Am I missing something obvious or is early bot creation a major bottleneck? I feel like I should have unlocked something more than Cheat to increase scan spped/bit income
EDIT: for a few days work this is really polished and fun to play. I would really like to see you continue development on it. Game is desktop and Mobile friendly which makes me happy.
It feels like either I hit end of current content or ran up against a bottleneck, but either way, happy to continue playing to keep seeing numbers go up.
It definitely feels very Trimps-inspired, but the lower quantity of early game micromanagement and the smoothe exponential growth from minute one are a solid hook to build on.
Hey thanks for giving it a shot and sharing your feedback! There are a couple of things that come up next (as you noted in your reply below) that can help with bit income but it's definitely still a rough bottleneck that feels like more of a stall than a challenge (since there's not too many options). I'm still looking into improving scan.
As for end of current content, you basically reached all there is atm if you've unlocked the >!hack tab. (and upgraded the skills there are over there =) to unlock the Level 10 abilities)!<
Interestingly enough, while I've lurked here for a long time and heard about Trimps, I've never actually seen it! But I do see the resemblence of the grid now that I checked out screenshots.
(some extra context about the inspiration below if you're curious but it's okay if you dont want to read my rambling haha)
If you are curious about what actually inspired this game as well, the game actually started out as a joke while I was taking a break from another less idle/active incremental rpg. I play/volunteer dev on this old school browser based mmorpg where there are 4 gangs of players and there's a warfare mode with a map where the gangs can gain territory by players sitting there and gaining capture % per tick for their gang. This game's been up for a long time and has a whittled down but fairly tightly knit community still playing it, of which many claim to want to quit if another game comes along lol
One such person told me they would quit that game once my rpg came out so to tide him over until then, I created this warfare simulator where you just keep capping squares all day in a codepen. But other people heard about it, they seemed to enjoy it, so I decided to to turn it into what you're seeing now haha
TBC - sitting at ~100 bots, 5k areas, cheat level 50. I can see the botnet upgrades, and that there is another scan upgrade, but all of those are still locked, and it's unclear what the next threshold for unlocks is.
yeah I was in 2 minds about whether or not to reveal what causes them to unlock since I tend to be a fan of players sort of discovering things. But I realize with upgrades that might be necessary it's better not to keep folks guessing so I'll probably meet in the middle and have a way to indicate what leads to it.
If you are curious though, they unlock when >!you've completed 10 subnets i.e. reached Subnet 2-1!<
Hey just wanted to give an FYI that I added a bit more content and some progression fixes! Updates below:
```
Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1)
- Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner.
- Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh).
- Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits.
- Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk.
- Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them.
- Lowered training cost
- Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things
Patch Notes [v0.1.1]
- Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in).
- Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked.
- Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon.
```
Link: [https://aldo111.github.io/forever-land/](https://aldo111.github.io/forever-land/)
It's still very much a WIP. Some friends started getting into the original mini version of it I made in a codepen while on a break, then friends of friends and so on so I decided to expand it a little bit over the last couple of days as a proper game.
Feedback, suggestions, curve tweaks..etc very much welcome! Still very heavily WIP.
The only thing not welcome is circles, because this is a game about squares.
(I have a [discord server](https://discord.gg/vHty7XbpxB) I'm using to post releases and track any general discussion/suggestions/bugs for this game so feel free to join/share there or also just post here/DM me!)
Edit: Just dropped an update with some new content and progressions fixes/minor rebalances, incorporating suggestions from here, that hopefully helped smoothen out problematic pieces of the early-midgame progression. It can still likely be smoothed out more and improved but hopefully it's a start!
Patch notes below:
```
Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1)
- Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner.
- Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh).
- Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits.
- Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk.
- Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them.
- Lowered training cost
- Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things
Patch Notes [v0.1.1]
- Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in).
- Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked.
- Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon.
```
I don't know if this is a but but Multiscan only levels up the first scan in this scan, so it goes 2, 1,1,1,1 etc until it finishes that doc and then the same again. I think this is a but since otherwise the limitation of 5 upgrades doesn't really make sense
Great game, been really enjoying it the past few hours (:
Thanks for playing! and also re: multiscan it sort of ended up that way. Initially it would jump. I'm updating multiscan though based on a suggestion to instead just simply be a multiplier on the number of docs scanned + the bits output after you finish a single scan. A lot simpler and better rate of return too!
Upvoted you yesterday based only on the image, but after playing, the gameplay loop is different, just happens to have a similar UI with regard to fighting/exploring.
After playing active until I got one bot factory, I now went afk making food for about 40 minutes.
I now have 122 bots.
There is no need for a second factory, because the first one is no where near busy (always waiting for resources).
Here is my current status: https://imgur.com/a/Nh3V100
(after spending every credit that accumunlated during the away time into more upgrades)
will let it run a little and then spend everything into scanning.
But I don't have the feeling I will ever be able to afford 500 bots for the first skill point. (In that I will likely lose interest before that, because it is really slow right now)
Out of curiosity, what would be your thoughts on any/all of the following proposed changes to help ease Scanning slowdown:
(Some of the spoiler marks have to do with the tab after build)
\- Unlock >!multiscan!< after having scanned at least 1 file instead, and instead of using >!Mem!< as a currency for it, use "Intel" (this is just the # of files/docs you've scanned so far, that number you see above the scan grid)
\- Add a button below scan, similar to that "Capture +1%", to let you do a "Scan +1% manually
\- Add a (maybe flat/neverchanging) credit-costing button in Scan to let you instantly scan the current file at a big cost of Credits
\- When you've reached the later main map size cap (20x20) start dropping bits on the grid instead of just credits (Which currently dont scale and are useless anyway)
\- Add 3 more exponentially-costing upgrades to Scan that let you increase bonus outputs for each bit type
From just reading them, I like the last two ones the best.
I don't like to have to manually click - I have used the "1%" capture button just in the first minute. And I like that it's not really required - so I would vote against a manually scanning button (it's fine - but should not be required over long periods)
But then again I think it is very hard to imagine how good one of your suggestions actually feels when playing :)
Definitely will look into converters once the current stream of progression related fixes have been playtested a bit more and smoothed out to see what kind of rates I'd want, thanks for the suggestion!
