What is an incremental game ?

Incremental games are games that will increment using real world time as a ressource.

Each X (Time value), a tick will be triggered, and some variables will increment.

The most well known game in this genre is Cookie Clicker (2013, Julien Orteil Thiennot).

You just click on a cookie, and you will earn one more cookie. Interaction ends here, and the game completely stops playing until you click on the cookie again.

The moment you earn 15 cookies, you have the possibility to buy a Cursor that will automatically earn you 0.1 cookie per second.

This is a choice : the player can, if he is crazy enough, just click on the cookie as long as you want, or you can optimize the ratio time spent/cookie creation by spending those 15 manually click-earned cookie for a possible better passive gain later.

Now you can either continue clicking on the cookie and interacting with the game, or you can just wait real time and earn the same amount of cookies.

And the numbers will keep going up, until you spend it all on an another upgrade to earn more and more… and that’s the gameplay loop of an incremental game !

Interaction

For a video game to be a video game, you need one factor : interaction.

Players need to interact with the game and can’t only be spectator. Or else it will just be a movie !

Heavy interactions

Some games are ultra heavy on interaction, even so that players compare and calculate their APM (Actions Per Minute).

This acronym originates from Starcraft (1998, Blizzard Entertainment), a real-time strategy game where you command armies of controllables units that only acts by the player’s commands.

Players can achieve up to 200 APM ! Even if it isn’t a measure of skill, to be good at Starcraft means to achieve great planning and multi-tasking.

Low interactions game

Video games & movies are very similar : characters make choices that will impact the story at play.

It was obvious that at one point we will all have video games that are exactly that : the player is a spectator of a movie but sometimes he will have a say in what the characters have to or not to do.

The player can only interact when the game asks you to interact and in between you have cinematics portraying the choices the player’s made.

The game continues without you during those cinematics (Even if they trick the player by making those QTE (Quick Time Events) to prevent you to go to the toilet…) but the game will sometimes wait for your decision in order to shape and resume moving forward.

But what about games that are interactive, but not in the conventional low or heavy way ? What about games that just play themselves, and all you have to do is click maybe one time per day, per week, per year or even do nothing ?

Idling as an interaction

Incremental games are also called idle games.

Quite the oxymoron, since idling means spend time doing nothing.

It’s like saying idle interaction, makes no sense.

In a videogame, time can be measured and controlled : ticks are always in some way incrementing.

If you play a survival game with a day/night cycle such as Don’t Starve, even if you do nothing waiting for the night to pass, you are still interacting with the cycle.

Of course it’s a minor part of the game, but some games deeply rely on this mechanic of idling.

:THE LONGING:, made by Studio Seufz and published in 2020 (Yes it’s not a typo the game have 2 ”:” in the name) is a video game where the goal is to wait 400 days real time days for the King to awake from his long nap.

You are the Shade, a servant of some sort, and the choice is yours: do nothing and wait, or explore very slowly the caves…

Conclusion

Incremental games are a video game genre that are addictive and interesting.

And this is why we love them, and this is why you are able to read this :) !

Happy coding !