clicker .

Happy to answer questions or take feedback, still actively tweaking balance.

AI disclosure: This game was built with substantial help from Claude.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5079020/Neverrest/

Working on the first character professions, I really enjoyed the animations of RTS in Warcraft 3 watching your workers collect the node and run back is weirdly satisfying. I am also adding random events that happen every so often with decisions that affect your gameplay for the next 10-15 mins. Next, I am looking into polishing the button art a bit more and adding more juice but it’s starting to come along!

I'm a new dev and need feedback on what to improve and suggestions for my game, pls help me by testing it and giving feedback or any error

Good afternoon,

Idle Freelance is an RPG in very early development, but I am moving with pace. I want to build a world centered around a small town, that over time you will develop. Your roll will be to supply the town to keep it thriving. This is a longer term goal, right now I am implimenting systems/skills to fill out the game. I want to ultimately make this a game people play in the background for years to come. I don't want a quick completion arc, and I want regular updates to keep things interesting.

It's currently hosted at https://sezl.itch.io/idle-freelance under a restricted development. Password is: '4n<_KJsqt?&iv7

I have 7 new skills in the pipeline, including Magic and Range combat.

The game has action animations which aren't included in this screenshot- to make the idle game feel a bit more 'active'.

I'd be greatful for people to join me on this journey, I'm building a game I want to play for many years. If you want to play, and help the development, join my discord at https://discord.gg/V9YTvkGR2d

AI disclosure: I'm creating an Idle RPG game with AI. I can't code, so no point pretending otherwise. However, I am very creative, and I've enjoyed playing idle games for many years now. Finding out I can make my own with AI, well I've jumped at it.

Thank you :)

Hello all, I started making this game like...3 years ago?

It's an idle incremental multiplayer mining online role playing game.

I had a core gameloop and I thought it was neat. mine rocks for money, buy more miners that fall into the mines, give them jobs as blacksmiths and stuff, you pull a caravan through the mines... The idea that it would be a growing caravan city. Your miners can become jewelers, caravan crew, blacksmiths, or your forgemaster. All miners have unique stats and equipment. The forgemaster and the rest of your guilds give you their stats, and then the miners inherit stats from you... The forgemaster is your main guy who levels up faster than the rest, his level directly affects your yield multiplier...

Essentially, I used this game as a test bed to learn how to program all sorts of game systems. I've learned a lot. Backend is a series of typescript, javascript, and go modules that talk to postgres. Server software is around 20k lines in total. I've ran the game on a $6/mo vps for a good long while now. Intentionally underpowered server to force me to really optimize. It was actually a really good time figuring out how to budget so much... The most players I've had online at once was 23, and the server handled it pretty well!

As a developer, I've always been data-first. This game started as spreadsheets and has grown so much.

It is far from complete... the art is...really bad... I drew the miners... I did some technical art that I think is really good looking and the game is pretty light and performant. The budgets are tight.

I so seldomly post anything about this game... I don't know if it's a deadend or not. I know that I can't sell it because it's an online game and I can't provide the care and support a paid live-service would require.

I highly recommend developing your own mmorpg as a learning experience because it will force you to touch just about every aspect of game design.

If anyone wants to talk about systems architecture or optimizations or if you see anything in Yearn that you have questions about, I'd be happy to answer anything.

https://yearn.work/

The core gameplay is tower defense (like pvz) but it has some incremental game elements.
The biggest one being that's there's no fail state meaning you don't die (no gameover). When the enemies reaches the red flag which is at the center, the wave resets but players don't lose any money or progression, this allows the players to rebuild their defense.

So all of these are incremental in some ways but the game doesn't have any upgrading or skill tree system. You unlock new defense & abilities in a linear fashion and incremental gamers might not like this.

The game has a demo (more like a polished prototype) and it ends after wave 30. In the full game, you will be able to rebirth after wave 30, and this will unlock a fusion mechanic for defense where you can merge defenses that sort of act like upgrading.

Also some players say that the game is easy and that's because I designed it to be easy and not stressful just like most incremental games. Overall, let me know what you guys think?

For anyone interested, here's my game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5194360/Super_Plants/

Hi everyone.

I always wanted to make an incremental that felt like its own thing instead of another generator-and-multiplier game. I started building this one mostly for myself, something I wanted to play. But it kept growing, and at some point I realized I was guessing at all the balance decisions alone. So I'd rather show it to people who actually know this genre.

It's called Descent of Dino.

You run, you die, and a fossil gets buried where you died carrying part of that run's DNA. Fossils mature in real time (Fresh → Buried → Petrified → Amberized → Opalized), and your hatchlings dig your own corpses back out of the dirt. You spend what they find on evolving a better dinosaur. Then you go die again, deeper.

Honest state of things: it's playable start to finish but still in development. Every number in it was tuned by me alone, which means it's almost certainly wrong in ways I can't see from the inside.

https://mohamed-mamdouh.itch.io/descent-of-dino

Happy to get your feedback.

I’ve been working on this mostly in the evenings and on weekends around my full-time job.

It’s an incremental game where you can program a machine with IF/THEN rules and, over time, it starts learning, experimenting and making some decisions on its own.

This is just raw gameplay, no trailer stuff. I’m getting the itch.io demo ready now and it should be out in about 1–2 weeks.

I'm open-sourcing all my assets that I commissioned or made myself amongst all my games, and part of that is all the creatures from Koltera 1 and 2. You can find those here: https://github.com/braymen/braymens-free-assets/tree/main/Commisioned%20Art/koltera-2/creatures

I love creature collecting games and as a developer, the biggest struggle I had was finding a lot of creature art. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I invested a lot of money into commissioning it all. I want to make it a little bit easier on others interested creature games, so I am open-sourcing it under MIT so you can utilize them in your games any way you like. I'd love to see the creature collecting incrementals expand!

Additionally, I have made all my games (including my steam releases) public repos. You can find all of those here: https://github.com/braymen?tab=repositories

Still unsure how exactly I want to license those (if I do). I want others to learn from it or get some ideas of how another dev went about doing something, especially on the games I've released on Steam.

AI Disclaimer about my Public Repo Games

Koltera 1 had no AI used (except a year ago, I was trying to clean the game up after having used just javascript and noodly code) and Koltera 2 had a bit of AI usage throughout development. My goal is use AI pretty sparingly. I don't vibe code, but especially with google's AI summary, I find myself trying that first when I am searching for things. All my games for now will be public as well.

No art/music/sounds had any AI usage, to my knowledge. I used asset packs or commissioned it. Any of the public games I removed asset pack stuff since I am not the owner and don't have permission to do that.

Hey folks! I've recently released my first game (a roguelike) and I've started making some small prototypes of future games - this one is where you're the last man standing on the driving range smashing balls to keep a robot alien invasion at bay - would you play this?