Why Incremental Games Are A Good Choice

For years now, the genres of idle games and incremental games have been incredibly popular. More and more players flood to it, which also means more and more developers flood to it. I remember specifically, 5+ years ago now, that a game publisher told me to “make an idle game” if I wanted to sell them something—any other genre or idea I offered was immediately disregarded.

I feel a bit foolish for ignoring that opportunity back then. I had an interested party for my work … and I told them “sorry, I don’t make idle games, bye!” Stupid! But I was young and I still thought I had to make some really unique dream game and nothing else mattered. Which had the completely expected consequence of burn-out, not finishing anything, dropping game dev entirely for years, the same old story.

Fast forward to today. More and more people in the game development space are saying “make an idle game as your first Steam game”, or some adjacent genre.

In fact, without even looking for advice or marketing data on this, I kept hearing it and stumbling across it somehow.

And so I thought, You know what? Let’s actually listen this time!

I didn’t expect some major success or dream project. I just wanted to get experience with a first Steam game, a finished product, a tiny bit of money to support a next project in a different genre/of a different scope. I took the jump, paid the Steam fee, gave myself a month or two, and worked on such a game.

One game became two. Two became four. The more I worked on a game, the more ideas I had for cool twists and takes on the genre. The more I worked with this genre, the more I realized that almost anything could fit this mold. It was just a very useful, strong, enjoyable mold. My ideas had completely opposite themes, completely opposite mechanics, but I was quite sure they’d all work as an incremental game and would be quite good.

These games are reasonably fast to make. It’s fast to try ideas, to iterate on them, to improve them, to build the game step by step while having a functional game you could test/publish at any point. It makes the entire process of game development much more enjoyable and snappy. The process of making an incremental game is almost the same as playing one (at least a good chunk of the time).

When I asked others to playtest my new prototypes, they had basically the same effect. They were prototypes made in a few days. Missing art, missing features, stuff is broken, the core loop is simplistic, but the testers loved them. How do you know? No, you don’t listen to what they say or hand them a survey at the end. You ask them to “test the game for 10 minutes” … and they end up playing for an hour. You almost have to slam the laptop shut and drag it away to stop them from clicking stuff :p

And so, after dabbling in them for a few months, I can confirm that yes, creating a small incremental game is a great first professional game dev project. “Professional” here means that you finish it, publish it, sell it. (If you’re completely new to programming or game development, then you obviously want to look at much much simpler challenges still.)

But, of course, now I’m interested in the why. Why do they work so well, both for players and developers? Have we overlooked something all these years? Is it just a trend/hype?

What Are They?

An incremental game, to me, is any cycle where you,

• Repeat the exact same challenge over and over.
• But doing so gives you stuff (money, resources, experience) that allows you to upgrade (grow, unlock, expand) …
• … which makes you able to handle the challenge better next time.

That’s where the “increment” comes from. You get a little better, a little more powerful, a little further, a little richer each time. Some of them work towards a definite end goal. Many of them have no end in sight and you’re curious to see how far you can get (and how fast).

When put this way, the creative juices started flowing for me. Everything was an incremental game! Everything can be turned into a simple singular challenge, and upgrades to help you overcome it over time.

Watering plants? Sure! You start with a tiny garden that you have to water fully within 10 seconds. But your hose is tiny, your water supply scarce, your aim very bad. And so you need UPGRADES!

Being a taxi driver? Okay! You start in a tiny randomly generated city and need to make X money in a day to advance to the next city. Your car is slow, your fuel tank tiny—you need UPGRADES!

It goes on and on. When I had over 60 ideas, I had to start discarding a lot of them, combining a few, and organizing that massive brainstorming session into files and specific notes.

Now, idle games are theoretically unrelated to incremental games. They are games where you progress over time even if you don’t do anything. Some of them track the time between logins so you literally get extra resources while offline. Some of them give you machines or automatic tools to, well, make stuff happen automatically.

The two are, however, often linked because they borrow mechanics from one another to become something bigger and better. Idle games need some interaction, such as which automatic upgrade to buy. Hey, what’s that, upgrades!? Starting to look like an incremental game!

Conversely, a game where you literally have to do the same thing over and over would be quite annoying and boring. And so incremental games usually give you upgrades to automate some of the process, to speed it up, to “idle” your way to the next stage if you want.

Wait, Isn’t That Just A Game Loop?

