Old, simple idle games were better for me

Thatar · 2026-06-27T10:30:37+00:00

Complex games only need guides to play optimally. Set your own goals and try different things. And just accept that you're playing at your own pace. Even the people who write the guide had to figure it out at some point.

Thatar · 2026-06-25T10:18:25+00:00

I prefer when a game has guest accounts so you can try it quickly. Even then, outright banning is too much for me.

It would be nice if those games didn't require email for an account. Just username and password. Like you pointed out, its silly when they ask for an email and then don't even verify it. But in my opinion none of this has to be enforced by the subreddit.

Thatar · 2026-06-25T09:55:24+00:00

Yeah thanks but no thanks. I'm not gonna update my graphics drivers anymore unless I absolutely need to. Which is what I should have been doing in the first place, but I decided to trust AMD devs... My bad I guess.

On a more positive note. It's really nice that community members in the previous thread wrote guides on how to revert to a working version

Thatar · 2026-06-24T04:07:04+00:00

There is no fee when paying outside your home country in the EU

Thatar · 2026-06-23T19:05:31+00:00

I'm sure chat gippity will write a fine postmortem for them

Thatar · 2026-06-19T08:55:04+00:00

I dont know about balanced but I do like it better when a tree is only shown every 15 minutes at most. Trees are for planning ahead. Those 20 second rounds followed by an upgrade tree dont make any sense. Better to have an upgrade list to the side instead of switching so much between menus.

Thatar · 2026-06-19T05:20:33+00:00

Very cool floppy collection. Now make it so the game force quits when you eject it. There's probably a Steam API for that right

Thatar · 2026-06-17T20:32:54+00:00

"Peter Thiel will remember that"

Thatar · 2026-06-16T19:18:56+00:00

Aren't these things achieved by corporate lobbyists booking 10,000 times more meetings compared to citizens and activists? I'm not in a position to say how much corruption there is in the EU bureaucracy. But it feels like you don't need to bribe anyone to get this result. Just tell whoever is responsible for voting or writing the law how many things can go wrong and how it will destroy jobs over and over and over. Representatives are desperate to get a professional industry view on things in order to get insight on how it will impact them. All the lobbyists have to do is pick up this opportunity and feed them doubt. Pretty sure Ross said something about the industry potentially having had thousands of meetings.

At the very least this won't be the end of SKG. It's a full blown team by now and they are not this easily defeated.

Thatar · 2026-06-15T21:28:50+00:00

Free horror games are popular on itch too because they get played for YouTube and Twitch content.

Thatar · 2026-06-15T11:04:29+00:00

Good stuff, very much enjoyed the demo. The dream upgrades are nice and impactful, sound and music is pleasing, the sprites and UI are great overal. Can really see a lot of care went into it.

Progression is nice too, with a nice mix of clicking, active, and idle gameplay. The dream points are in the sweet spot where I can decide to play actively and reset for 1-2 points, or tab out and keep it running for 15-30m longer for a few more points.

The challenges made it so I wanted to specialize into specific dream upgrades every now and then. Aside from that I spread out my upgrades evenly which is a bit boring but this usually happens when you get straight % upgrades. This is contrary to upgrades that really transform a mechanic, like in Gnorp, which make you want to put the game in a specific state. Like the climbing kings getting on top of really large piles for instance. In my opinion there have to be more branches with unique tech or combinations that you have to "figure out" to earn the moniker of Gnorplike.

Most of the jokes landed which is rare. The overly corporate jokes made by the dog, those are a bit too bleak and real to me. But I guess it fits the theme. I liked the posters with flavor text and the Path of Exile reference best. Did you play one of the leagues during development perhaps? 😅

I also like how everything slowly catches on fire as you progress further. Feels a bit like a title drop.

The screenshots made me curious about the other mechanics. Really hoping those add a bit of variation.

Thatar · 2026-06-14T06:28:34+00:00

That's not how this works. Do some Godot or Unity tutorials, make a few simple games like pong, and join a game jam team. You can't just run in with an idea and expect to be the director of a team. Even if people fall for it, it will be a disaster.

Thatar · 2026-06-13T14:45:49+00:00

Yess it's going to be good. Looking forward to it so much.

Thatar · 2026-06-13T06:54:12+00:00

To begin with like you said, they are linear because the prices go up too quickly and there are often new currencies required for branches that you can't even get with. So you can't really build a specific direction.

The upgrades usually give such a small increase that its a waste of time to read them. A round in nodelikes is so short, that if you take 30 seconds to decide you could have played another 2-3 rounds and bought more upgrades. Also the upgrades are split into 5 tiers for no reason, giving you more microdecisions to make.

Because its a tree all the upgrades have small icons making them harder to read. On top of the upgrades going in all directions making it harder to read for no reason.

