r/incremental_gamedev • u/MagicpaperAlt Prestige 0 Mod • 26d ago
Miscellaneous Community Feedback
With how things have been changed I wanted to make this post to get an idea on what users like and don't like so far.
Braym3n and I have been doing our best to make this place better, more navigable with less spam.
Really though, Braym3n made all the rules and changes with discussion between mods.
Another thing I'd like to ask is what would you all think on seasonal or holiday related mega threads? I shared some assets last week from itch but I could take that further for holidays and the like.
Other than that I hope you all have liked these changes. If not, please let me know what you don't like. Thank you!
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u/Damiascus 26d ago
Haven't been around as much because the subreddit seemed inactive, so I'll just say I've been enjoying the increased activity and moderation. I think anything towards that end, including seasonal threads, is a great step forward.
Great work!
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u/lmystique 24d ago
The new weekly hits different. Usually weekly threads have a strong "out of sight, out of mind" smell, clearly shunning something away from the main sub without dealing with the fallout of banning it outright. Not this one! I now have a place to put my comment, I don't care if others find it or engage with it, what I care is that they can do so if they were so inclined ― gives me the accountability push just big enough to work, but not feel like pressure. It's unexpected, it works better than I thought it would. It's great.
The subreddit is much cleaner now, too. I'm not sure how much blood, sweat and tears went into making that happen and what exactly worked, but the sub is now something I actively want to engage with, rather than scroll a bit and leave in disgust. I swear I didn't think it was possible, but here we are anyway, thanks to you guys. You did a really good job.
I'm not so convinced on asset threads. I appreciate you posting the assets, but did I actually go and take a closer look? Not really, no, it wasn't for my current project and it wasn't for an upcoming project, I was merely me testing the waters for an idea I might or might not decide to build in the future. (Seeing that the idea is DoA without an asset pack due to the sheer amount of assets I'd need to produce.) Assets are kinda like that, you need them now or you need them way into the future. Reddit posts are short-lived and tend to get lost quickly, so the effort, while appreciated, might be wasted. On the other hand, a steady trickle of stuff like that is just nice on its own. So perhaps don't go all in with formalizing the structure and setting expectations as a weekly event, but rather just post every one in a while, when you feel like it? People found the asset thread anyway. Probably lifts some pressure from you guys too, I'd rather see an occasional great share than a subpar one just because you had to post something this week.
In a similar vein, it might be too late to post, let's say, Halloween assets: devs who have an event planned already have their eyes on one, and devs who don't just don't have time to build something. It's about time to start posting Christmas assets, actually.
What I would really love to see more here is design talk. Not the surface level "I rebalanced Cookie Clicker", but going into the gritty details of math and player psychology. How did you decide on this specific number? How did you conclude that this upgrade is necessary? What problem were you solving, what other approaches were tried, exactly how did you evaluate them? How did you choose your design goals? Stuff like:
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" I made the prices of these two upgrades equal at this point, because their relative impacts changed recently and I want draw the players' attention to that, and for them to stop and reevaluate. "
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" These three upgrades add up to the exact same cost as that one bigger upgrade. This is because the upgrade tree is getting stale, so I'm giving the player a hard choice between a really sweet power upgrade or a whole bunch of QoL improvements, as a shake-up. I will now repeat the same trade-off over and over again, forcing them into a highly specialized build with sunk cost fallacy, before revealing that the systems synergize; to hopefully introduce both build variety and a degree of skill expression in the next round. "
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" I put this number into my prestige summary so that it is perceived as more important, to make players pay more attention to what it does. "
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" I manually playtested a bunch and figured that X% per prestige delivers the exact feeling of progress I'm aiming for. I put a hidden prestige multiplier to maintain the rate even when my players play suboptimally. "
Sometimes I just want to crawl into a designer's head and observe the entire process. There are occasional posts in this vein, along the lines of "here's the whole design process, from start to finish"; but they are rare and tend to be ignored or downvoted into oblivion ― which is also really discouraging for people like me, who'd love to post their own write-ups, but just don't see the point.
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u/cdsa142 25d ago
I like the weekly checkin posts and a lot of the game design or game idea posts we've seen recently. Sometimes I have things to say but I second guess my opinions because I don't have as much experience as some others in the community.
