CLICKER HEROES 2 PERMADEATH OPTION UPGRADE
But you quickly upgrade, and upgrade, and upgrade some more, until you are literally generating thousands of points per second.
CLICKER HEROES 2 PERMADEATH OPTION MANUAL
You start off able to generate something like 1 point per second, and this requires manual clicking. Now along comes Cookie Clicker and its ilk. You basically can't make your character fundamentally stronger, faster, or better than he was when he started (at least, not permanently). Mario? You can collect powerups, which are handy when you need them, but then they're used up. Other games have little to no development at all. And, as you get tougher, it gets harder and harder to get any tougher than that. You started out able to deal 1d8 damage, and after all that development and quest-reward magic swords and so on, you now deal 2d8+2. In a venerable game like D&D, you start off with maybe 5 hit points, and after literal years of building your character up to level 30, you've got maybe 50-100 hit points. By that I mean, how much more bigger/better/faster/stronger can you get your in-game personality to be, compared to where it started? I think what clicker games have really optimized is the development curve. Simple hack prevention is enough to prevent people from ruining the game for themselves. Due to the "wait a while" nature of clickers, it's very tempting to just hack the numbers you need, but that absolutely destroys the draw of the game. If possible, the game should prevent hacking. Exporting a save for safe-keeping is a serious relief to the player. The best clickers also give a way to start over with bonuses, promising that you'll get to later parts of the gameplay faster than if you just kept going. If there isn't something you can do to speed things up in a meaningful way, then you lose the player. The best clickers give you something to do when you start, and then encourage you to wait a bit. Or even something more complex, which threatens to come close to being a regular game. This could be as simple as a linear story that happens automatically, or a situation where mismanagement leads to "deaths" in the community. They get you to care about the things that are incrementing, or the people depending on those numbers, instead of just wanting numbers to increase. The really good ones also have some kind of plot or story. So I think a clicker has to give a frequent increase in the number of things you're thinking about and dealing with, and not just once in a while. I ended up writing cheats to get to the end, rather than waiting. I recently played a slow incrementer and it was not fun. This causes you to consider whether you'll buy the cheaper or the more expensive item, and which would increase your numbers faster. The least of these is having multiple tiers of things to buy that go up in price as you buy more, but scale linearly in output. They present challenges to the player that prevent them from just blindly clicking to maximize efficiency. For me, the best clicker games don't just add numbers. Unfortunately, I don't think clickers would be compelling without it.ĭepth. This is something I worry about as I design games. In particular, the speaker mentioned that it tricks you into feeling like you've been productive, even though you haven't, and this can lead to letter other parts of your life suffer in consequence. I recall a gamedev talk that discusses "social" games and the ways that they trick the player into player, and the detrimental effect on people's lives because of it. In managing resources so as to promote further growth in the best way possible. I've found that there is a sense of satisfaction in getting numbers to increase. There's an addictive quality to them that defies reason, though. And what did I find? They're just as uninspiring to design as to play. So of course, I've looked at designing them. (AKA incremental games.) I know they're stupid and pointless, but I just can't help but play them.