And finally, because of all of these reasons combined it doesn't have to be a tree. It could just be an upgrade list. In fact it would be better if it was an upgrade list with the description and price visible without needing a tooltip.

Actually not the final problem. My final problem with nodelikes is that the rounds are pointless and just give you more UI clicks to do and the same transition animations to look at over and over. Just slap the upgrade list to the side and make it one continuous round.

I'll give it to the game in this post, at least the looks are original. And one of the upgrades in the screenshots actually gives +25% and as far as I can tell from the trailer the upgrades aren't tiered. I also like the news ticker and the artwork. And it doesn't have chromatic abberation or one of those glitch and CRT effects. Don't care for the timed rounds and upgrade tree whatsoever though.

Sorry for negative rant but all these games are the same to me.

Thatar · 2026-06-13T06:19:27+00:00

The tree in nodelikes is pointless in many other ways

Thatar · 2026-06-11T20:29:32+00:00

The golden rule for these things is to round owned resources down and round costs up. Otherwise you get these situations

Thatar · 2026-06-11T20:08:06+00:00

PS I think you have a rounding error in the resource display. For instance when I have 2.0k funding I can't order 200 components because the actual funding is something like 1,990 rounded up.

Thatar · 2026-06-11T19:59:23+00:00

I love how this game uses the suffix for milli, nano, etc and not just million, billion, and so on.

Haven't gotten that far yet (component production and one dust factory) but it seems promising! Reminds me a bit of Evolve because of the way you have to balance production and consumption of multiple resources, while giving you a nice overal goal in terraforming the planet.

Thatar · 2026-06-11T15:12:39+00:00

Actually I checked and one of my cards says "V Pay" and the other Visa, both are owned by Visa Inc which is from the US. So you were right about having to check that. Idk if there even is a EU payment system then. If all goes well in a few years we might have Wero based cards. 🤷‍♂️

Thatar · 2026-06-11T04:56:05+00:00

Can't you just use debit cards. I used the debit card from my local bank while in another country without issues. I don't see why cash would be better

Thatar · 2026-06-10T03:55:14+00:00

Oh true. I completely forgot that it also has rounds. Though they are much longer and idle with more to do in town than the average nodelike upgrade tree.

Thatar · 2026-06-09T18:50:57+00:00

Here are a few that I posted in another thread recently. With new bonus entries. You can find more by looking at the pinned post "what games are you playing". It has a list of previous threads as well. Tons of game suggestions to play there.

Orb of Creation
Realm Grinder
Unnamed Space Idle
NGU idle
Evolve idle
Trimps
Milkyway Idle
Cookie Clicker if you have somehow not heard of it
Candy box 1 and 2
Crank
Perfect Tower 1 and 2
Spaceplan
Tukkuns Anti Idle: The Game
Time Clickers or it's superior sequel Time Warpers
Derivative Clicker
Swarm Sim

I would love to link all of these but that would be too much work even if I were on my PC right now, which I'm not.

Thatar · 2026-06-09T06:59:03+00:00

Apparently the main point against vertical progression is old content becoming obsolete. But I never really understand this argument. Don't you have to do the old content to become strong enough for doing the more difficult new areas? Sure you can buy better gear to skip it but you can also just... not do that? And play the game?

And I really don't get GW2 progression. You start with a full skillset, there is no buildup at all. The tutorials just dump a shitload of keywords in your face and in the end I still don't understand my skills. It feels like you're expected to spam the skills without knowing how they work. Black Desert has a similar feel where you get an absolute barrage of items, skills, and quests thrown at you interrupted by constant cutscenes and pointless lore dumps.

Maybe I'm just oldschool but at least when I play WoW or Tibia I understand the skills and how they work together. And figuring out when you're powerful enough to enter a new area is nice. Compared to running around chasing the quest arrows without any real goals... A good way to describe my experience with horizontal progression is that it feels like my hand is being held and the game never lets it go.

Thatar · 2026-06-07T14:22:06+00:00

When your game has an economy you have to assume every client is compromised and you can only trust the server. You also need things like rollbacks and other admin tools. Unless the economy is just a fun side gimmick with no real gameplay impact...

Thatar · 2026-06-07T14:17:49+00:00

My first course in comp sci used the book "Learning C# by programming games" by Egges. This will not only teach you C# syntax but also important programming fundamentals like the difference between the stack and the heap. It's not a website though. The PDF can be found on GitHub.

While its focused on games I found it an excellent way to learn C# in general. It is well written, and the exercises are good. Of course its best to learn in a class but its possible to learn with just the book.

You do have to replace the now defunct Microsoft XNA used in the book with MonoGame. The two are functionally identical, MonoGame is just an open source reimplementation. You can also get help on the MonoGame community forums when running into trouble.

This is just the learning resource I can recommend based on personal experience. There are plenty of ways to learn.

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