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I started over when I switched from Kong to Steam, and actually enjoyed it. It was neat to play through the early game again but understand wtf I was doing  Not advocating that you should do that. Just still thinkin bout thos NGUs
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Jan 12, 2023 06:10
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Yeah, I don't know the best way of resolving the Mac issue, but moving your savefile from the incredibly old last-updated Kongregate version to the slightly-less-old last-updated Steam version worked for me (and allowed me to finally finish the game after a couple of months because I didn't realize that last update never came to Kong lawl) So, as for FE000000 : 'You have won the game! Congratulations!' Charming. 8V Was pretty neat, reasonably well-paced, was a nice thing to have going in the background to peek in on while doing other stuff. The built-in guide (and a couple of pointers from the thread) helped immensely. I really only hit a hard wall once, and the guide got me past it even though my game state didn't quite line up with its advice. As far as idle games go, it is mechanically one of the most solid, no-frills experiences I've had. I do appreciate the fluff and frippery and, well, actual game aspects of things like candy box or catnip forest or ngu or any number of other resource/idle games, but as far as a pure distillation of 'number go up to give little doses of seratonin through the day', FE000000 might be one of the most well-constructed piles of numbers I've yet encountered. It's very satisfying to trundle through a tier of the game and then be able to start automating it, and then to start automating that automation. The depth of the recursion helps to make it feel more satisfying to see how much faster a given task or tier goes each subsequent time you encounter it. While it sometimes required more or less interaction, it never felt like I was being punished for idling, nor did I ever require an autoclicker. All in all, very good.
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Jan 12, 2023 09:48
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Yeah, I don't know the best way of resolving the Mac issue, but moving your savefile from the incredibly old last-updated Kongregate version to the slightly-less-old last-updated Steam version worked for me (and allowed me to finally finish the game after a couple of months because I didn't realize that last update never came to Kong lawl) What I did was install NGU steam on my PC, and I am using my Mac Steam client to stream the game from my PC. I also found NGU industry, but apparently that has been abandoned so I did not start it up yet. I might poke around with it later however.
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Jan 12, 2023 15:31
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4g is working on the next game already, I think. he doesn't post as much as he used to but I haven't heard he's given up on it yet so I assume it's still in the works. I think the hook is it's like some mega man battle grid thing? but idleable
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Jan 12, 2023 23:37
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I remember NGU-I came out and people weren't as positive on it as NGU, and 4g said something about how the problems seem to be caused by fundamental game systems that he didn't know how to correct without basically making a new game. This was literally within 3 days or so of launch so idk what happened after that but maybe it just made more sense to move on. I remember feeling real bad because 4G seems cool and I didn't like that his 2nd game didn't feel successful to him 
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Jan 12, 2023 23:44
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ngu was a clone of a game he already liked, that I forget the name of, and ngui was supposed to be a Factorio homage, it just happened that the way idle game upgrades work made the gameplay loop frustrating for players and sometimes that's just the way it goes. this thread will all be playing the next one he makes as soon as it's playable, just like they were with ngu. he got a good head for this poo poo
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Jan 13, 2023 00:24
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Feline Mind Meld posted:ngu was a clone of a game he already liked, that I forget the name of, and ngui was supposed to be a Factorio homage, it just happened that the way idle game upgrades work made the gameplay loop frustrating for players and sometimes that's just the way it goes. NGU took big inspiration from both Anti-Idle and Idling to Rule the Gods, I believe. And there are already a number of games inspired by it, like Wizard and Minion Idle. Feline Mind Meld posted:this thread will all be playing the next one he makes as soon as it's playable, just like they were with ngu. he got a good head for this poo poo Also this
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Jan 13, 2023 00:30
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Feline Mind Meld posted:this thread will all be playing the next one he makes as soon as it's playable, just like they were with ngu. he got a good head for this poo poo hell yeah we will
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Jan 13, 2023 00:50
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big cummers ONLY posted:I remember NGU-I came out and people weren't as positive on it as NGU, and 4g said something about how the problems seem to be caused by fundamental game systems that he didn't know how to correct without basically making a new game. This was literally within 3 days or so of launch so idk what happened after that but maybe it just made more sense to move on. I think it suffers the same problem most idle games that try to do industry scale have. You have too limited a space to make it interesting and you just have to keep rebuilding. Idle games are about balance to reach infinity and factory games are about scaling ever larger you combine these 2 concepts and well you need a server farm to run the game or make some compromised to the core systems of one of the genres spoiling the union. At least in every attempt so far. I mean you can make a nice short little game there were several on Kong you could complete in under a week. A good idle game is easy to understand what you need to progress to the next phase but not *how* it is up to you to figure out the how. Mechanics should have complex interactions but you should also be able to basically just use a screen to quickly see how optimal it is. If it takes a few hours to see if a build is better than the previous one that's bad. I think you could make an incremental factory game where the limiting factor is your computer CPU and provide more tools for scaling to insanity but couldn't you just make a factorio mod at that point? That engine is already polished to hell and that's the hard part in these. There's almost certainly a way to combine them but the obvious ways don't really lend themselves to an idle game that keeps players and keeps updating for years.