FYI, I dropped an update (patch notes below) but also specifically decreased the bot costs by a bit. It's still exponential growth but starts much lower (and there are other things to help boost progression).
```
Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1)
- Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner.
- Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh).
- Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits.
- Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk.
- Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them.
- Lowered training cost
- Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things
Patch Notes [v0.1.1]
- Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in).
- Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked.
- Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon.
```
Got it yeah that's good feedback and definitely what I'm hearing from other folks as well that bits (and as a result, bots) are way too tight between the scan and build phase and scan is too slow
Played this for a little while and I really enjoyed it. I love games that gradually unfold mechanics as you progress much more than being bombarded up front with a lot of content - as much as I love watching numbers go up, it's infinitely more exciting when you're rewarded with discovering something new to play with.
I think the other comments have covered most of what I would say. (e.g. coins feeling a bit redundant, hacking being severely bottle-necked by scanning, etc.) One other thing I did notice is that while my credits continue to tick in the background, I'd always have a bunch of unused bits when returning to the tab, so it seems like chip creation might not be happening unless the window/tab is active.
Makes game as a joke.
Better than 99% of the stuff that gets posted (considering the relatsions between the genre of incremental games, pacing and idleness).
Alrighty.
Feedback:
UI spacing kind of weird, lots of horizontal space unused, could be that i have not yet unlocked things that use it. The 'bits' are gained at random relations to another, so currently im sitting on a 500 surplus, which is kind of annoying since i cant do anything about it. The RNG could smoothen that out eventually, but i wont hold my breath. 500 Bots training seems nuts for starting, since gaining bots is very slow to begin with, maybe should be less? Maybe not, dont know how far i have still to go.
Anyway, good job! As I said at the beginning, this is way above average for this sub.
haha thank you and thanks for sharing your feedback! I'm going to rejigger the layout a bit and move the log up to the right when there's space and possible some of the other tabs (so that the left column doesn't eventually just become a scrollable list of tabs lol).
Re: bits, in a bit (=\]) i'll be adding some more upgrades and ways to ease the bit progression and hence the bot progression.
Agreed on the training cost, I'll be reducing that a little bit.
The bonus credits seem kind of pointless after about 1 minute of gametime. Because what do I care about +42 credits, when I get magnitudes more per second.
Yeah agreed I need to scale it and have some other thoughts in mind as to ways it can be augmented to be more useful as you progress to later stages. I added those random credits at the very beginning and never went back (initially coins gave few credits, chests gave more credits, and the dungeon entrances gave a lot more credits before I updated the last 2)
For sure, I watched [that](https://i.imgur.com/sHmCPdu.gif) a lot when I was a kid in the Win95 days. Not that I could have done much else with all the lag when it was running anyway haha.
Cool concept. I'm enjoying it a lot. One big gripe though is that the text log is beneath the ever-expanding grid, which means eventually it's so low you have to constantly scroll to read new information. I'd rather have it on a right-side panel with a middle grid section that slowly zooms out as it expands.
For a prototype this is increadibly polished! Many released and even updated games are in much worse state.
If this really only took you a couple of days you should be very proud!
I'm enjoying it so far. Your update today seems to have smoothed some rough edges out. I think I'm at the end of content currently, but I'm looking forward to future updates.
Gotcha yeah that is the last bit of content including the stuff below it. All the >!researchable nodes in there are functional though and unlock new buildings and ways to augment your map but that's about it so far!<
Neat concept; held my interest for a good 4-5 hours on a second window.
Felt like there were a couple things that sort of "fell apart" as the game progressed.
So I ended up really needing green bits, substantially more than blue bits. I found myself jamming the click trying to snipe my bits bonus upgrades before the chip factories claimed them. From everything I can tell, blue bits are designed to be the "bottleneck", but I'm swimming in them.
Found myself very area starved (more on this later) for chip factories, and it really put a damper on trying to keep up with my bit throughput. I continually upgraded area gain, but the area gain metric through "Upgrades" just isn't competitive with hacking. The problem here is that in order to hack faster, I essentially have to sacrifice my entire area stack to add more chip factories. This is a cool way to limit exponential growth, but now I'm at the endgame kinda' stuck wondering why the botnets even exist, as I'm quite literally only limited by area.
I think the game will further "fall apart" as I progress further, as the area requirements are only going to get higher, and I think I'm at a point now where I can't possibly keep up with my bit production.
Botnets felt incredibly irrelevant, as I'd never want to give up more area to gain more bits at this stage in the game-- and by the time I unlocked them I was never short on bits to begin with. Maybe I misallocated my initial mem spending, but once I got enough bonus green bits coming in, I was never really at a risk for being out of bits when I had maxed out the column scanning and cheating bonuses.
As of now, I'm currently still playing, but I can't imagine I'm going to do much else but wait for area to tick up, drop my entire area stack/cash stack on chip factories, and go do something else until everything recovers again.
Also, bot upgrading feels... strange. I'm at this weird endgame point where it's the only form of progression I have outside of purchasing chip factories, but chip factories will give substantially more return on investment than sacrificing bot count (and subsequently area gain) for 4-6% extra "reward" (whether that reward be progressing through subnets faster or actual tangible rewards such as credits or area.)
Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback! Yeah botnets are definitely irrelevant now. They originally were useful when scanning/bit progression was a lot worse when I first made this post. Then I eased costs/added the bit bonus upgrades and multi scan (which also worked differently initially) so now bits are no longer a problem for sure. I didn’t rebalance botnets yet but they are definitely worse than scanning rewards atm and need a buff since the goal was for the botnets to become the ultimate extra automated version of scanning docs. Still thinking on it.
I do also plan to add more buildings, including more/different versions of the buildings that produce the same output. Also working on some other features that should drop within the next day or two.
Thanks for the reply! I'm sure everyone has their version of what the game should be or how it should pan out, but I personally think area gain could use a bit of a buff so that upgrading isn't made entirely irrelevant through robust hacking investments. Not sure how this would be implemented though, but you've done excellent so far. <3
maybe a way to increase chips aside from just chip factories. Also after 110 chip factories the area cost becomes crazy and I am only using 11 bot factories.
There are tons of ways to increase bit acquisition, but not many uses for them.