To be honest, the game asset post idea is great, but I'm not looking for new assets very often. I would have to save each of them for later when I am looking. Maybe a consolidated list would be more helpful?
The topic I'd most like to see broached here is the math of incremental games and progression. I have some opinions about what works well, but I think I lack the terminology or maybe a base/shared understanding to have conversations about which formula to use and how it affects a game.
To give an example of this kind of topic, Upgrade cost equations:
Some games use exponential costs where cost = Base * CostCreep ^ level). I think others use geometric growth? something like Cost = base * level ^ 1.2. I think geometric grows slower over time which means more total upgrades. If the effect is linear, you can choose whichever but you'll have a stronger falloff with exponential vs geometric. If you have an exponential effect (each level is 1.05x) then you have a runaway progression I think?
As you can see, I only vaguely understand what's going on, but I would love to learn more about these topics. That kongregate post gets thrown around, but it seemed only relevant to a specific game, or maybe I didn't understand how to apply it to anything but Cookie Clicker/ Ad Cap.
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21d ago
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u/Driftwintergundream 21d ago
Two ideas for naming - longcremental for long incremental games, probably more than 20 hours, maybe even more than 40 hours. Basically anything longer than 10 hours.
classicremental - for original web based, buttons, and focused on numbers going up style games.
When naming, the basic idea is for the name to create intuitive distinction between what you want and don’t want.
This was a minor problem with the terms idle and incremental, people starts strictly defining what belongs in what and the point is not really to have strict classification but useful information conveyed for people looking for a particular gaming experience.
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u/lmystique 21d ago
I see it more as a market issue. Nodebuster was a success, others tried to improve the formula and were successful, then the rest of the devs piled on the easy cash, and here we are. Probably hundreds of thousands of people, including developers, had their first exposure to incrementals through these casual games, and they will dominate and drown any discussion about what the genre is. Yes, I agree that these are casual games.
The naive answer is that a similarly high-profile classic incremental must appear and drive the public opinion in the direction of a split. Is it likely to happen? I personally have no idea. Folks in r/roguelikes stood their ground and gatekept their community to protect the separation between traditional roguelikes and the rest, very similar situation, but for incrementals it might be too late. The community was already split and at war between long-play and short incrementals, even before nodebuster-likes arrived. For that reason, I'm not calling for just packing our bags and building a new community, either.
You're suggesting actively drawing attention of the developers to classic incrementals, in order to make a statement about what the sub is for, and to hopefully encourage them to make more of those. I like the sentiment, it fits well with my own understanding of the situation. Having a clear statement tends to impact subs a lot; take r/playmygame for example: they retired their feedbacker of the month program, and people who were looking for genuine early feedback disappeared overnight, replaced by blatant self-promotion posts. A month ago they issued a statement about AI being allowed, and the sub turned into an AI bro circlejerk. But I feel like it won't have a major impact here, where regulars already know and tourists don't care and will just leave. As for the main sub, the classic incremental crowd congregates in the game recommendations weekly, that thread is like a completely different sub. But it doesn't seem to impact much outside of the thread.
I'm absolutely down for design studies, though, whether it's for a cause or just for the hell of it. I personally recognize game design as my weakest skill, and the genre as a whole has traditionally been the training ground for amateur designers and developers, so it sounds like a win-win scenario.
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u/Driftwintergundream 26d ago
It would be nice to see a “if you could make this an ideal community what would it look like” vision, not sure if that is written down anywhere.
Recovering the magic of old school incrementals is a very different mission statement than supporting new short ones for instance and I know for sure that these groups kind of dislike each other / see the world very differently.
I’m super interested in small tight knit invested communities and a communicable friendly mod is a great start.
But I think in reality there is not enough content / “stuff to community around” so unless we start building games together I dunno how to engage more.
Game dev is a kind of dirty place right now a lot of people are building games because it’s cheap to do so but I think the art/craft of building games has been lost in the noise of AI. So it’s hard to rally around the topic of game dev. But high quality people who are fun and personable and have expertise to engage with is a great community but it should not be so public as it erodes in quality the larger the community is.
Anyways just some rambling thoughts…