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Jan 13, 2023 14:27
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There's an idle game that gets discussed here every once in a while with a tree in the middle of a grid that you plant stuff in. Functionally it is reminiscent of grid games where you build reactors, with some squares outputting The Numbers and other squares boosting them orthogonally. In that game, you can (eventually) reach the point where you can just save your grid layouts for resets, simplifying the loop process. Also, and I cannot stress this enough there aren't that many squares to begin with. Oh, and while values do get dynamically better as you play, if I remember right there's little cause to tear down and reset builds mid-run. Now compare to NGUI, where the biggest issue was that you can have complex needs resulting in myriad of produced Numbers, what you wanted changed the production layout of several large maps, you probably had to manually tear down and rebuild semi-regularly and (if I remember my own experience) the automatic save+rebuild either wasn't in or didn't help anywhere near as much as it needed to. You'd poke one mid-chain producer to make 5% more and it could require an entire rebuild and resave. It was a nightmare. It REALLY needed some kind of auto-calc+auto-build feature, maybe unlocked in mid-game, allowing you to automate layouts. "I want to have X of final-tier producer Y" you'd select from two drop-downs or whatever. It would then populate the map with whatever was minimally needed to ensure production was green across the board. BOOM, problem (mostly) solved, imo. Maybe it doesn't consider boosters, maybe there's no elegant way to factor them in. idk, there was an optimization tool I saw online that absolutely factored booster distribution as well, so it COULD be done. I think if you're making an idle game and there some kind of insane need to constantly fiddle with elements and, most of all, no way to eventually automate, it's not really an idle game at all. And by "fiddle" I don't mean a little bit of tweaking here and there, the original NGU had more than I ended up liking but it was still an OK amount. NGUI had waaaaay too much fiddling, far too regularly. It needed a way to automate that. KazigluBey fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 16:16
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KazigluBey posted:I think if you're making an idle game and there some kind of insane need to constantly fiddle with elements and, most of all, no way to eventually automate, it's not really an idle game at all. And by "fiddle" I don't mean a little bit of tweaking here and there, the original NGU had more than I ended up liking but it was still an OK amount. NGUI had waaaaay too much fiddling, far too regularly. It needed a way to automate that. I've spent a lot of time trying to articulate the problems I had with NGUI but I think this nails it. You never stop needing early-game resources, but you keep getting more and more resources that are needed, and every single new one required re-doing the entire build from the ground up (unless you wanted to run out of a precursor resource sooner or later). Beacons, if anything, made this worse, since now you had even more things competing for your limited space. But you still needed at least one gear/rods/whatever producer somewhere in the chain for every single resource. I think it might have worked better if there were fewer resources unlocked per map, like maybe 6 at most. You could still place whatever on whichever map, but at some point you could call the first map "done" and forget about it as it just mindlessly churns away all the early game resources. Maybe there'd be a paradigm shift every now and again where you need to retool it but you could easily handle that with blueprints (e.g. one for an iron-heavy phase of the game, vs. one for a copper-heavy phase). But these shifts should be few and far between, not every other unlock like it was.
