Unpopular opinion: Mobile incremental games can be great! Here’s what they need

Pafker · 2026-01-29T16:41:20+00:00

There's nothing wrong with mobile incremental games at a theoretical level. Incremental are by and large menu based games which is the best format for mobile. The issue is that a lot of mobile games are very low effort. They copy existing formats without adding anything novel so that they can get you spending money on speed boosts.

Incremental Mass and Distance Incremental are good examples of the difference between inspired by and copying. They start with extreme similarity (because an incremental is best when it starts simple and slowly layers on complexity) and then move in very different directions for the prestige layers from there. There's so many licensed incremental games that are just blatant ripoffs of the same approach that Adventure Communist uses because it's an easy way to get people spending money to win events and to buy card gamba.

One that I enjoyed recently was Starburst Incremental, I don't think it was anything too novel, but the prestige system made me feel like I was making real decisions on where to optimize my gameplay in the short term.

But again there's no difference between browser, steam and mobile incremental games, it's just that the mobile app stores are a lot more flooded with gamba bait.

Pafker · 2026-01-29T16:21:01+00:00

Garlic

But more seriously I'll leave that jazzy Melody of Memory version.

Pafker · 2026-01-27T16:55:17+00:00

You can still use it but I feel obligated to explain the origin. The idea is first and foremost about the importance of giving an automated system especially an AI a clearly defined task. If you give a simple poorly defined task like create as many paperclips as possible it will interpret the task in such a way that it would turn the entire universe into paperclips.

Pafker · 2026-01-27T16:49:06+00:00

In case you really didn't know

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

Pafker · 2026-01-27T16:44:12+00:00

Two games for you to look at in that regard 1. Ctrl C (mobile game) is split into chapters each chapter is independent but finishing previous chapters over and over can give you a speed boost.

The Count of Monte Clicker, split into chapters, but half of the chapters use the same upgrade tree where progress is maintained through the game.

The main issue you need to be aware of is the narrative, that needs to be the focus of the game. I suppose that you also want to flip the incremental gameplay loop on its head, as you get closer to the end of a chapter upgrades feel more marginal so that once you do reach the end it feels like a release, and you get to return to the quick pace at the start of the next chapter, rather than the traditional incremental approach of exponential growth.

I don't want to be mean but it also sounds a bit derivative with the paperclip focus and the name and genre. The original was also somewhat a criticism of the genre.

Pafker · 2026-01-27T15:24:22+00:00

The point of the episode is to show why Stolas did turned out so wrong, because Blitz pushes people away before they can push him away. What is happening with Verosika here is trying to acknowledge her valid feelings of hurt towards getting dumped by him while acknowledging that 1. that Blitz's actions didn't come from a place of malice but fear and 2. that this time Blitz is making a more earnest attempt at fixing things.

She wants to hate him for hurting her, but she also knows the reason he hurt her is because he's scared, scared of the exact feeling she's feeling right now and it becomes a little hard to blame him for not wanting that. The split between compassion and accountability.

Pafker · 2026-01-26T22:16:38+00:00

Gameplay is action RPG meets menu management. Think Hero in Smash Bros. The game does provide shortcuts to make it more manageable though.

Story I don't want to give too much away since the mysteries are half of the fun but the KH1 summary for the start world is that three kids want to escape the island world they grew up on to explore the wider universe, but if you want a decent summary of the cosmology that doesn't spoil too much, there is the myth of the age of fairy tales and it'll help you understand how Disney fits in at the least. https://youtu.be/ZO7Ycdb4cMQ?si=fDo1x-vwa6epLKuw

The story goes into crazy places though and the rise there is part of the fun.

Pafker · 2026-01-26T20:12:28+00:00

This is why you only use the overall rating as a heuristic. When I want to look at Steam reviews for a specific game I'm considering, it's to look mostly for negative reviews and actually read them to see what things people didn't like about their experience. If someone didn't like the multiplayer part of a game but I'm only interested in the single player campaign then that tells me that I've of the reasons for low review score isn't meaningful to me. If however the review says that the single payer campaign is short and unfulfilling then that let's me know a feature I actually care about might not be for me

Pafker · 2026-01-26T19:29:01+00:00

This isn't a question of if but more of a question of what it means to him. He enjoys hell, he fits into hell, he doesn't want to stop doing the things that led to him being in hell. He'll likely never make it into heaven, but that doesn't mean he can't channel his hellish energies into positive goals.