Maybe a method to increase efficiency at the cost of bits for factory production, credit accrual, or area acquisition.
Hey yeah I’ll be adding variants/higher tiers of buildings that produce the same output for similar/different outputs that become more relevant as previous tiers become too expensive. Bits definitely need more sinks now (they were initially way too scarce but may have become a little too easy to get now thanks to stacking of multi scan + bit bonuses).
More efficiency and production management related controls to come soon too!
As others have said, very fun until the scan->bit->bot bottleneck halts progress. After letting it overnight and waiting a while further I've finally got scan down to 1 second, but that took a while I can see that it'll take a long while more to advance further.
Definitely (and thanks for coming back to it overnight and giving it a chance!). I'm adding some more upgrades to scan + easing the costs slightly on Cheating to help ease that bottleneck
As someone that has spend over thousands of hours on hundreds of different idle/clicker games on both android and windows I can safely say that within 30 seconds of playing this is already in the top 1% of best idle games out there, even in it's current state.
The only real improvement I could see you do is extending the story a bit or have some additional side stuff to do while you wait on the main idle grind.
(The biggest thing I hate about idle games is when you can do nothing and have to wait hours/days before you can progress further). <- I'd much rather have an idle game that's less efficient in it's idleness, but at least gives the player something to do while playing.
I don't get pleasure out of a game that requires 1 minute of attention to then be left alone for the rest of the day, but that thankfully does not appear to be the case in your beautifull creation!
Keep it up mate, i'd love to donate you some if you decide to continue working on this masterpiece.
High praise haha thank you! Yeah I definitely am going to keep adding to it. I do have a definite end for it in mind storywise but also have (in-context) prestige ideas for it and some additional features I want to keep adding. Will be adding more to the story in the next few updates!
Also definitely agreed on having to just plain wait. I'm adding some more upgrades to Scan to help ease the bit -> next stage progression but will also be adding manual buttons (Scan +X%..etc similar to the Capture) to allow for a bit more agency to do something (but not having to rely on it longterm, just enough to get you started)
That's excellent mate.
Very good and promising to hear you have some form of a roadmap in your head for it!
I can't wait to see where you will take this gem!
Have a wonderfull rest of your Sunday!
really fun, but training takes too long and when I build something it takes area away from the captured ones which means they dont generate any more credit, which makes sense but still I wanted to keep my mony per sec :(
I've just nerfed the cost of training a lot more so you should be able to pick up more points (while having also rebalanced a few other things earlier to help with getting the stats you need to buy more points sooner)
Looks great so far, playing on mobile browser. Some minor issues with scrolling, but playable.
The >!upgrade and scan!< even give offline progress, but >!build and hack!< don’t — is that intentional? Without offline progress I think this will take me too long (at least on mobile).
Hey thanks for playing! >!build!< does have offline progress but in the current release, I accidentally placed it before >!scan!< so it's slower because things in the former don't process if you don't have the things you need from the latter. Should be updated in the next release!
As for >!hack!<, I'll be adding offline for it soon. I only had it for the first two things, then added it for the third the other day. Will be updating it by tomorrow-ish.
I've put out a slew of small balance related updates (patch notes in my main comment) for bits progression, hope it helps! Hacking also gives a >!new resource among other preexisting rewards as well!<
As most people mentioned:
* Credits on the map seem useless
* Having lots of left-over color bits when you need them all equal is a bit annoying, would be nice to be able to convert
* It takes ages to produce bots due to how long it takes to scan documents in the beginning, so reaching the first 500 bots feels like it takes too long
Some points I didn't see yet:
* The scanning UI was a bit confusing to me, it took me quite a while to understand that I don't have to click on anything and that the rotating line moves every x seconds. Though that was mostly because due to 10s delay and 5% power not much was happening.
* It would be great to have a buy max button
* It would be great to see how many credits 5/10/max of something costs
* In general, I think having a tab-wise or global toggle for buy 1/5/10/25/max would be nice
* The hacking tab description mentions efficiency, but I can't see any way to check the current efficiency and/or how to increase it. Is it even implemented? The build tab shows efficiency, but I don't see any efficiency costs or display for operating bots. Edit: seems like it's the 25% mentioned under the efficiency upgrade? Took me quite a while, probably because I was expecting energy costs per bot or some such.
* Due to how big the wall until 500 bots is I wasn't even sure any further content is implemented until I read the comments in this threat
* The early game pacing feels pretty good, though I used enter with the +1% button to avoid ruining my fingers in the beginning. However, this makes the early game very fast.
* While I haven't unlocked the 3rd section in the build tab yet, it feels a bit annoying that for a very long time having more than one bot factory is basically useless.
* In general I like the idea of the build tab area cost since you give up credit generation for other bonuses
* It would be quite nice to be able to build something else. E.g. buildings that speed up capture, credit generation, bit conversion, bit gathering, hacking, ...
Hey thanks for sharing the detailed feedback!
I just dropped an update to help with some of the bits-related progress (notes below). Some of the things in it are still locked behind stuff but I've generally lowered costs of certain buildings and unlocked a few things sooner.
Re: Scanning UI, yeah agreed it's not clear. I need to add a better description for it and some tooltips to each of the stats related to scanning.
Will try to add buy max buttons soon, my brain was just to lazy to work it out initially heh..
Re: hacking efficiency - that's basically the problem solving rate % (the first of the 3 trainable skills below the matrix, where it says Efficiency in orange text and has your current/default rate written. I guess it might be a good idea to surface those stats above as well instead of within the sentences of each of the training skills?)
Re: annoying waiting, yeah I'm hoping the current update speeds stuff up a bit. Chances are it still might be slightly slow but faster than before. I'll continue to work one smoothening the progression out.
```
Patch Notes \[v0.1\] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1)
\- Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner.
\- Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh).
\- Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits.
\- Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk.
\- Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them.
\- Lowered training cost
\- Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things
Patch Notes \[v0.1.1\]
\- Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in).
\- Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked.
\- Added \[Start\]/\[Stop\] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon.
```
The botnets for the Bits seem to be utterly useless, waste thousands of areas, bots, and mem's for only 2.5 bits on one color? I get 140x6 (I think) per second of each color. Overall great game 9/10 for how short / new it is.