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Jan 13, 2023 18:35
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IIRC once you get far enough in NGU Industries you start generating infinite amounts of earlier resources, and you never have to touch them again; the problem being that it happened way too far into the game and most people had already made up their minds by then.
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Jan 13, 2023 18:45
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I've wanted to try cutting my teeth on making an idle game for a while, but the big thing that keeps me from trying is I dunno how I'd even approach getting the math to work out. Lots of my favorite idle games have soft walls and breakpoints and I don't even know how I'd get started figuring out what those should be, much less the actual math to put those in place.
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Jan 13, 2023 19:51
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Pseudoscorpion posted:I've wanted to try cutting my teeth on making an idle game for a while, but the big thing that keeps me from trying is I dunno how I'd even approach getting the math to work out. Lots of my favorite idle games have soft walls and breakpoints and I don't even know how I'd get started figuring out what those should be, much less the actual math to put those in place. Things like this are a good start: https://blog.kongregate.com/the-math-of-idle-games-part-i/ Basically understanding what the graphs for various mathematical functions look like helps. like x^2 vs log(x). One is going to shoot up into massive numbers very rapidly, the other is going to rapidly increase and then taper off.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:12
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Pseudoscorpion posted:I've wanted to try cutting my teeth on making an idle game for a while, but the big thing that keeps me from trying is I dunno how I'd even approach getting the math to work out. Lots of my favorite idle games have soft walls and breakpoints and I don't even know how I'd get started figuring out what those should be, much less the actual math to put those in place. Talking with 4G while he made NGU I had the feeling he was just winging it for the first year or so and where the numbers landed that's where they landed. Things were then patched to be easier and eventually he started doing beta cycles and fine tuning numbers before patches. You don't have to start with a well organized set of numbers. Remember the game can be living and breathing you can always release a patch to make it easier, you can't release one to make it harder. I mean you can, but that's not fair that's how you get backlash from the community. Always start too hard and make it easier while zeroing in on the correct difficulty for the audience you have captured.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:29
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pixaal posted:Talking with 4G while he made NGU I had the feeling he was just winging it for the first year or so and where the numbers landed that's where they landed. Things were then patched to be easier and eventually he started doing beta cycles and fine tuning numbers before patches. You don't have to start with a well organized set of numbers. Remember the game can be living and breathing you can always release a patch to make it easier, you can't release one to make it harder. I think it only gets you backlash if you make things harder in a big game, like NGU or Evolve or something like that. In a short game like Universal Paperclip or a moderately long one like FE000000 you can easily get away with doing so.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:38
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nrook posted:I think it only gets you backlash if you make things harder in a big game, like NGU or Evolve or something like that. In a short game like Universal Paperclip or a moderately long one like FE000000 you can easily get away with doing so. It's more a caution not to use it as your primary balance method. If something is very broken fix it! (or own it and there's a content shift here now)
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Jan 13, 2023 20:39
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I always assumed idle game devs just check what number you arrive at after 3 hours (sped up via a console command probably) and just make the next upgrade cost that number
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Jan 13, 2023 21:53
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GrossMurpel posted:I always assumed idle game devs just check what number you arrive at after 3 hours (sped up via a console command probably) and just make the next upgrade cost that number I feel like this is probably what bad idle games do, but if your idle game requires any skill or piloting or decision-making then there can be a very large gap between what the worst players are doing, what most players are doing, and what Discord optimization-pilled people are doing. So you can do a lot of fast forwarding to check poo poo out for sure, but idle games require balance changes just like all games to remove things that are not meant to be strict roadblocks. The thing about the math is that you need to get a sense of rates of increases of different things, and it's hard to keep those in the goldilocks zone of long enough that people want to figure out how to optimize so they don't waste their time but short enough that it's also not like "gently caress you, no progress until you do my taxes and untangle this ball of wire." Fast forwarding can help you get that sense, but it can't tell you if 3 hours is where to put that breakpoint or if that 3 hours will be 3 years for most players.
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Jan 14, 2023 00:04
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Play around on Wolfram alpha. Make graphs that roughly simulate various mathematical models, see if the resultant shape is pretty.
