How did you all come to discover incremental games?
How did you all come to discover incremental games?
I'll start, with less of a discovery and more of a full history:
I think I was around 8 years old when I first got into them, so I can't recall for certain, but it had to be a mobile game, because all I had was an iPad at the time. I remember some of my favorites from that time tended to be arbitrary mobile games like PickCrafter, Tap Tap Trillionaire (I/A), and the classic AdVenture Capitalist. It's weird to see some games I used to play so long ago still maintained to this day.
For a fair while I fixated on a game called Cookie Collector 2 (now known as Cookies Inc) (I/A), with occasional brief interest in games made on Scratch. At some point, I learned about Antimatter Dimensions, and I was irreversibly hooked on browser incrementals. I think at the time I even went as far as disowning Cookies Inc, which was a bit extreme, but I was likely 10 or 11--I guess I wasn't able to comprehend the concept of playing multiple games at the same time. :P
I stuck close to Antimatter Dimensions for a long time, and played most of the mods that had been created, but I can only recall getting deep into the community of Dilmod (potentially broken now?). I don't think Dilmod itself served as inspiration for it, but while I was active in the community I created the first iteration of Tree Game, which was heavily inspired by AD's Time Studies.
After Tree Game, I (most notably) went on to make Tree Game Rewritten, AltTPT (the first mod of The Prestige Tree, before TMT even existed), Tree Game Reloaded, CLEANSED, idle2.html, Pipegame, and most recently, galaxy.click. It seems like a lot when laid out like this, but the games tend to be very short, and I've only published roughly 8 spread out over 4 years. It's okay to not be a constant idea machine, or a master of productivity. It's still possible to make some pretty neat stuff even if you don't have a lot of time or energy.
I started, like many, with cookie clicker.
I love Trimps(Desktop) and Antimatter Dimensions(Desktop and Mobile)
Every once In a while when there's a new update I play Ctrl C again. It's a great time sink. Especially if you just repeat levels for the multiplier. And they even stack.
Those are some that stuck with me. I mostly play incremental games on my mobile these days, and non-p2w games are extremely rare. So I just keep hopping around.
I became aware of Universal Paperclips after it was mentioned on the podcast Hello Internet.
Cookie Clicker was the gateway drug for me, at least.
First Cookie Clicker, then AdVenture Capitalist (which I'm surprised to learn is still around!)
I've played a few others, most recently Sixty-Four.
My first incremental "game" would have been Progress Quest, probably. I really liked the idea of numbers going up, and there were a few early clickers about in 2009, 2010 - and then I found Anti Idle - which I still play today. Have played everything on the Ultimate List of Incremental Games, and since then the market's been flooded with low-effort reskins and I lost interest in keeping up and shoot for more satisfying games rather than a broad spectrum.
My favourite game for years was Civ IV, which I see now I played in a sort of incremental-ish fashion - for those who know it, I played using cultural victory only, no space, city flipping through culture, no wars. My victory objective was to win through supreme culture and incrementally take all my opponents' cities that way. It was always interesting trying to place the big culture-generators at the periphery of my empire for best effect. This would have been late-90s? I've still never won the game this way, but lots of incrementals have no end :D
I don't remember how exactly I was introduced to incremental games. There were two instances in my life which could have been my first introduction to them. The first was Tap Titans on my iPad. The second was the discovery of websites dedicated to hosting Flash games through one of my cousins playing an incremental-adjacent game on one of those sites. I remember the first happening when I was in 1st grade, and I forgot when the second occurred.
Incrementals and games that took heavy influence from them were the first games that I really got attached to. I had played incremental games on many platforms. At first, I played them primarily on Flash games sites such as Armor Games and Kongregate. I had also played a lot of incremental games on my phone, although most of these games were filled with advertisements and microtransactions. For a time, I played some games on Roblox which were very incremental-adjacent. Most of the games I played back then I now consider to be mechanically (and narratively) shallow.
I consider my proper introduction to incremental games as a genre to have happened near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics. I was searching for Swarm Simulator since I was acquainted with ScaryBee's version, and found myself surprised that there was a web version. And I also found myself surprised that there was apparently a subreddit dedicated to these sorts of game. It was from there that I became properly acquainted with the incremental genre, its community*, and the diversity of the genre.
*I have never actually interacted with users on the subreddit. However, I joined the Discord server during the Reddit API changes strike and was active there.