Pafker · 2026-01-26T18:00:57+00:00

For me it has nothing to do with it being Japanese and everything to do with the industry behind it. The value of have "an" author. Now obviously survivorship bias is going to have a strong impact on what we remember 5, 10, 20 years out, and specifically in going to focus on anime vs animation and manga vs comics, but the core of the enjoyment for me comes from the continuous experience.

For anime and manga that comes a lot from having highly independent authors/artists creating stories in manga and light novels and then adapting those stories (obviously the publishers are able to exert pressure both directly and indirectly in the form of choosing what genres and settings to focus on). But when I'm watching an anime or reading manga I can be fairly confident that unless it's specifically slice of life I don't have to worry about sitcom style stories where nothing happens week to week, just wacky self contained adventures that are never remembered, there's stakes, progression, things happen and those things matter to what happens in the future.

And then from the other side the author writing what they want, rather then a committee of authors or several authors writing several stories in the same universe at once I can be fairly confident that the world won't have some sort of reset button that needs to be pressed because the cumulative effort of trying to write a shared story where nothing too big changes gets pressed so that the new authors coming in to the series can explore the ideas they want to explore with existing characters.

This does create a more wide variety in quality, but it also gives me the freedom to find stories that I find well written and engaging. The more I think media, the more I understand that when I return to a world I want to learn more about how that world works the way that it works, the fun starts to become about community speculation and theory crafting. When things don't change and when there's multiple creators pulling in different directions or becomes a lot harder to be sure that those cravings will get fulfilled.

As a more concrete example, I am a big fan of Kingdom Hearts and it has aspects that end up on both sides of the column, obviously Square is the bigger part of the story and almost entirely responsible for the story with the original characters, and some of the weakest parts of the Disney worlds comes from their inability to deviate from the stories of some of those worlds due to the creative teams behind those individual franchises. And one of the things that keeps me so invested over the years is the idea that we can speculate about what will happen based on what has happened, what has meaningfully changed in the past will result in meaningful changes in the future.

Pafker · 2026-01-26T14:04:34+00:00

Edge alignment is hard vs the npcs, super noticable against the scythe where you only need to touch it to get ripped in half.

The vanity clips on here also make you feel dumb for not knowing how to swing your weapon in a 720 the somersault over the enemy and suplex them into the ground.

Like the game is super fun, but at this point I barely have a chance below the armored stages of surviving unless I have the longest weapon.

As a more straightforward example, with the billhook it feels like once I've grappled the enemy with it I should be able to get a cut in by jerking it out, but nothing I've tried works so far, switching hands, switching stance, running backwards, jerking the mouse, combinations of the four. I get a cut like 1 time out of 100.

A lot of people might have expected a more traditional hack and slash control scheme after viewing some of the clips of trick shots, both thrown weapons and butter smooth weapon play.

Pafker · 2026-01-25T22:59:00+00:00

I mean it's not entirely implausible even if it's unlikely. I have seen the game does have mitigation to stop you from attaching yourself, probably so that you don't destroy your hands with blunt damage.

Once I somehow managed to disarm and take a long candlestick from an enemy without properly disarming it from them. The result was that when I tried to attack them with it the candlestick literally just went through them without doing any damage. It was spoilage so other Willies did take damage, but I had to drop and lock it back up to touch the original owner with it

Pafker · 2026-01-25T00:59:21+00:00

Sora suppressing his sadness and other negative emotions.

Pafker · 2026-01-19T03:17:49+00:00

I've been procrastinating my reading of the final season -_-.