Yes! Try something -> fail and learn/upgrade -> Try it again but better. That’s the one game loop to rule them all. The core of all games. (And also most stories and, erm, life?)

So for the most part, yes, I think it’s as simple as this. Incremental games ARE a satisfying game loop. Whatever theme you put around it, whatever the specifics, it’s basically THE game loop in its purest form. Everyone likes it.

Our brains are literally hard-wired for it. Since the time we lived in caves we learned that we need to go out each day, gather food and other resources, then return with said resources. More succintly, “go out and return, having changed” That’s what our brains enjoy. That’s what our brains are naturally motivated to do, either in real life or in a simulated activity (like a video game).

Go out, return changed.

Attempt to beat a level, return with 5 more experience points.

Attempt to beat a boss, return with knowledge about what NOT to do.

Run your little cozy shop for another day, end with 20 more money to buy a better counter for your shop.

Incremental games are the purest form of that. There’s no fluff around it. There’s no delay in knowing if you did it right or not. It’s just the game loop and nothing else.

That’s why they are satisfying to play. It’s also why many of them don’t even bother with pretty graphics or anything around it, because you can’t really hide any mistakes here. You can’t hide a bad incremental loop with extra mechanics and skins and what not. The core loop has to be good—if it’s not, the game will surely fall flat.

Thus I found developing these games great exercises in game design. I really had to prototype and refine that core loop, because it IS the game. It takes ten minutes to write code that checks if you clicked on something and gives you money. It takes many days to try a hundred different ways to build a loop around that and find something that is actually fun—even when done 1000 times.

Many times I was tempted to just start making visuals, start adding particles, start adding more content to make the core loop more fun. But that doesn’t really … work here? No amount of stuff around this loop can make up for a loop that’s not fun to do over and over.

It’s true for all games. But it’s especially true for incremental/idle games.

In summary:

• Incremental games are the purest form of the game loop that is the beating heart of any game.
• This means it appeals to almost all humans, as it directly speaks to our natural way of thinking and living.
• You’re forced to really work on the design and learn how to improve that loop; you can’t hide any problems there or ignore them.
• This is a benefit because it improves your skill. It’s also a benefit because it means pretty art or great polishing—for which small indie developers often don’t have the resources—is not needed.

They Are Flash Games, But Sellable

When I asked people to test these games, or explained what I did now, they all had the same reaction.

• “Increwhatal? Incremental games? What are THOSE?”
• … I explain the gist of it in a few sentences …
• “Oh! Like that Flash game I used to play as a child! That was fun.”

A massive chunk of those Flash games from years ago were incremental games.

You had Shopping Cart Hero, for example. Each “attempt” you try to get as far as possible with your cart. You earn some money for that, buy upgrades (like rockets underneath your cart), and try again.

Or there was this Bratz Aquarium game. On the surface, it’s a management game … but it’s really an incremental game. You buy new fish, more people come to watch, now you have more money, so you buy more fish and a bigger tank.

Some leaned more towards idle. Some more towards management or strategy. Some were just silly.

But they were all fun. My entire generation knows all these games. Played them to death. For no other reward than getting a little further than your friend or little sister. But they (mostly) disappeared because they were free. They were small hobbyist projects, they weren’t generating any revenue, so nobody is able to update them and keep them around nowadays.

Incremental games are a way to make those really fun, accessible Flash games, but commercially sustainable.

• You take the fun, simple, silly core loop of a classic Flash-like game.
• But you add a big(ger) upgrade tree, an executable that does not disappear, and quality of life improvements.

When combined you have that fun core that you could develop in a few days, but at the end you have a bigger professional game that is worth some money.

When I realized this, you guessed it, my brain exploded with even more ideas and possible routes to go down.

It sounds so stupid, but it’s really a matter of “we forget that games should be fun”. An entire generation wasted years of their life playing silly Flash games that someone made in a few days, with crappy graphics and no clear reward, not even global leaderboards or anything. Why? Because it was FUN.

In summary:

• Think of classic Flash games. A large part of them are actually incremental games. Think of their silly core that people want to keep playing: that’s your nugget of gold that can support a bigger game.
• Now apply extra weeks or months of development. Make it big enough that it does not feel like it should be free, but you can sell it and earn sustainable income from it.

Are They Really That “Easy” To Make?

Whether you can do it, and how “easy” it will be, is a question only you can answer. But when we use the word “easy” in game dev circles, know that it’s a relative term.