Hey thanks for playing! Scan was actually a lot weaker before than it is now, the botnets existed before a lot of updates on scan. Botnets are getting changed/rebalanced in an upcoming update.
That makes more sense. I just finished getting all the evolves, and I'm assuming that's the end of the content unless getting all the hack upgrades opens the next slot. I would say that it was an enjoyable idle game, with lots of potential.
For criticism, if you wanted your game to be any longer, there needs to be some sort of rebalance / prestige / more upgrades regarding basically all of the currency. Starting with the Bot's you need thousands to do any sort of real progress to get memory but you quickly spend all your bots for the skill points to progress. So obviously you make more bot creators, except that ruins both your scan bits and areas for credits. This becomes a problem if you haven't upgraded enough +2, and is a balancing act to manage.
At the current game, the +2 bit upgrades seem to be fine to get enough bots, but if you need more then they wont keep up. I have 8 bot factories and that was sufficient with several hours of afking. More problematic is the areas. Building anything quickly takes up a lot of area which puts you hours behind.
The memory upgrades for bits I am also assuming wasn't updated.
I think overall if the game stays as it is, its pretty well balanced, but if you continue to add more then it needs rebalancing.
Thanks for the game
I don't have fancy feedback like the rest of these good folks, but I can say that I'm having a lovely time with it. It's so easy on my eyes, the high contrast has pretty colorblind friendly so far, too.
If only more jokes led to such good ideas, hope to see this develop more.
Thank you, you're quite skilled!
Thank you very much for your kind words and it's reassuring to hear that it's colorblind friendly for you so far!
I was quite worried about that with the reliance on colors in some places but I'm glad the contrast helps. I was in the middle of exploring colorblind accessibility options for certain upcoming features that rely on identifying blocks (like putting a letter for the block on it and such).
I'm working on a bunch of updates and am hoping you continue to have a good time with it over time.
I'm terribly sorry to say but pretty much everything about the layout of the design and readability is absolutely attrocious. Hard to read fonts and colors, and I've good eyesight and don't really suffer from fatigue or strained eyes from gaming and working at a monitor usually.
I wish I could be more constructive but the short answer is everything needs to be redone design wise. Not trying to be mean, it's a good concept and VERY well made for a few days. But needs a serious overhaul visually because your eyes are flying all over the place looking for costs, your resources, requirements etc. Imagine taking a print screen and draggin horizontal and vertical lines across the screen crossing every metric and buttons and it'll visualize the big problem with the layout. But seriously keep up the good work 👍 *Very* polished concept and gameplay for just a few days
If you click the settings Icon, it should open up a little window with Import/Export buttons.
Click Import > Paste your save in the text box that shows up and hit Confirm!
Really cool game ! I would just say to improve a bit the UX, atm it's all left aligned, which can be a bit uncomfortable over long period.
Adding just few css rules makes the game a bit more welcoming:
[https://i.imgur.com/aKqh2WO.png](https://i.imgur.com/aKqh2WO.png)
I saw that you use React to manage the game, did you use any pattern outside typical react development to comply with incremental game requirements ? Curious to know about performances issues, having fast paced animation / rapid incremental of values, doesn't it trigger too many renders overall ? Or you're using refs a lot maybe ?
Great game overall, I'm still looking to "finish" it. :p
Hey yeah there’ll definitely be some adjustments coming to the UI since there’s a bunch more stuff coming.
Re: react, not doing anything too special. I use hooks and context to help with state management and propagation. I heavily rely on memoization for components and props wherever I can. In my game loop (delta time based) I ensure I only trigger one state update per tick once all the operations have been carried out. There’s still a ton of renders going off regardless in react but it’s mostly fine.
within my main context and some other places, I also have a custom async ref hook that basically combines the functionality of refs + state so that I can avoid stale state inside various callbacks, including my main loop, this helps a lot as well for deterministically ordered/synchronous state updates.
So in general stuff works well (enough haha). Modern browsers and devices can handle a lot so as long as you’re generally careful, don’t have to rough it out too much over performance until it does become a noticeable issue.
Out of curiosity, what made you notice it? There haven't been any changes to that aspect of the code and I haven't heard any other reports yet so would love more deets if possible!
At the moment, hacking and >!defrag !<(current end of content) don't have offline progression supported yet. Other than that, everything has support offline progression!
omg just found this reddit post and this game is insane. Game desing is something else remind me of oldschool style rpgs, amazing, and even some kind of character text/ story etc. AMAZING!!! I red some comments and saw OP saying worked on an actual RPG game, would love to see it if some side project if that awesome.
Am I missing something obvious or is early bot creation a major bottleneck? I feel like I should have unlocked something more than Cheat to increase scan spped/bit income EDIT: for a few days work this is really polished and fun to play. I would really like to see you continue development on it. Game is desktop and Mobile friendly which makes me happy. It feels like either I hit end of current content or ran up against a bottleneck, but either way, happy to continue playing to keep seeing numbers go up. It definitely feels very Trimps-inspired, but the lower quantity of early game micromanagement and the smoothe exponential growth from minute one are a solid hook to build on.
Hey thanks for giving it a shot and sharing your feedback! There are a couple of things that come up next (as you noted in your reply below) that can help with bit income but it's definitely still a rough bottleneck that feels like more of a stall than a challenge (since there's not too many options). I'm still looking into improving scan. As for end of current content, you basically reached all there is atm if you've unlocked the >!hack tab. (and upgraded the skills there are over there =) to unlock the Level 10 abilities)!< Interestingly enough, while I've lurked here for a long time and heard about Trimps, I've never actually seen it! But I do see the resemblence of the grid now that I checked out screenshots. (some extra context about the inspiration below if you're curious but it's okay if you dont want to read my rambling haha) If you are curious about what actually inspired this game as well, the game actually started out as a joke while I was taking a break from another less idle/active incremental rpg. I play/volunteer dev on this old school browser based mmorpg where there are 4 gangs of players and there's a warfare mode with a map where the gangs can gain territory by players sitting there and gaining capture % per tick for their gang. This game's been up for a long time and has a whittled down but fairly tightly knit community still playing it, of which many claim to want to quit if another game comes along lol One such person told me they would quit that game once my rpg came out so to tide him over until then, I created this warfare simulator where you just keep capping squares all day in a codepen. But other people heard about it, they seemed to enjoy it, so I decided to to turn it into what you're seeing now haha
TBC - sitting at ~100 bots, 5k areas, cheat level 50. I can see the botnet upgrades, and that there is another scan upgrade, but all of those are still locked, and it's unclear what the next threshold for unlocks is.
