idle thoughts.

loops and boops.

In my first post I was talking through how I might describe my game to folks. This was brought to mind because I have started attending a few of the WAGIC game development community events, so naturally everyone is curious to hear what projects are being worked on.

I realise I still haven't actually given a good overview of the game (see previous post for reasons why that is hard), but one of the main features will be a procedural platformer that provides a semi-idler type loop. Think of it as an arcade machine in something like Arcade Paradise. The player will load up the platformer with a timer and run around collecting resources until they a) die or b) run out of time. Their run through that level will then loop X upgradeable times, providing them with the resources they gathered in the first playthrough that many more times.

There are still a lot of questions to answer around how the loops operate (which might be the topic of another post) but one of the things that has been occupying my mind lately is: what do players do while waiting for their idler machines to...idle?

filling time.

In something like a traditional RPG or open-world action game, the time between player actions is spent generally either travelling to the next spot, or performing some kind of administration like inventory management or upgrading their character. Idle games generally don't have that problem; any time that isn't spent actively clicking or managing the resources that you have available to you is, by nature of the genre's key features (i.e. generators), still productive. In fact, that dopamine hit of coming back to an idle game and seeing the number having gotten so much larger since your last sighting is probably a key feature for some folks.

Management of 'skipping' content[1] by abusing this ability to just go away and come back when the number is larger is managed a couple of different ways. The 'unlocked' way, for when you want players to learnscientific notation, is managed by an ever-increasing requirement for raw numbers, like a Risset rhythm that loops back on itself to require higher and higher derivatives of those raw number increases. Generators that generate other generators, that multiple successive generaton, that sort of thing. Alternatively, you can lock the player in to progressively higher bands by introducing some kind of limit, or bank. They can only hold 100 coins until they unlock the next tier of bank, wich allows 1000 coins, and so on. This forces the player to come back more often to spend those resources to avoid inefficiency.

The bank method can reduce the amount of time the player might spend away from the platforming sections in WLDiG, but it's still a temporary solution as eventually the bank must be raised to stop players feeling punished/frustrated. So what to do while they wait for their loops to finish and their bank limit be hit? The aforementioned Arcade Paradise has the player perform menial jobs around the laundromat in which the arcade is located: picking up rubbish, helping people wash and dry, or cleaning the toilet. These are mainly to hammer home the message that the arcade makes way more money than the menial jobs of the laundromat. Eventually playing and finishing the arcade games will upgrade them to get more popularity and money, and the menial jobs are put completely aside[2] in favour of completing challenges in the different minigames. In the case of WLDiG I may be able to have a version of this where the menial tasks are less menial and more interesting to keep the player's interest while they are waiting for the resource looping to occur.

This is the case in another idle blend game I've played recently, Cauldron. Again, it has multiple minigames that you complete that provide resources based on how well you do in them. But in the meantime, you explore a 2D map and fight enemies in the style of an old-school JRPG. Exploring unlocks new companions who can then help you to play some of the minigames, as well as offer powerful abilities during combat once you've unlocked some of the later upgrades. The exploration and battles take long enough that by the time you've finished them, there's a good chance you have enough resources that have ticked over to upgrade something in one of the minigames, and use that upgrade to try and get a better score. This is a fine balance to maintain, though, and the tradeoff is that sometimes the exploration can feel like a chore to grind through rather than an exciting tactical battle if you've spent enough time building up resources and unlocks.

vision and revision.

Thinking this through and playing quite a bit of both Cauldron and Arcade Paradise has made me realise that I want my side activity to fulfil a few requirements:

Pulling those requirements together gives me a few verbs to look into: things like growing, mixing, cleaning, searching, gathering. There's also a vague notion in the back of my head that the resources themselves could be a management activity. Imagining that they pop out of the platformer dimension to be represented as a physical object that must be carried around and dumped places. Something to think about.

Okay, enough navel gazing. It's Sunday, the dog needs walking, and my taxes need doing (blergh). Until next time!

  1. In my opinion there's no such thing as skipping content in a good idler, since the true content is contained in the interactivity of the resource spending/management part of it. ↩︎

  2. In actuality you never need to do the laundry. This has been confirmed by the devs; they intended for the player to work out the disparity between the economies for themselves and stop doing the laundry at the point at which they decided the value proposition was no longer there. ↩︎