Game development is stupidly hard. “Easy” just means it’s way less hard than making your own online multiplayer MMO or large scale strategy game with 20 civilizations to play. It doesn’t mean you can half-ass an incremental game in a day and print money, of course not.

I already touched on this a little bit, but now I’ll give a bit more detail. What’s “easy” about them is,

• You can develop the game step by step. You can create only the first five upgrades today. And by the end of the day, your game will run and you’ll be able to play for 20 minutes before the upgrade tree just stops. Then tomorrow you can do five more upgrades. And then the day after that, you can make the next challenge that’s slightly harder. At all points in time, the game is playable and functional. It just gets longer (and hopefully better and more interesting) as you continue.
• There’s no expectation or requirement for the things small developers struggle to do. No massive art requirements. No voiceover work in thirty languages. No online infrastructure to set up or maintain. (Personally, I’ve long tried to make multiplayer games, but it’s just so hard to find groups of people willing to test your game each time. As a tiny solo dev without budget this is just not doable. A singleplayer incremental game is much easier to get tested regularly.)
• The tradeoff between input and output is more balanced. These games are faster to make, so you can sell them at a lower price point and need less “success” to be sustainable. Every feature you decide to put in the game is likely to be noticeable and worth the effort. (Squeezing an extra funny upgrade somewhere into the tree might only take you 5 minutes to implement, but it will give a gazillion more options and ways to play to the player.) Compare that to something like working for weeks on a big level or environment for a game … that many players might never even see or only barely notice.

If you want a bit more of a timeline, below is what I’ve experienced so far.

• It takes at most a day to code your core game loop. The core thing you’re attempting to do over and over. (It will look ugly and be half-broken and whatever, but it’s a prototype of what that repetitive challenge is.)
• It takes at most three days to try different versions, play around, finetune it, and find the exact core that you think is most fun.
• It takes at most a week to build that into a bigger game. Find all possible upgrades, find extra mechanics and twists to keep it interesting, get all the parts moving and connected.
• And then, as they say, the other 10% takes 90% of the time :p It takes multiple weeks to add visuals, to polish it, to balance it, to squash all bugs, to integrate with Steam, etcetera.

No, these are not some strict requirements or rules written in stone. I just think it’s very useful to have restrictions to put on yourself to prevent dilly-dallying or chasing bad ideas. If your idea doesn’t feel fun after days and days of trying, then you’re probably better off trying a different one. If you don’t have a massive list of upgrade ideas for your core game after minimal effort, then it’s likely not good enough to support an entire commercial game.

Please remember that the “core game loop” of most incremental games is something like this.

• Click on something to mine it / get it / remove it / get money.
• Hover over stuff to (slowly, on a timer) do the same thing.
• Place stuff to automatically do this for you (by clicking somewhere on the map!)

This is not hard to code. Whatever twist you come up with, whatever three tweaks you want to make to have your game stand out, they won’t take long to program. They shouldn’t. If it takes that long, you’re not making a small-scoped incremental game anymore, but probably a larger-scoped genre game. If you start adding buttons to the game, and movement for a player character, or different weapons to fire … you’re “adding the fluff” around the game loop. You’re burying it in a breadth of other systems, mechanics, ideas, conventions, playstyles, etcetera.

Which is obviously fine, but it’s not an incremental game anymore!

That’s why I say you shouldn’t take more than a few days to validate that core loop, including all possible upgrades/twists/progression mechanics. This isn’t about grinding or going fast fast fast. It’s just about knowing when to kill your darlings and try a better idea.

In summary:

• No game is easy to make, but these kinds of games are definitely on the easier side. Faster to make, more rewarding bite-sized progress every day, faster to prototype and iterate on.
• Once you’ve made one of them—and by that I mean made it yourself, not AI, not copy-pasting someone else’s work—you understand the general structure and the things you need. You can reuse a lot of code and build new games from new combinations of the same elements (“combinatory play” as Einstein called it).
• Even if the game massively fails or underperforms or whatever, the “tradeoff” of time/energy/money versus result still makes it worth it. If a game took only a week to make, it’s much easier to deal with all the mistakes you’re going to make when launching on Steam for the first time, to deal with it not being that good. If that game took a year or more, it’s much harder.

What It All Comes Down To

Some people have started using the term “infinite unique situation generators”. They say small time indie developers, especially solo developers or newbies, should focus on those kinds of games. And I basically completely support this reasoning.