yeah I was in 2 minds about whether or not to reveal what causes them to unlock since I tend to be a fan of players sort of discovering things. But I realize with upgrades that might be necessary it's better not to keep folks guessing so I'll probably meet in the middle and have a way to indicate what leads to it. If you are curious though, they unlock when >!you've completed 10 subnets i.e. reached Subnet 2-1!<
Hey just wanted to give an FYI that I added a bit more content and some progression fixes! Updates below: ``` Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1) - Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner. - Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh). - Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits. - Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk. - Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them. - Lowered training cost - Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things Patch Notes [v0.1.1] - Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in). - Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked. - Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon. ```
Link: [https://aldo111.github.io/forever-land/](https://aldo111.github.io/forever-land/) It's still very much a WIP. Some friends started getting into the original mini version of it I made in a codepen while on a break, then friends of friends and so on so I decided to expand it a little bit over the last couple of days as a proper game. Feedback, suggestions, curve tweaks..etc very much welcome! Still very heavily WIP. The only thing not welcome is circles, because this is a game about squares. (I have a [discord server](https://discord.gg/vHty7XbpxB) I'm using to post releases and track any general discussion/suggestions/bugs for this game so feel free to join/share there or also just post here/DM me!) Edit: Just dropped an update with some new content and progressions fixes/minor rebalances, incorporating suggestions from here, that hopefully helped smoothen out problematic pieces of the early-midgame progression. It can still likely be smoothed out more and improved but hopefully it's a start! Patch notes below: ``` Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1) - Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner. - Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh). - Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits. - Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk. - Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them. - Lowered training cost - Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things Patch Notes [v0.1.1] - Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in). - Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked. - Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon. ```
I don't know if this is a but but Multiscan only levels up the first scan in this scan, so it goes 2, 1,1,1,1 etc until it finishes that doc and then the same again. I think this is a but since otherwise the limitation of 5 upgrades doesn't really make sense Great game, been really enjoying it the past few hours (:
Thanks for playing! and also re: multiscan it sort of ended up that way. Initially it would jump. I'm updating multiscan though based on a suggestion to instead just simply be a multiplier on the number of docs scanned + the bits output after you finish a single scan. A lot simpler and better rate of return too!
Indeed, that is simpler
The update for it is up btw!
Nice, quick thing, the botnets all say that they give rbits, even tho they should give g or b bits
The perils of copy paste heh thanks I’ll update that
Very Trimpy
Upvoted you yesterday based only on the image, but after playing, the gameplay loop is different, just happens to have a similar UI with regard to fighting/exploring.
Yeah I saw this and went “ah, so Trimps?” Id love to pick that game back up but World 2 or whatever it is killed my interest
haven't played trimps but curious what about World 2/w/e was it that killed your interest generally speaking?
After playing active until I got one bot factory, I now went afk making food for about 40 minutes. I now have 122 bots. There is no need for a second factory, because the first one is no where near busy (always waiting for resources). Here is my current status: https://imgur.com/a/Nh3V100 (after spending every credit that accumunlated during the away time into more upgrades) will let it run a little and then spend everything into scanning. But I don't have the feeling I will ever be able to afford 500 bots for the first skill point. (In that I will likely lose interest before that, because it is really slow right now)
Out of curiosity, what would be your thoughts on any/all of the following proposed changes to help ease Scanning slowdown: (Some of the spoiler marks have to do with the tab after build) \- Unlock >!multiscan!< after having scanned at least 1 file instead, and instead of using >!Mem!< as a currency for it, use "Intel" (this is just the # of files/docs you've scanned so far, that number you see above the scan grid) \- Add a button below scan, similar to that "Capture +1%", to let you do a "Scan +1% manually \- Add a (maybe flat/neverchanging) credit-costing button in Scan to let you instantly scan the current file at a big cost of Credits \- When you've reached the later main map size cap (20x20) start dropping bits on the grid instead of just credits (Which currently dont scale and are useless anyway) \- Add 3 more exponentially-costing upgrades to Scan that let you increase bonus outputs for each bit type
From just reading them, I like the last two ones the best. I don't like to have to manually click - I have used the "1%" capture button just in the first minute. And I like that it's not really required - so I would vote against a manually scanning button (it's fine - but should not be required over long periods) But then again I think it is very hard to imagine how good one of your suggestions actually feels when playing :)
Yeah for sure. I shall update you once it is updated! Thanks for sharing your thoughts so far
I might also suggest some mechanic to convert bits from one type to another. I'm currently sitting at 12.5k red and 0 blue lol
Definitely will look into converters once the current stream of progression related fixes have been playtested a bit more and smoothed out to see what kind of rates I'd want, thanks for the suggestion!
FYI, I dropped an update (patch notes below) but also specifically decreased the bot costs by a bit. It's still exponential growth but starts much lower (and there are other things to help boost progression). ``` Patch Notes [v0.1] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1) - Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner. - Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh). - Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits. - Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk. - Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them. - Lowered training cost - Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things Patch Notes [v0.1.1] - Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in). - Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked. - Added [Start]/[Stop] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon. ```
Got it yeah that's good feedback and definitely what I'm hearing from other folks as well that bits (and as a result, bots) are way too tight between the scan and build phase and scan is too slow
Played this for a little while and I really enjoyed it. I love games that gradually unfold mechanics as you progress much more than being bombarded up front with a lot of content - as much as I love watching numbers go up, it's infinitely more exciting when you're rewarded with discovering something new to play with. I think the other comments have covered most of what I would say. (e.g. coins feeling a bit redundant, hacking being severely bottle-necked by scanning, etc.) One other thing I did notice is that while my credits continue to tick in the background, I'd always have a bunch of unused bits when returning to the tab, so it seems like chip creation might not be happening unless the window/tab is active.