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Jan 14, 2023 02:10
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what was the name of that idle game allstars style game where you had a bunch of games within the games and progressing in individual games added metaprogression boosting other games? I'm asking for reasons
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Jan 14, 2023 06:50
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Saraiguma posted:what was the name of that idle game allstars style game where you had a bunch of games within the games and progressing in individual games added metaprogression boosting other games? I'm asking for reasons https://jacorb90.me/?
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Jan 14, 2023 09:02
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that's it thank you
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Jan 14, 2023 09:16
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Saraiguma posted:what was the name of that idle game allstars style game where you had a bunch of games within the games and progressing in individual games added metaprogression boosting other games? I'm asking for reasons There was also this ame jam meta game where you played the games from that jam
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Jan 14, 2023 12:48
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Pope Guilty posted:Is there any way to restart NGU Idle without dumping your AP purchases? Supremely late on seeing this but yeah i can add your packs to a new file, once per person. Discord PM's the easiest way to flag me down! something fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 15:34
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honestly if you introduce a feature that is too strong the best play is to add another layer that nerfs it for a boost or is much stronger but scales better. idle games benefit from power tripping just like arpgs do, mistakes into miracles and all.
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Jan 15, 2023 00:22
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Feline Mind Meld posted:honestly if you introduce a feature that is too strong the best play is to add another layer that nerfs it for a boost or is much stronger but scales better. idle games benefit from power tripping just like arpgs do, mistakes into miracles and all. The opposite of this is also possible. Trimps does this real well. The in-game challenges are harder than normal runs, but designed to be worth way more per hour in order to catch you up to a certain point. So the early ramp for the game is pretty clean in ferrying you through each challenge up to the next until you get up to 230 or so. Then daily challenges become the thing, and those slingshot you through most of the rest of the first universe. So even if you make content hard, if you have an extensible system for catching new players up then it mitigates a lot of need to fully rebalance.
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Jan 15, 2023 12:27
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it's also good design, and I've of the reasons ngu is very good, to go back and nerf walks earlier on. most late game players won't care and it gets everyone zooming up at a better pace. has the benefit of your community doing all the work to identify it too, especially here since people play at different paces and like to talk about the experience
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Jan 16, 2023 00:50
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This one was worse in some regards as there are games included without the polish needed to make them click. It's a game jam though, so some of that's to be expected.
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Jan 16, 2023 05:19
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I am trying to figure out how to maximize the Expeditions in FAPI. Anyone know some specifics about the mechanics? Is the expedition time fungible? i.e. will 2x 1 hour runs give the same expected resources+exp as a 2hr run? I ask because I just did a 12 hour one with a level 1 pet I just unlocked and he only got 1 level which seems weird. If i read things right, it sounds like expedition level will boost regular pet exp so its probably a good idea to keep them rotating in and out, at least for a few levels I guess? It's getting a little micromanage-y.
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Jan 16, 2023 18:43
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Salvor_Hardin posted:I am trying to figure out how to maximize the Expeditions in FAPI. Anyone know some specifics about the mechanics? So far I've only done 12 hour runs, with the only team-building criteria I follow being making sure each expedition is comprised of 2 ground and 2 air pets. I get 22 Expedition tokens per 12 hours per team, and I have three teams at this point (and the final fourth should be ready in a week or two) , but the process of picking stuff up prior to having all three spun up made it feel like 22 per 12 hours per team is the "intended" pace with the minimum amount of stress and micromanagement. You unlock stuff at a decent clip. I don't bother rotating. Maybe later on when cards are added expedition team comp will matter more, but right now the only things that matter is having each team be 2 ground 2 air fir the bonus that gives and maybe making sure one team has the highest "damage per rank" pets in order to more quickly unlock all expeditions, and then have that team be your main prog team for whatever expedition bonus you want raised most quickly? Like, when I unlock the final fourth expedition slot I'll go back and shuffle team comps to make sure all four expeditions are using the highest "damage per rank" pets, and maybe I'll do that again after unlocking some more pets, but generally speaking I don't see myself fiddling with it too often. KazigluBey fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jan 17, 2023 |
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Jan 17, 2023 18:23
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KazigluBey posted:So far I've only done 12 hour runs, with the only team-building criteria I follow being making sure each expedition is comprised of 2 ground and 2 air pets. I get 22 Expedition tokens per 12 hours per team, and I have three teams at this point (and the final fourth should be ready in a week or two) , but the process of picking stuff up prior to having all three spun up made it feel like 22 per 12 hours per team is the "intended" pace with the minimum amount of stress and micromanagement. You unlock stuff at a decent clip. Yeah that makes sense. I monkey with it a bit because I want to usually have +2 residual on my main pet crew but still want to level up the +whack and +rez exp ones a bit.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:20
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I finally finished Antimatter Dimensions. That was a fun ride, even if it's slightly too slow/grindy/repetitive in parts and the Glyph system introduces too much variability and luck into progression for a few days. Still shocking that the Reality update was actually released.