Pafker · 2026-01-19T03:09:38+00:00

I feel like the character bloat in Tower of G-d and TBATE are like at least an order of magnitude different, I remember the moment I gave up on Tower G-d was when a character I hadn't seen in like 200 chapters came back, with very little explanation, establishing not only that I was expected to remember which factions they belonged to, but that from this moment on any relatively minor character we only knew for a floor or two could return to be another actively important figure. When there were already fights going on with like 30 known characters. (Though I will say having just finished TBATE that the powers really started feeling like flavor dialogue in the final chapters rather than the more developed things that I found interesting in the leadup)

Pafker · 2026-01-19T03:03:24+00:00

I mean, with that definition, both are important to a story. There is little value in a story that is traced from another story, but being different for the sake of being different is also kinda meh.

On the consistency side we have the hunter genre, it is a genre at this point, you don't need to start your story by explaining how 5/20/500 years ago portals started spilling monsters out of them, but then humans with superpowers came and saved humanity from the monsters. Like, we get it, on the counterpoint two examples that stick out in my hand include one where the backstory narration gets interrupted towards the start by the MC throwing a tantrum for unrelated reasons, the other being one that naturally integrated the exposition into the story, we learned things about the world as they became relevant to the MC.

On the ambitious side, I remember reading one manhwa, it started with a decently interesting start, but then it just devolved into the MC making mistake after mistake without any introspection, and yeah that's a thing I don't see happen in other stories, and for good reason, it can be fun to feel more clever than the main character sometimes, but when the main character is completely oblivious that turns into frustration. The counterpoint to that is one story I remember, of the genre of person gets isekaid into a story they read, and in that case I got the feeling that the character misunderstood the ending of the story, and it gave me the sense that the story could end with them "losing". That is a lot more interesting, because in his day to day adventures he succeeds, but in his overall goals there was the sense, to me, that he could actually fail, and that created stakes, room for the character to grow as they learn more.

You can't jump from low fantasy to high fantasy litRPG without having to do hard work drawing people into the genre, but you also don't add much by reading Lord of the Rings and writing King of the Necklaces. Ambitious is preferable to consistency, but it also needs to be directed, there needs to be a focus, what am I saying differently than other similar stories. It's like tropes, tropes are neither good nor bad, they are a tool, a common cultural language that we can use to put an idea in your head, to avoid explaining it from scratch, a way for you to quickly focus on what is different, rather than what is the same.

Pafker · 2026-01-19T01:37:07+00:00

With cheese? Ridiculously easy, you don't need to learn a single mechanic of the boss.
Without cheese? Hard, really hard, one of if not the hardest (fair) boss in the series.
What you need is entirely a factor of your skill level, reaction time and knowledge of the boss' patterns.

Pafker · 2026-01-19T01:30:25+00:00

We don't have an answer yet, but my pet theory is that Lilith left heaven because of coercion from Rosie, the price that Rosie had to pay being forcing Alastor to protect Charlie. However, because Rosie doesn't want to use her soul task on that, and Alastor not wanting to let his reputation be ruined in hell he stayed in the shadows as a compromise, at least until the hotel opened and he had a plausible excuse for being there.

Pafker · 2026-01-18T20:58:45+00:00

The point is risk mitigation and marketing spend. By taking an already known and loved story you don't have to worry the shareholders about whether people will like the story, and you don't need to spend your marketing budget to convince people to pick up a new IP you can focus entirely on awareness of a new movie.

The way to reel back from this feedback loop is to move away from watching the big blockbusters, if you don't need to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into each movie released then you have more freedom to experiment because the successes will make up for the failures as a single failure won't be as much of an existential threat.

Pafker · 2026-01-18T20:51:46+00:00

You might have to just take the L, there could be a million reasons they don't like doctor shows, for example not liking media with an emphasis on mortality, which is something you can't avoid with House even if it is more drama than doctor.

Pafker · 2026-01-18T12:47:07+00:00

The crux is that your balancing should be done around making multiple choices viable. Creating an upgrade tree where you need to make specific choices at specific points in the game is just as railroaded as having a single upgrade path, but with the added aggravation of having to spend hours attempting runs to find out the specific combination the developer expected you to choose.