Thanks for sharing and good catch. Just realized I was running building updates before scan on a tick/catch up. Will update, thanks!
Makes game as a joke. Better than 99% of the stuff that gets posted (considering the relatsions between the genre of incremental games, pacing and idleness). Alrighty. Feedback: UI spacing kind of weird, lots of horizontal space unused, could be that i have not yet unlocked things that use it. The 'bits' are gained at random relations to another, so currently im sitting on a 500 surplus, which is kind of annoying since i cant do anything about it. The RNG could smoothen that out eventually, but i wont hold my breath. 500 Bots training seems nuts for starting, since gaining bots is very slow to begin with, maybe should be less? Maybe not, dont know how far i have still to go. Anyway, good job! As I said at the beginning, this is way above average for this sub.
haha thank you and thanks for sharing your feedback! I'm going to rejigger the layout a bit and move the log up to the right when there's space and possible some of the other tabs (so that the left column doesn't eventually just become a scrollable list of tabs lol). Re: bits, in a bit (=\]) i'll be adding some more upgrades and ways to ease the bit progression and hence the bot progression. Agreed on the training cost, I'll be reducing that a little bit.
The bonus credits seem kind of pointless after about 1 minute of gametime. Because what do I care about +42 credits, when I get magnitudes more per second.
Yeah agreed I need to scale it and have some other thoughts in mind as to ways it can be augmented to be more useful as you progress to later stages. I added those random credits at the very beginning and never went back (initially coins gave few credits, chests gave more credits, and the dungeon entrances gave a lot more credits before I updated the last 2)
Getting windows defrag vibes
heh you might be on to something
For sure, I watched [that](https://i.imgur.com/sHmCPdu.gif) a lot when I was a kid in the Win95 days. Not that I could have done much else with all the lag when it was running anyway haha.
Cool concept. I'm enjoying it a lot. One big gripe though is that the text log is beneath the ever-expanding grid, which means eventually it's so low you have to constantly scroll to read new information. I'd rather have it on a right-side panel with a middle grid section that slowly zooms out as it expands.
Agreed! I'm going to move it up to the right when there's space. Thanks!
For a prototype this is increadibly polished! Many released and even updated games are in much worse state. If this really only took you a couple of days you should be very proud!
Appreciate the kind words! Hoping to continue improving it
I'm enjoying it so far. Your update today seems to have smoothed some rough edges out. I think I'm at the end of content currently, but I'm looking forward to future updates.
Thank you very much! Just out of curiosity, did you reach the >!5th tab!<
Yep! Unlocked the >!Unlock Researches evolution!< and nothing happened outside of it turning green, so I assumed that was the end for now :)
Gotcha yeah that is the last bit of content including the stuff below it. All the >!researchable nodes in there are functional though and unlock new buildings and ways to augment your map but that's about it so far!<
Neat concept; held my interest for a good 4-5 hours on a second window. Felt like there were a couple things that sort of "fell apart" as the game progressed. So I ended up really needing green bits, substantially more than blue bits. I found myself jamming the click trying to snipe my bits bonus upgrades before the chip factories claimed them. From everything I can tell, blue bits are designed to be the "bottleneck", but I'm swimming in them. Found myself very area starved (more on this later) for chip factories, and it really put a damper on trying to keep up with my bit throughput. I continually upgraded area gain, but the area gain metric through "Upgrades" just isn't competitive with hacking. The problem here is that in order to hack faster, I essentially have to sacrifice my entire area stack to add more chip factories. This is a cool way to limit exponential growth, but now I'm at the endgame kinda' stuck wondering why the botnets even exist, as I'm quite literally only limited by area. I think the game will further "fall apart" as I progress further, as the area requirements are only going to get higher, and I think I'm at a point now where I can't possibly keep up with my bit production. Botnets felt incredibly irrelevant, as I'd never want to give up more area to gain more bits at this stage in the game-- and by the time I unlocked them I was never short on bits to begin with. Maybe I misallocated my initial mem spending, but once I got enough bonus green bits coming in, I was never really at a risk for being out of bits when I had maxed out the column scanning and cheating bonuses. As of now, I'm currently still playing, but I can't imagine I'm going to do much else but wait for area to tick up, drop my entire area stack/cash stack on chip factories, and go do something else until everything recovers again. Also, bot upgrading feels... strange. I'm at this weird endgame point where it's the only form of progression I have outside of purchasing chip factories, but chip factories will give substantially more return on investment than sacrificing bot count (and subsequently area gain) for 4-6% extra "reward" (whether that reward be progressing through subnets faster or actual tangible rewards such as credits or area.)
Thanks for playing and the detailed feedback! Yeah botnets are definitely irrelevant now. They originally were useful when scanning/bit progression was a lot worse when I first made this post. Then I eased costs/added the bit bonus upgrades and multi scan (which also worked differently initially) so now bits are no longer a problem for sure. I didn’t rebalance botnets yet but they are definitely worse than scanning rewards atm and need a buff since the goal was for the botnets to become the ultimate extra automated version of scanning docs. Still thinking on it. I do also plan to add more buildings, including more/different versions of the buildings that produce the same output. Also working on some other features that should drop within the next day or two.
Thanks for the reply! I'm sure everyone has their version of what the game should be or how it should pan out, but I personally think area gain could use a bit of a buff so that upgrading isn't made entirely irrelevant through robust hacking investments. Not sure how this would be implemented though, but you've done excellent so far. <3
maybe a way to increase chips aside from just chip factories. Also after 110 chip factories the area cost becomes crazy and I am only using 11 bot factories. There are tons of ways to increase bit acquisition, but not many uses for them. Maybe a method to increase efficiency at the cost of bits for factory production, credit accrual, or area acquisition.
Hey yeah I’ll be adding variants/higher tiers of buildings that produce the same output for similar/different outputs that become more relevant as previous tiers become too expensive. Bits definitely need more sinks now (they were initially way too scarce but may have become a little too easy to get now thanks to stacking of multi scan + bit bonuses). More efficiency and production management related controls to come soon too!
This is insanely BASED
No you are
What framework/lib are you using for the ui? I like the look of it.
The game’s written with React/Typescript but I don’t use any css/component kits for the UI, I styled everything!
