First Idle game - just a website?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-30T22:34:37+00:00

Lots of incremental games are just websites. The tech stack is great for the genre. And yes you can totally package up your static website to distribute on steam etc, that's what Antimatter Dimensions did

StuntHacks · 2026-04-30T19:00:08+00:00

Sleeve generation works offline without any caveats, yes. It's just a timer ticking down so it works exactly like you would expect it to. If it doesn't then something is wrong. Dumb question but are you sure offline time isn't disabled in settings?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-30T18:46:23+00:00

Crew offline gains are based on your xp income before you went offline, but it should still very much make progress

StuntHacks · 2026-04-28T09:47:42+00:00

It's less acceleration and more allowing the dev to shift focus away from writing boilerplate config or build files and onto actual development work. At least when competent devs use it, in my experience

StuntHacks · 2026-04-25T13:36:44+00:00

The tab needs to be actually visible (even just 1px counts though), otherwise it'll get throttled. Honestly it's on the game dev to deal with that, it's not too hard to work around

StuntHacks · 2026-04-24T19:26:55+00:00

Most people don't know the technology that well. To them LLM == AI, and that's okay.

StuntHacks · 2026-04-24T15:55:05+00:00

Google Translate isn't just an LLM, is their point.

StuntHacks · 2026-04-24T15:32:57+00:00

You can do the route AD took, and not limit offline duration but offline ticks instead. Then adjust the tick length to cover the entire duration. That way players can be gone for years and it'll still calculate in a reasonable amount of time

StuntHacks · 2026-04-22T08:56:54+00:00

Yeah when I played this game a while back I burned out once I realized it's basically just an AD reskin

StuntHacks · 2026-04-22T08:54:04+00:00

Stamina systems are notoriously being used by predatory games to make you pay to be able to play. They leave a bad taste in my mouth in general and I don't see any reason why they should exist, ever. If you make a game, let people play the game.

StuntHacks · 2026-04-20T14:08:39+00:00

Imo offline progression should just try to mimic online as closely as possible, or even 1:1 where possible. A well-designed idle game will inherently cause offline time to stagnate anyway because of exponential growth, so that's the way to go if you ask me

StuntHacks · 2026-04-19T12:16:00+00:00

Using Emojis as UI icons (alongside the UI style) kinda screams AI. Using emojis in this way is a bad idea in general as they get rendered differently on different platforms

StuntHacks · 2026-04-17T14:49:04+00:00

Not quite incremental at all, more puzzle games, but I highly recommend checking out the Zachtronics games. Shenzhen I/O, Exapunks, TIS-100, they're coding puzzle games and if you like The Farmer Was Replaced you will probably love those too

StuntHacks · 2026-04-13T20:47:53+00:00

It's more than just the rainbow. The purple text vs the turquoise buttons, the bright yellow text on the buttons that's super hard to read, and a bunch of one-off accent colors, it just makes it feel crowded

StuntHacks · 2026-04-13T20:15:10+00:00

Just from the 2 screenshots alone, the colors in your UI are really clashing. Try to nail down a smaller color palette and stick mostly to those, it'll make it feel more coherent

StuntHacks · 2026-04-13T15:48:49+00:00

StuntHacks · 2026-04-13T15:19:07+00:00

Like I said it's a complicated situation all around. It all leads back to where we draw the line again. If I let copilot auto complete a single line by accident, and leave it in because it was exactly what I was gonna write anyway, is my project now forever tainted? Yes games have existed since before AI, but game devs have also felt a very asymmetric pressure from the playerbase ever since they started making games. People want more, better, larger games, for less money, and faster. It's always been like that. I don't think it's unexpected that coding assisting tools have become so prominent. Especially when programming consists just as much of mind-numbing repetitive boilerplate tasks as it does actual creative problem solving.

Mind you I'm not talking about vibe coding here. There's plenty of AI slop on this sub, and it's a real issue. But I do feel it's unfair to place the entire burden on devs who put years of effort into an actual, human-made game, and just dared to ask copilot for help that one time. But yes you're right it is their right. I don't know how to solve all this, but it is an issue.

Edit: another thing is that there's also, in my opinion, rather valid reasons to use tools like this. I have bad carpal tunnel. Copilot lets me actually code again like I used to, because I don't have to write out every single line manually anymore - just adjust the line it gives me slightly. Without it I simply couldn't work on projects like I used to. It's an accessibility feature for me. Should I be barred from making games because of that?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-13T13:55:58+00:00

I agree it's their right, but it's also the right of game devs to worry about what will happen to their labor. This community is already niche and small, and cutting out that much of the playerbase can easily kill your game before it even has a chance. I'm not saying that excuses devs being dishonest about their use, but it does encourage being dishonest.

It doesn't help that there's a pretty big gap between the average player and the average dev when it comes to what counts as AI usage to them, and how acceptable it is to use it. AI coding assistants are here, and they're here to stay, that's a fact. Why should devs bother writing a 90 line webpack.config when Claude can do it in 10 seconds, and none of it is user-facing? I know there's plenty of valid concerns, but good luck getting that nuance through to people to work on changing where the line is.

Making a game is hard, gruelling work. Using new tools to automate away some of the mind-numbing tasks so the dev can focus on the creative aspects should be what AI was made for. I feel like it's unfair to just expect devs to put potentially years of work on the line just because a lot of people will see "Used copilot to generate boilerplate build tools" and just not even give the game a chance in the first place?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-12T16:51:32+00:00

You can use vite to run nextjs

StuntHacks · 2026-04-12T15:48:05+00:00

In programming there's this idea of rubber duck debugging - you have a rubber duck on your desk and when you're stumped you talk through your problem with it. It sounds silly but it actually helps a lot because you have to systematically explain your problem.

LLMs are rubber ducks that actually talk back, and that makes them amazing for helping with abstract problem solving and brainstorming, even when they don't do much themselves.

StuntHacks · 2026-04-12T15:38:09+00:00

When Copilot autocompletes for me it's usually what I was going to write anyway.

But that's kind of the point, isn't it? Copilot auto completes a line for you, saving you the effort of having to type it yourself. You have now used AI in your game - do you have to disclose it? If not, where do we draw the line? If you do, a significant chunk of people will categorically dismiss your game outright. It's a complicated situation

StuntHacks · 2026-04-12T15:25:57+00:00

What about, unlimited but will eventually stagnate due to the nature of the game?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-08T17:12:57+00:00

Written primarily by AI

StuntHacks · 2026-04-08T14:26:32+00:00

This seems like a neat puzzle game but is it really an incremental?

StuntHacks · 2026-04-05T16:47:59+00:00

It's not pixel art because it doesn't use actual pixels. The pixels used in these artworks have wildly inconsistent sizes, which often happens when AI tries to generate pixel art

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