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In my desperate attempt to shelf out at least one game to the public before I return to college next month, I have decided to start working on yet another idle game, which I have just now officially named Unnamed Idle Game.*

In this game, the goal is to buy assets using certain units that you can acquire by clicking the unit icon on the screen. You will start off earning Atoms as your first unit, but later on you can unlock more advanced units, which in turn will allow you to buy more advanced assets.

One key element of this game is that most assets will require you to own more basic assets before you can buy them. For example, in order to purchase Water, you will need to have a certain number of Atoms as well as a certain number of Molecules - the Molecule is considered a more basic asset than Water. When you purchase the Water asset, you will lose the Molecules required for that purchase, which means you will have to rebuy more Molecules before you can purchase another Water asset. As you might expect, you will have to own a certain number of Water assets before you can purchase more advanced assets such as Vegetation and Life.

Each asset also provides a boost to your units per second. For example, you can currently earn 2 atoms per second for each Water asset you own. Even when you sell your assets, their boosts do not go away.

Another major feature is that the player can choose to be either good or evil, depending on which assets they buy ("good" assets are colored blue, while "evil" assets are colored red). The player can choose to invest in an equal amount of both sides, or they can remain neutral by avoiding those assets altogether. However, the game will reward the player far better for sticking to only one side or the other.

Final note. As you may expect, and as is typical for the majority of my games, there will be plenty of upgrades.

There is a lot to get done, but I will try to update this topic with a new demo every few days as long as people here show interest.

*By its final release, the game will probably not be titled "Unnamed Idle Game," though people are welcome to address it by that name if they wish.

Update: an info box now pops up whenever you put your cursor over an asset. This will display the requirements and current production of the asset.

I am aware that assets are producing units much slower than they should be (molecules, for example, should produce 0.5 atoms per second but produce closer to 0.3 atoms per second). This is an issue I will be addressing very shortly.

I actually really like that you pay for higher assets with lower assets instead of just the base "currency," like building off of smaller materials to build larger ones to construct larger organisms or whatever. This is pretty interesting (especially for an idle game, heh).

One thing I'm a little confused about is why "vegetation" is below "life," but I guess it doesn't have to be 100% accurate.

-OJ wrote:One thing I'm a little confused about is why "vegetation" is below "life," but I guess it doesn't have to be 100% accurate.

For the sake of simplication, "Life" solely refers to the animal kingdom. I may rename it later to better reflect this, but right now it's not a huge priority.

Good (and somewhat immersive) idea for a game but I dislike the repetitiveness and long waiting.

Killswitch wrote:Good (and somewhat immersive) idea for a game but I dislike the repetitiveness and long waiting.

I've already increased the production values for all of the assets because I also felt the game was too slow at the start, so you'll get to see that when I post the next demo (which will come once I fix the unit issue I mentioned before and once I add a save button). As for the repetitiveness, that's something I can't do a great deal about until I introduce more of the game's prime features, like upgrades and the prestige system.

Update 3 (15 August, 2015)

You will need to Hard Reset to see many of the following changes.

• More upgrades added. There are now 37, up from 16, and many of the old upgrade prices have been slightly tweaked to be more affordable.
• The game should run significantly better when you're not in the upgrades menu.
• The text for the button upgrades has been slightly edited. Now the cost lies at the very bottom of the button.
• A scrollbar has been added to the upgrades menu.
• Asset costs and production values have been heavily modified. Almost all of the base unit costs have been raised, as well as their base production values. However, asset requirements have been reduced as well (e.g. Water now requires 4 Molecules, down from 5). Although almost everything is more expensive, the new upgrades should ensure that everything feels much more balanced than before.
• Notifications have been slightly updated. They are larger than before, and any upgrade notifications will display the effect of that upgrade. You can also now click a notification to make it disappear instantly, as opposed to waiting 4 seconds for it to leave on its own.