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Jan 17, 2023 19:54
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I can't even get past the early IP part of AD where you need to look at it every few minutes to click the boost/galaxy buttons. It's too slow to just blaze through by paying attention to it constantly but you make almost no progress if you just let it idle. It's perfectly bad design.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:29
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New Yorp New Yorp posted:I finally finished Antimatter Dimensions. That was a fun ride, even if it's slightly too slow/grindy/repetitive in parts and the Glyph system introduces too much variability and luck into progression for a few days. Still shocking that the Reality update was actually released. About how long would you say it took from first reality to done? I'm nearing the end of my second reality now, after ~32 days realtime in my first and ~6 right now in my second.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:50
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Kyrosiris posted:About how long would you say it took from first reality to done? I'm nearing the end of my second reality now, after ~32 days realtime in my first and ~6 right now in my second. At least 100 days :v
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Jan 17, 2023 21:03
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Theresmore has a weird prestige curve. Like, usually the gameplay pattern is you play until the content is numerically overwhelming then ascend to gain major benefits allowing for further progression. In this it looks like you can beat it on the first run or two and prestiges are nice QOL boosts but won't meaningfully change the next gameplay loop. So, like, whats the point?
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Jan 17, 2023 21:34
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Kyrosiris posted:About how long would you say it took from first reality to done? I'm nearing the end of my second reality now, after ~32 days realtime in my first and ~6 right now in my second. 3 - 4 weeks. There are a few places where you just have timewalls that you can't do much about and no amount of optimization can help. Early realities are kind of painful because you have to redo all of the ECs every time and they're still a pain in the rear end. Knowing which perks to grab will help with that, because once you unlock the automator, you can fully automate everything from start to reality, but you have to have the right perks to fully enable it. Thing that don't seem like big deals like "auto-buy TT" and "achievements never reset" are actually critical to fully automating reality. The automator language is pretty straightforward, but it's still a little meta-programming game. I'm sure the discord is full of automator scripts at this point. Once you get past that, you have to worry about rolling glyphs with the appropriate attributes and playing an optimization game that can be a major pain in the rear end. "Am I using the wrong combination of glyphs, or do the glyphs I'm using have the wrong attributes, or are they underlevelled?" And this lasts for a while but improves over time. I'm going to play through it again, and yes the early game sucks. Autobuyers unlock earlier now, but the important ones (galaxies and dimboost) are still tied to challenges. You can fudge it with autohotkey or even javascript on a timer to click the buy all/dimboost/galaxy/crunch buttons every second, but it definitely still requires too much attention.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:31
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I think FE000000 just spoiled me because the "timewalls" there are things where you still get multiple OOMs more currency and upgrades that make it intermittently faster. Whereas in AD you have to go idle for 3 hours as the game does automatic resets for the same number of currency to build up enough.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:35
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Salvor_Hardin posted:Theresmore has a weird prestige curve. Like, usually the gameplay pattern is you play until the content is numerically overwhelming then ascend to gain major benefits allowing for further progression. In this it looks like you can beat it on the first run or two and prestiges are nice QOL boosts but won't meaningfully change the next gameplay loop. So, like, whats the point? If you're crushing all of the opposing angel armies on your second run, I would like to see your builds, please.
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Jan 17, 2023 22:37
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