I’ve been interested in idle games for a while. I’ve played Dragon Cliff, Idlescape, Melvor Idle, Plantera, and plant daddy.
This is a genre where the player doesn’t have to pay constant attention or actively do anything for progression to occur. Characters will automatically battle and gather resources. Players can take a more active role to speed things up and optimize activities, but it’s not required. The games are thus quite casual.
I’m interested in these games for two reasons. First, it’s satisfying to see progress. Second, they seem like a simple genre to make since graphics aren’t the primary draw.
Dragon Cliff
Dragon Cliff is a desktop game released on Steam about managing a squad of adventurers defeating monsters.
The battle system uses an action-bar turn based system. Enemies and your squad members have agility that determines how fast they fill up the bar to attack. There are a couple dozen classes for the adventurers, with each class having a passive attack that occurs automatically and an active attack that the player can trigger. Combat happens along a linear path through the area that is being adventured in. Between 5 and 20 battles happen and the path culminates in a boss fight that awards a chest with a chance at finding items.
There is a village system where the player can manage the residents of an inn, hire new adventurers, train adventurers, craft weapons and armor, upgrade items, and buy and sell items.
Residents of the inn provide passive bonuses such as increased profit from selling items, more practice points for training adventurers, faster crafting of items, higher likelihood of finding or creating better weapons, etc. One flaw in the inn system is a giant leap at certain points where expanding goes from 2k to 20k to 200k gold. It would be more enjoyable if it just scaled based on the current size. The inn system is very simple and there is no endearing quality for any of the guests. I simply ejected any guest that’s worse than another that is offered. Guests have different rarities similar to items, which seems to correspond with higher numbers.
Hiring new adventures seems interesting because of the variety in class mechanics. Unfortunately, only a few classes are truly relevant if playing optimally and mechanics are irrelevant as it happens passively. As with the guests in the inn, there is little endearing quality to your adventurers, so hiring and training a legendary adventurer with a better growth rate is just better. Adventurers use the same rarity scale as items, which corresponds with growth potential that determines how fast their stats increase. It is hard to discern what adventurers are best. I only stumbled upon damage charts online by accident.
Items have a large number of stats and there are a handful of unique effects. Unfortunately, the number of stats makes it very hard to decide which are worthwhile. The easiest thing is to optimize the DPS stat of the adventurer, either strength or intelligence. The unique effects are mostly irrelevant. Upgrading items combines 3 of the same lower tier item into the next higher tier with re-rolled stats. There are other upgrade options to change stats around, but due to the mess of different stats, and the speed of finding replacements, it seems like a waste of time. There is a socket and gem system with gems making sets that have further bonuses. The set bonuses of gems are generally just more stats.
One of the most annoying things about the game is that the squad has to stop adventuring to change equipment, which causes a lot of interruption when trying to decide what to replace. This would easily be the #1 improvement to the game, alongside being able to more fluidly switch characters in and out of the active squad. Simplifying the organization of equipment and reducing the number of stats to make comparison easier would benefit the game.
Overall, the game has a lot of systems that the player can choose to pursue. It has quests to guide the player towards advancing through the game. The fact that there is nothing endearing to the anything is disappointing.
IdleScape
IdleScape is a web based game where the player has a few skill they can work on.
There were 13 skills in the game when I played. I’ll break them into 4 categories: collection, crafting, enchanting, and combat. Each skill offers an option for performing an action passively, whether logged in or not. As the skill is leveled up, new options are made available to the player, typically a higher tier version of the base action type for the skill.
The first 4 skills are all collection skills: mining, foraging, fishing, and farming. The first 3 are simply a set of actions that occur passively, where the character will gather some resources such as ore, wood and seeds, or fish. Higher tier actions of the first 3 provide a different set of resources, which is useful at higher levels in other skills. Farming is different in that there is no action for the player to take, except to choose which seeds to plant. As the farming level increases, there is more farm land to plant seeds. Collection is a decent set of skills, but actions are incredibly long. Fishing in particular is ridiculous due to a 10 second interval between actions combined with a 20% success rate.