That probably covers everything, but I also need to take this time to say that I am returning to college tomorrow, which means updates will be coming in much less frequently. Even though I wanted to finish this before I returned, I am quite proud of the progress I've made on the game so far, and I will try my best to update it throughout the year. Unfortunately, it's pretty safe to assume that there won't be any major updates for quite a while. On the bright side, I've made it so that it takes very little effort for me to add upgrades to the game, so if you guys want, I can try to do a weekly thing where I update the game with 10 upgrades or so. Unfortunately right now the only way to see new upgrades is to hard reset. Still, if you guys are interested in a weekly update or something, let me know and I'll do my best to make it happen.

Edit: Some more balancing, and 4 more upgrades added.

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Update 2 (7 August, 2015)

• Upgrades are finally here! There are currently 16 upgrades to choose from (and more will definitely be coming!). The upgrade system was a little more difficult to add than I'd care to admit, mostly because hard resetting would cause some pretty game-breaking bugs to occur. Nonetheless, I finally got it to work. If the upgrades seem overpriced, keep in mind that there is a future feature being planned which will significantly lower the cost of all upgrades.
• Notifications have been added. When you save, hard reset, or buy an upgrade, a notification will pop in the bottom right alerting you of the most recent action.
• Bug fix. There was a bug that allowed the player to buy multiple assets at once if they clicked fast enough. This could potentially break the game by causing the player to have both negative Atoms and negative assets. This is fixed now.
• Some other small improvements (mostly updates to the info panels).

You may notice that you can't view all the upgrades at once right now. I'm planning to add a scrollable bar in the next update that allows you to scroll through and see all available upgrades.

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Update 1 (2 August, 2015)

• The game now runs 100% in real time! Turns out there was a key multiplier missing in the calculation that caused everything (particularly Atoms per second) to run slower than they ought to. That is fixed now.
• The Progress menu has been added, although it's not quite finished yet. Currently you can use it to save your game and hard reset. You can also press S to save at anytime, so you don't have to constantly go into the menu to save. (Also, an autosave function will be added in the future).
• The info panels have been slightly tweaked. They now display the individual Atoms per second for each Asset. Their requirements also turn green when you can afford them, as opposed to white.
• You can now hold shift + tab to buy 1000 Assets at once (although you probably won't need this feature right now). Originally the plan was that holding shift + tab would let the player buy as many assets as they could afford. However, the way this was calculated (through recursion) caused a huge drop in performance, especially as the player could afford more assets. For those of you who aren't familiar with recursion, it means that a function will keep calling itself until it has reached a certain paremeter. Flash handles recursion really poorly, since a function only has to call itself a few times before performance begins to take a hit. Moreover, the function must be called every frame so that it can update properly. (So if you can afford 200 Atoms at once, the function has to call itself 200 times every single frame. And for a game running at 60 fps, that's 12,000 times a second!!! You can imagine how this becomes a problem.)
• Asset prices and boosts have been recalculated. Most assets cost more but also provide more Atoms per second. However, the Molecule base cost has been reduced to 20 (down from 30), so it should now be a little easier to buy Molecules than before.
• And my personal favorite new feature: Offline production has been added! A message prompt will appear when you reload the game, telling you how long you were gone and how many units you earned.

I want the next update to be very content-heavy, mostly with upgrades and a few other things. I'll try to get the next update out within a week or two, but no promises.

I also want to say that an export/import function was initially intended to debut in this demo, but I haven't quite figured out how to correctly load data from a text file. It's still on the bucket list of features to add, but it's going to take longer than I originally had hoped.

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(Original post)

Update!

• All assets now produce more Atoms per second than before.
• Atoms per second should be more accurate now. (It's still not perfect however, so I'll continue to look into it.)
• The asset description panels now display more information.
• You can now hold shift to buy 10 assets at once, or tab to buy 100. The prices will change in real time so you'll immediately see if you can afford it or not.
• Unit and asset prices turn red in the description panel if you can't afford them.
• User interface has received an improvement, along with some new buttons (most of which do nothing yet ).
• Saving! Click the Progress button to save your progress. (The Progress button will do more in the future, which is why I did not just name it "Save.")

And that's about it I think. Let me know if you like/dislike the changes, or experience any glitches, game-breaking bugs, etc.

BlabEdit: I just pushed another update for the atoms per second. It now runs 1.5 times faster.