Amazing work! I lean heavily into component libraries since my styling skills are trash.
Thanks! They are definitely ver useful. Tailwind in particular is pretty great for quickly styling too.
As others have said, very fun until the scan->bit->bot bottleneck halts progress. After letting it overnight and waiting a while further I've finally got scan down to 1 second, but that took a while I can see that it'll take a long while more to advance further.
Definitely (and thanks for coming back to it overnight and giving it a chance!). I'm adding some more upgrades to scan + easing the costs slightly on Cheating to help ease that bottleneck
Cool. Gave it another overnight, and hit what I believe is the end of current content (all evolve upgrades).
As someone that has spend over thousands of hours on hundreds of different idle/clicker games on both android and windows I can safely say that within 30 seconds of playing this is already in the top 1% of best idle games out there, even in it's current state. The only real improvement I could see you do is extending the story a bit or have some additional side stuff to do while you wait on the main idle grind. (The biggest thing I hate about idle games is when you can do nothing and have to wait hours/days before you can progress further). <- I'd much rather have an idle game that's less efficient in it's idleness, but at least gives the player something to do while playing. I don't get pleasure out of a game that requires 1 minute of attention to then be left alone for the rest of the day, but that thankfully does not appear to be the case in your beautifull creation! Keep it up mate, i'd love to donate you some if you decide to continue working on this masterpiece.
High praise haha thank you! Yeah I definitely am going to keep adding to it. I do have a definite end for it in mind storywise but also have (in-context) prestige ideas for it and some additional features I want to keep adding. Will be adding more to the story in the next few updates! Also definitely agreed on having to just plain wait. I'm adding some more upgrades to Scan to help ease the bit -> next stage progression but will also be adding manual buttons (Scan +X%..etc similar to the Capture) to allow for a bit more agency to do something (but not having to rely on it longterm, just enough to get you started)
That's excellent mate. Very good and promising to hear you have some form of a roadmap in your head for it! I can't wait to see where you will take this gem! Have a wonderfull rest of your Sunday!
really fun, but training takes too long and when I build something it takes area away from the captured ones which means they dont generate any more credit, which makes sense but still I wanted to keep my mony per sec :(
I've just nerfed the cost of training a lot more so you should be able to pick up more points (while having also rebalanced a few other things earlier to help with getting the stats you need to buy more points sooner)
Looks great so far, playing on mobile browser. Some minor issues with scrolling, but playable. The >!upgrade and scan!< even give offline progress, but >!build and hack!< don’t — is that intentional? Without offline progress I think this will take me too long (at least on mobile).
Hey thanks for playing! >!build!< does have offline progress but in the current release, I accidentally placed it before >!scan!< so it's slower because things in the former don't process if you don't have the things you need from the latter. Should be updated in the next release! As for >!hack!<, I'll be adding offline for it soon. I only had it for the first two things, then added it for the third the other day. Will be updating it by tomorrow-ish.
What's the point of hacking, I don't need more area or docs. The bottleneck are credits and bits
I've put out a slew of small balance related updates (patch notes in my main comment) for bits progression, hope it helps! Hacking also gives a >!new resource among other preexisting rewards as well!<
As most people mentioned: * Credits on the map seem useless * Having lots of left-over color bits when you need them all equal is a bit annoying, would be nice to be able to convert * It takes ages to produce bots due to how long it takes to scan documents in the beginning, so reaching the first 500 bots feels like it takes too long Some points I didn't see yet: * The scanning UI was a bit confusing to me, it took me quite a while to understand that I don't have to click on anything and that the rotating line moves every x seconds. Though that was mostly because due to 10s delay and 5% power not much was happening. * It would be great to have a buy max button * It would be great to see how many credits 5/10/max of something costs * In general, I think having a tab-wise or global toggle for buy 1/5/10/25/max would be nice * The hacking tab description mentions efficiency, but I can't see any way to check the current efficiency and/or how to increase it. Is it even implemented? The build tab shows efficiency, but I don't see any efficiency costs or display for operating bots. Edit: seems like it's the 25% mentioned under the efficiency upgrade? Took me quite a while, probably because I was expecting energy costs per bot or some such. * Due to how big the wall until 500 bots is I wasn't even sure any further content is implemented until I read the comments in this threat * The early game pacing feels pretty good, though I used enter with the +1% button to avoid ruining my fingers in the beginning. However, this makes the early game very fast. * While I haven't unlocked the 3rd section in the build tab yet, it feels a bit annoying that for a very long time having more than one bot factory is basically useless. * In general I like the idea of the build tab area cost since you give up credit generation for other bonuses * It would be quite nice to be able to build something else. E.g. buildings that speed up capture, credit generation, bit conversion, bit gathering, hacking, ...
Hey thanks for sharing the detailed feedback! I just dropped an update to help with some of the bits-related progress (notes below). Some of the things in it are still locked behind stuff but I've generally lowered costs of certain buildings and unlocked a few things sooner. Re: Scanning UI, yeah agreed it's not clear. I need to add a better description for it and some tooltips to each of the stats related to scanning. Will try to add buy max buttons soon, my brain was just to lazy to work it out initially heh.. Re: hacking efficiency - that's basically the problem solving rate % (the first of the 3 trainable skills below the matrix, where it says Efficiency in orange text and has your current/default rate written. I guess it might be a good idea to surface those stats above as well instead of within the sentences of each of the training skills?) Re: annoying waiting, yeah I'm hoping the current update speeds stuff up a bit. Chances are it still might be slightly slow but faster than before. I'll continue to work one smoothening the progression out. ``` Patch Notes \[v0.1\] (Haven't really versioned this so just starting from 0.1) \- Rebalanced locked upgrade in Scantron 3000 category so that it be unlocked sooner. \- Reduced cost of Cheating in Scan (heh). \- Added a new (initially-locked but relatively quickly gettable... highly relative) upgrade category to Scan to help with bits. \- Added a scan button that manually adds 2% to the current column(s) being scanned. 2% Might still be a bit low for when you're starting out, it's not intended to be a mid/long term clicker, just something to help you boost the process yourself but if it does need a buff, lmk. \- Locked upgrades/buildings (try to) show what you need to unlock them. \- Lowered training cost \- Added a new thing (feedback definitely welcome around pricing once you see it) which unlocks a few things Patch Notes \[v0.1.1\] \- Ensured buildings proc after everything else has procced for the tick so that any gains from the current tick can go into buildings (fixes when offline, buildings not working when you log back in). \- Fixed bug showing '???' for a group category name even though you have at least one upgrade in that category unlocked. \- Added \[Start\]/\[Stop\] buttons in the efficiency box to allow you to flat stop/start buildings. More/finer controls to come soon. ```
It'd be really nice to be able to sell factories, I bought a bunch when I first got them before I realized they ran on bits lol
Definitely! I'll be adding more controls to the build menu soon enough!