Games with a boatload of content are not doable for small indie devs. Games with intricate simulations or complex strategy systems are not doable for first-time devs. Games with fixed, handcrafted content and systems are not doable when it’s just you, a computer, and no budget.

So how do you make a game that has enough content, enough replayability, to be able to sell them and make people happy? You make a systemic game. A game with a few knobs and levers to tweak, and they turn into a random new journey. A game where people can choose their own upgrades, and that specific combination will lead to unique and diverse situations each time they play. A game where the core loop is based on a bit of randomness / random generation by default, so you don’t need handcrafted content.

Incremental games (and adjacent genres) simply fit the bill, better than anything else. You invent a fun core loop and interesting ways to “increment”. Voila, your game has endless unique games to play inside of it.

And maybe you test it, and it’s not fun, then it’s not a catastrophe. Because you can shuffle some things around, maybe enable or disable some new rule, and see if the unique situations are more fun now. You don’t have to rewrite a massive story from scratch, or re-do all the character models, or whatever.

Of course, the other conclusion to draw from that is that good incremental games must likely fit all the things I’ve listed.

• The core challenge should have some random generation. Mining for gold? Randomly generated field each time. Watering plants? Random plants planted in a random configuration.
• The upgrades should sufficiently change this each time to add more diversity.
• None of it should depend on some rigid structure or fixed content. If your game falls apart without a “story”, or without unlocking exact upgrades in one exact order, then you’re likely shooting yourself in the foot. If you think you have to handcraft some specific content for a game … think again. It often means you’re needlessly overcomplicating something in your mind.
• Don’t waste time on features where the tradeoff isn’t right. Features that take days to figure out and make, while only impacting a tiny tiny portion of players maybe. Focus on features that take an hour and will make every unique situation generated slightly better or more interesting.

Conclusion

Well, that’s how I think about it right now.

These are the words of someone who is still figuring stuff out here. I’m making tons of mistakes, learning about these different genres as I go, still having days where I worry if this was a good move at all.

Maybe you agree with that last sentiment. You’re thinking, right now, that I’m chasing trends or commercializing or ripping off successful incremental games.

I tried, I really tried, to make some more ambitious games. To make local multiplayer games. To make something more experimental, or unique, or just “bigger”. It never worked out. I’m as flexible and hard-working as can be, trying all genres and languages and setups, and honestly none of it got very far. As a solo indie dev without resources, you have to be realistic. You have to realize that your runway is measured in months. That your expertise should be unique situation generators for single players, at least until you do have the funds or a team to do more.

At the same time, if you do check out my games, I hope you agree that I’m bringing something new to the table. My background makes me see this genre in a different light.

• I focus more on games with a clear ending/target.
• I focus more on graphics and visual polish than most games in this genre. (I mean, the fact I am NOT using pixel art already makes me a weirdo in this space :p)
• I focus on games that are even more flexible and allow you to “break” the game in all sorts of ways, because I am experienced enough to code systems like that.
• I focus on games with smaller numbers, smaller spaces, less overwhelming, less seizure-inducing special effects and colors and whatnot in the later stages. I’m a hyperactive person; I strive for minimalism in everything or I would go insane.

All I can say is that creating incremental games brought back some of the joy of making games that I lost a while ago. It suddenly made projects feasible. It made releasing something on Steam within a month or two doable. It made it easy to find people willing to test my games ;)

A proper idea creates fun within a day or three. Once you have that, building the game step by step becomes so much easier, because you have your motivation and you have your validation that it’s at least somewhat fun to play. At the same time, there’s no massive mountain to climb to then get the game over the finish line. Because, as repeatedly stated now, the game IS its core incremental/upgrade loop with some minor window dressing. You decide how much art, polish, extra systems, whatever you want to tack on—none of it is a requirement.

Incremental-like games have been consistently selling all these years. They have a large and diverse audience, in the same way those Flash games had a large and diverse audience. People like these games, more than they themselves often realize.

It must also be said that my mind does not work chronologically at all. That’s just hyperactivity for you. I don’t do anything in a sensible order, I hate plans or structures with a passion, I just go with the flow. Incremental games are, so far in my experience, the genre that fits this type of mind the best. I can jump around, do things out of order, get distracted by shiny new ideas, and the game will still progress in meaningful ways and get done on schedule.

I hope to show what I mean and why I am positive about this soon, by releasing some incremental-like-adjacent games I’ve been working on.

Until next time,

Pandaqi / Tiamo