Idle Games. Genre Discussion.

[Radiant_Maelstrom]

Ooo thanks for the ton of info! That was very enlightening.

Yes I do agree with you that the flooding of idle game may have devolve the quality of games due to the ease of production of making one. However, I think it is lack of game design knowledge rather than programming is what cause the bad ones to multiply. There are some really good gems out there that would be trivial to program. One that I really like is Idle Factory (the same author as Idle Reactor). Think of it as Factorio as an idle game. It is also notably harder than most of the idle games out there since you have to not only manage the ratio of each materials and its product but also manage production path and routes to minimize the amount of space you need. I'd highly recommend it for spatial thinkers!

[GenghisKhan44]

Thank you for bringing up Pavlov. That gets to the heart of my beef with it. Pretty much every other game genre requires ingenuity and/or creativity of some sort to win. Ingenuity and creativity are two of the things that make human beings interesting. Idle/tapper games do not require either of these. It reeks of pure animality - I mean, in the sense of lab rats who respond to stimuli without thought or premeditation. Even sex is often premeditated among human beings; you don't just have sex with whatever woman won't kill you. You have sex with people you believe you love and who you think love you. That's human. Idle games... they work on subhuman impulses. We become less human for playing them.

[TeckXKnight]

Yes I do agree with you that the flooding of idle game may have devolve the quality of games due to the ease of production of making one. However, I think it is lack of game design knowledge rather than programming is what cause the bad ones to multiply. There are some really good gems out there that would be trivial to program. One that I really like is Idle Factory (the same author as Idle Reactor). Think of it as Factorio as an idle game. It is also notably harder than most of the idle games out there since you have to not only manage the ratio of each materials and its product but also manage production path and routes to minimize the amount of space you need. I'd highly recommend it for spatial thinkers!

I actually had to stop playing idle factory because it got too hard for me, haha. I had just gotten to artillery(I think?) and managing all of the different resources and waste was too much for me to mentally take designing a layout for so I just put the game down and stopped for good.