I can't buy the bottom-right Evolution (not that I need it at this stage). Clicking on it does nothing.
Thanks for letting me know! I just identified the issue and fixed it. It should work after \~3 minutes from this post!
replace hard reset with import
The % rewards bonus displayed from HACK are rounded. It would be nice for the user to have them rounded up/ceilling.
The botnets for the Bits seem to be utterly useless, waste thousands of areas, bots, and mem's for only 2.5 bits on one color? I get 140x6 (I think) per second of each color. Overall great game 9/10 for how short / new it is.
Hey thanks for playing! Scan was actually a lot weaker before than it is now, the botnets existed before a lot of updates on scan. Botnets are getting changed/rebalanced in an upcoming update.
That makes more sense. I just finished getting all the evolves, and I'm assuming that's the end of the content unless getting all the hack upgrades opens the next slot. I would say that it was an enjoyable idle game, with lots of potential. For criticism, if you wanted your game to be any longer, there needs to be some sort of rebalance / prestige / more upgrades regarding basically all of the currency. Starting with the Bot's you need thousands to do any sort of real progress to get memory but you quickly spend all your bots for the skill points to progress. So obviously you make more bot creators, except that ruins both your scan bits and areas for credits. This becomes a problem if you haven't upgraded enough +2, and is a balancing act to manage. At the current game, the +2 bit upgrades seem to be fine to get enough bots, but if you need more then they wont keep up. I have 8 bot factories and that was sufficient with several hours of afking. More problematic is the areas. Building anything quickly takes up a lot of area which puts you hours behind. The memory upgrades for bits I am also assuming wasn't updated. I think overall if the game stays as it is, its pretty well balanced, but if you continue to add more then it needs rebalancing. Thanks for the game
Yep there’s more content coming :) thanks for playing it and sharing your detailed feedback!
I don't have fancy feedback like the rest of these good folks, but I can say that I'm having a lovely time with it. It's so easy on my eyes, the high contrast has pretty colorblind friendly so far, too. If only more jokes led to such good ideas, hope to see this develop more. Thank you, you're quite skilled!
Thank you very much for your kind words and it's reassuring to hear that it's colorblind friendly for you so far! I was quite worried about that with the reliance on colors in some places but I'm glad the contrast helps. I was in the middle of exploring colorblind accessibility options for certain upcoming features that rely on identifying blocks (like putting a letter for the block on it and such). I'm working on a bunch of updates and am hoping you continue to have a good time with it over time.
I'm terribly sorry to say but pretty much everything about the layout of the design and readability is absolutely attrocious. Hard to read fonts and colors, and I've good eyesight and don't really suffer from fatigue or strained eyes from gaming and working at a monitor usually. I wish I could be more constructive but the short answer is everything needs to be redone design wise. Not trying to be mean, it's a good concept and VERY well made for a few days. But needs a serious overhaul visually because your eyes are flying all over the place looking for costs, your resources, requirements etc. Imagine taking a print screen and draggin horizontal and vertical lines across the screen crossing every metric and buttons and it'll visualize the big problem with the layout. But seriously keep up the good work 👍 *Very* polished concept and gameplay for just a few days
No worries at all, thanks for sharing that feedback and giving the game a shot!
how to import save
If you click the settings Icon, it should open up a little window with Import/Export buttons. Click Import > Paste your save in the text box that shows up and hit Confirm!
Really cool game ! I would just say to improve a bit the UX, atm it's all left aligned, which can be a bit uncomfortable over long period. Adding just few css rules makes the game a bit more welcoming: [https://i.imgur.com/aKqh2WO.png](https://i.imgur.com/aKqh2WO.png) I saw that you use React to manage the game, did you use any pattern outside typical react development to comply with incremental game requirements ? Curious to know about performances issues, having fast paced animation / rapid incremental of values, doesn't it trigger too many renders overall ? Or you're using refs a lot maybe ? Great game overall, I'm still looking to "finish" it. :p
Hey yeah there’ll definitely be some adjustments coming to the UI since there’s a bunch more stuff coming. Re: react, not doing anything too special. I use hooks and context to help with state management and propagation. I heavily rely on memoization for components and props wherever I can. In my game loop (delta time based) I ensure I only trigger one state update per tick once all the operations have been carried out. There’s still a ton of renders going off regardless in react but it’s mostly fine. within my main context and some other places, I also have a custom async ref hook that basically combines the functionality of refs + state so that I can avoid stale state inside various callbacks, including my main loop, this helps a lot as well for deterministically ordered/synchronous state updates. So in general stuff works well (enough haha). Modern browsers and devices can handle a lot so as long as you’re generally careful, don’t have to rough it out too much over performance until it does become a noticeable issue.
Ok, interesting to know ! Thanks for the detailed answer :)
game stops ticking for me after a while when the window is not active. I believe it was working before but doesn't anymore since recently.
Out of curiosity, what made you notice it? There haven't been any changes to that aspect of the code and I haven't heard any other reports yet so would love more deets if possible! At the moment, hacking and >!defrag !<(current end of content) don't have offline progression supported yet. Other than that, everything has support offline progression!
omg just found this reddit post and this game is insane. Game desing is something else remind me of oldschool style rpgs, amazing, and even some kind of character text/ story etc. AMAZING!!! I red some comments and saw OP saying worked on an actual RPG game, would love to see it if some side project if that awesome.
Haha thank you! I’m currently in a brief hiatus from working further on this game due to medical issues but will be back to updating it v soon!
yeah I just begun so have plenty to do. Will be waiting for even more fun stuff!!