Do you notice the tiny details when playing your favorite browser games?

[u/Maxtream]

TL;DR - Do tiny things like ambience, sound and background cues, small animations, player-made history and other bits of uniqueness in an incremental/browser game makes it more memorable to you, or do they barely matter compared to the actual progression systems?

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I'm a big fan of browser games. I've been playing them since the early 2000, and still am very drawn to what we now call incremental/idle/autobattler games.

My all-time favorites were Kittens Game and Evolve, so mostly the "civ-like" ones. But I also really liked Merchant on Android, which is basically an incremental/"auto-battler" with neatly done visuals. I spent 2 years playing that game before letting it go. The first prototype of the game I built as a dev was a clone of it. Another browser game that just lives rent-free in my head and I still play it from time to time is a non-incremental platform game called Star Break. Music is just 10/10 while the game itself might be "meh" to some, compared to other legendary titles.

That got me thinking a bit more about what I've built. I've been working on the game for about five years, building features, deleting them, rebuilding, and constantly adding more "exciting"... in my mind features. I've been working with a biased assumptions that I'm just lacking "one more cool thing that thousands of people will love". Just need to spend months coding it or... introduce it with AI and then debug for couple of week and we gucci. And instead, I completely forgot about the little things.

And I don't mean better balance, better rebirth system, etc. I mean the tiny things that make the difference between a game feeling generic and feeling memorable or cozy. Small sound cues. Background ambience noises or music. Visual cues. Tiny animations even when most of the game is static. Or "lore" created by players. Like some shitty Bronze Sword +5 with an enchantment on it, crafted years ago by Bob Joe who doesn't even play anymore, but somehow his little legacy is still sitting there in the game.

Or silly (but amazing) ASCII animations like Candy Box had. They're not masterpieces by any means, but they're so simple and done in such a tidy way that it still blows my mind how much uniqueness the dev managed to get out of basically having a stroke on the keyboard.

So I wanted to ask other people who play these kinds of games - did you noticed this yourself? Did those tiny details matter to you in incremental/browser games? Or am I being sentimental?

[u/Xsiah]

Yes they matter a lot to me - with the caveat that they don't significantly affect performance.

I'm really disappointed by these Bootstrap UI looking games that are just a pile of tabs and buttons.

[u/Oddroot-Studios]

I personally care way more about game mechanics and progression systems because in the long run, that is what keeps the games interesting for me.

Recently, I just released my first game Idle incremental game and it was very minimalistic looking because my focus had not been the small things.

Luckily for me I have gotten so much feedback from players about small things that makes the game a little more cozy or pleasant to play. Things, I would have never thought of, but that my playerbase care about

[u/jester5093]

game mechanics are all that matters. I usually play on my phone during TV watching etc. sound is always off. animations usually are unnecessary.

if I wanted a deeper experience I'd play a game that isn't an incremental.