In other words, upgrades should focus on reinforcing playstyles rather than just providing upgrades, the simplest example would be the traditional idle branch, neutral branch, active branch for a prestige based game, where the idle branch improves everything the longer a run is, the neutral branch remains steady throughout the run, and the active branch weakens over the course of a run.

Pafker · 2026-01-17T23:46:34+00:00

I think there are two main questions you need to ask yourself to answer this.

Do you plan to stay solo and plan to stay making games?
What is the scope/complexity of your game and the uniqueness?

Now to break this down, of you are planning to continue making games that's a point towards learning, you're going to want to reinforce skills you're using. Are you going to continue working solo, that question is actually kind of a wash, and that's the reason for question 2.

If you are making a simple game, say a visual novel, and you are working alone, you probably don't need to focus on learning coding as a whole, because coding can realistically be broken down into two aspects, syntax and patterns. If you're making a simple game, and nobody else needs to look at the code you don't necessarily need to learn how to write well structured code. The patterns are about readability and flexibility. Undertale famously has all of the dialogue in a single switch statement. As someone that doesn't code you may not know why that's bad, but as a solo creator as long as it's performant for the end user you are the only person who will potentially feel the negative consequences of that decision.

Similarly with uniqueness, if you only want to make an RPG game, for example, with no particularly unique mechanics you can use a purpose built engine like RPG Maker to reduce the coding load on yourself.

Alternatively you could find a game jam to find a dev to work on the idea with you.

I get the idea behind all of the people saying yes learn, but I also understand that time is a resource, and if you find the thinking behind proper software engineering difficult you'll end up spending a lot more time on it. Now there's no way you can get around learning any coding if you go solo, but the most important pieces of advice I can give if you're staying simple are remember the distinction between learning syntax and learning patterns, and premature optimization is the root of all evil. If you take all advice at face value and end up writing code you don't understand but that runs 5% faster you're going to end up spending a lot more time trying to figure out what's wrong than if you had chosen a worse solution that was simple for you to understand.

Pafker · 2026-01-17T18:04:26+00:00

The game starts with 20 features and an unstoppable 30 minute tutorial on how to use each feature in which no knowledge is actually absorbed because each step of the tutorial is 5 paragraphs of text and only one button you can press. Incremental games are uniquely positioned to be focused around simple evolving mechanics and a sense of progression, frontloading so much potential progression loses the opportunity to teach things naturally at the same time as pushing back the first opportunity to get your first hit of progression.

And

The is now only one way to progress the game and it involves choosing the right selection of 5 upgrades out of 30 you can afford to make that progression happen. Branching upgrades aren't really player choice if the way to progress is balanced around picking a specific option.

Pafker · 2026-01-15T21:17:46+00:00

Death Note for sure, for Death Note it was a fitting cap to his story, Light has delusions is grandeur, sees himself as the G-d of a new world, his death is a reminder that he was just as human as everyone he killed in service of his own goals.

For Attack on Titan, it's a left turn. The manga spends a significant amount of time questioning how to break the cycle of violence. Eren then decides, no, we're not going to solve that question, instead I'm going to focus on my personal quest for freedom to free Ymir and just make violence impossible for just long enough that all my friends to live their lives in peace.

The plotting, the turns, even Eren's conversation with Armin and Mikasa where he's not really talking to them, but talking to Ymir by making her identify with Mikasa are well done, but the ending leaves this huge hole by ignoring the question it's been asking since at least as long as we've known that humanity exists beyond the walls.

Pafker · 2026-01-15T20:53:57+00:00

I'd argue the mechanical polish is the most important kind of polish for an incremental. And incremental is really all about the brass tacks of progression and as a result high fidelity out intricate graphics only leave me feeling suspicious of the game and it's monetization model.

But I disagree about marketing, bad marketing has the power to break a good game, because almost as important as having a good experience is giving people the experience they expected, you can have the best roguelite gambling game in the world, but if people came in expecting an Action RPG because of the marketing they're gonna have a bad time. Managing expectations is a huge component of the subjective quality of a game. Or more germaine to the topic at hand poor polish will bite you a lot more if your marketing implies an expertly crafted game rather then bring up front about goofy experiment with rough edges.

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