The next 4 skills are crafting skills, which take resources and turn them into useful items. Smelting takes ore and turns it into bars, which takes heat, which is gathered by burning wood or coal. Crafting takes primarily wood and bars, to create items such as weapons, armor, and tools. Tools improve collection skill performance. Cooking takes various ingredients from combat, farming, fishing, and foraging and turns it into items that can be eaten for healing in combat or for temporary bonuses to other skills. Runecrafting turns essence, which is passively gained when performing any action in the game, and turns it into runes that are used in enchanting.
Pretty much all of the crafting skills suck. Smelting is slow, boring, and requires some attention to switch ores. You need an enormous stack of ore or use a timer to alert yourself when your stack is nearly smetled. 24 hours of mining will power maybe 4-6 hours of smelting, but split between 2-3 ore types. Crafting is slow to level because you have to mine a massive ore stack, smelt it all, and make 3-4 items. The redeeming aspect of crafting is that is at satisfying to finally make an upgrade, but it’s annoying that it’s locked behind getting this skill level up and it’s perpetually so far behind the others. Cooking lacks straightforward information about what is worth cooking. The wiki mostly makes sense once I figured it out, but I don’t want to bother cooking anymore since the bonuses are weak and require a lot of resources. Runecrafting is slow to gather the essence and the skill that runes power is hard to get into.
Enchanting breaks down into 2 sub-skills, scrollcrafting and augmentation.
Scrollcrafting uses runes and silver to create scrolls that can be applied to most equipment in the game, which have slots for enchantments. There are a whole host of interesting enchantments that can provide bonuses like automatically smelting bars, finding extra resources, and combat improvements. Augmentation is a way of improving equipment, it takes some extra materials and gives a % chance of success to give a +1 bonus that can stack on the equipment. Augmentation is mildly interesting, but burning resources on augmentation seems like a poor use of resources since the bonuses are very weak. I would rather use bars on crafting XP which will provide better bonuses when I get to the next tier of equipment.
Scrollcrafting seems basically inaccessible after a couple weeks of playing. One issue is that leveling enchanting only comes from augmentation which I’ve talked about. Another issue is that all of the truly useful scrolls require high levels of enchanting. Its very hard to even get the runes for scrolls that I could potentially make. Crafting scrolls also has a failure rate, so I’d be risking any resources to try to make a scroll unless I already have a high enchanting level. If scrollcrafting was more accessible, it could really open up the game.
Combat is inline with the rest of the game.
Overall, this is a fine game if I would just log in twice a day. It uses a 12 hour timer before it stops passively collecting resources for you, so that’s all you have to log in for. Collect resources for a week or two, build up a massive stack of ore, smelt it, craft it, etc. However, I would only prettystart seeing mildly interesting things happen after several months of consistently doing that, so I’m not very interested in spending my time.
Other Games
I’m not going to give full reviews of the other games I’ve played, but here’s a couple short reviews.
Melvor Idle is a game that’s very similar to IdleScape, except that there’s a lot more going on with skills that pretty much match RuneScape. I only played for a couple characters for a few weeks. It’s a well made game, but checking on it twice a day didn’t feel rewarding.
plant daddy is a simple game where you grow randomly generated plants and fill up your wall/shelves/bathroom with these plants that give resources for making more plants. It’s very chill. I played for a few hours. It doesn’t go beyond that timeline unless you really want to grind for rare combinations of plant looks.
Summary
Idle games are fun, but the veneer of progress is often very thin. Sorting out confusing systems isn’t fun for me. Checking on a game twice a day just to keep progress going when nothing meaningful happens for weeks feels bad.
I’ve tried designing a few idle type games and its harder than it appears. It’s not too hard to create a tree of activities and resources. Making that feel rewarding is the difficult thing. You also have to create an huge tree of content if you want a steady drip of rewards for the players. Creating so many things can be tedious.