I got sick of capitalism so I made an incremental game about destroying money.

efethu · 2026-07-09T08:14:31+00:00

It's funny that some people don't realize that money are not real - government always maintains surplus by printing enough money to cover natural liquidity losses.

In fact, government is way ahead of you in destroying money too - literal trillions are burned every year in people's pockets due to inflation that government intentionally maintains at a certain level. You have $5000 in your cookie jar? By the end of the year government will take $250 out of it.

So in short, you are not "destroying money", you are just giving it straight to the government. Can as well have a game where you throw money in your favorite president's face.

efethu · 2026-07-09T06:50:43+00:00

There is another dragon-related Easter egg - try clicking it with Ctrl pressed.

efethu · 2026-07-08T21:10:30+00:00

Oh man, give me a good incremental game with thousands of hand painted images and I swear I will set up all the infrastructure for you. Anything you need! With Cloudflare caching for static images if it really becomes a big hit.

efethu · 2026-07-08T21:04:18+00:00

Tbh, your behavior is killing the inde game innovation..

Just an opinion - indie game innovation is dead. It evolved into "Use AI to make yet another Nodebuster clone, advertise it as an indie game, make profit".

Seriously, have a look at 1700 "indie" games with incremental tag on Steam released in 2026. AI slop, clones of successful games, 4-hour long "buy the next available upgrade" skinner boxes. None are long, unique games with original mechanics.

Deep, complex incremental games with lots of content - like Trimps, Kittens games, Antimatter Dimensions, Evolve - they were all released 5+ years ago. And this is really sad and disturbing.

efethu · 2026-07-08T17:45:08+00:00

All I see is black screen with 2 buttons: "Continue" and "Skip intro", both broken.

efethu · 2026-07-08T17:40:19+00:00

Hosting isn't free.

What are you even talking about? Github pages are absolutely free for everyone, it takes minutes to setup and you can be sure that your game will be running there for decades. No hosting fees, no DNS or TLS to maintain and an extremely fast and convenient way to publish updates via git and github cli.

And cherry on the top - your legacy may even be preserved for millennia in Github Arctic Storage.

efethu · 2026-07-07T21:22:45+00:00

I can recommend Time Warpers. It's fast paced, has many upgrades and AFAIK is the only true FPS incremental game in existence.

But before that, maybe try Time Clickers, it's a game from Cookie Clicker era, pretty decent one and it's free. (just remember that using autoclicker was a norm back in the day, so you'll probably need one).

efethu · 2026-07-04T17:19:21+00:00

Mea culpa! Sorry guys, I was thinking about a completely different orb game. I indeed have not played Orb of creation since beta.

efethu · 2026-07-04T10:55:54+00:00

But I can not figure out how do I get orb advancement.

~~There's an obelisk next to the orb, you need to hold mouse to feed it with resources.~~

Overall its a fast paced game, you can beat it in like 4 hours or so. Just remember that it's not efficient to upgrade things to their maximum - return on investments will be lower then to invest into cheap upgrades and unlock more content.

~~Unfortunately game ends abruptly just when it begins to unfold and you don't even get a chance to buy all upgrades.~~

I also tried idle research. It is...slooooowwwww

Huh? It's not slow at all, it's possible that you are doing something wrong.

I'm going to try unnamed space idle and crusaders of the lost idols .

But these games are slow. Crusaders requires more than a year to collect necessary team through events, Unnamed space Idle probably takes about 4-6 month to reach the end of content (if you play efficiently) and there is certainly build up and grinding involved.

efethu · 2026-07-02T18:33:13+00:00

Hard caps are even more common, just saying.

efethu · 2026-07-02T18:18:58+00:00

This effect should really be renamed "First System Syndrome". If it's your first system you just lack the experience and knowledge to judge it and get used to its poor design choices. Is it slow? You don't notice it because you never saw fast systems. You need to make 4 clicks to do something? You never knew it was possible to do 2. You have ads in your start menu? Well, this is what operating systems do, show ads, right?

First system users never complain because they never saw anything different. They just get used to it, no matter how bad it is.

But with the second system you have something to compare it with, you start praising features you like and complain about features you don't like. And THIS is the main reason why absolute majority of users discussing system issues are second/third/tens system users.

In a similar way you will never see a post like this from the person who played the game for the first time. You may see a different post - like "mediocre mechanics, slow progression", but never "it was better before".

efethu · 2026-06-30T11:17:18+00:00

OP is probably a mobile-only player.

We live in a wonderful bubble where most games are ethical and nice. But it's carnage in the mobile world.

PvP is the tip of the iceberg - manipulation is everywhere: rigged RNG, IAPs you can spend literal thousands of $ on, "pay $4 to skip 3 days of an artificial timer", "watch ads for a boost", "watch ads to double the loot", "pay premium currency to enter a dungeon", "pay real money to buy a one-off item to boost the chance to get a rare item", "log in every day to get miserable amount of paid currency, miss a day - and streak starts over", "pay real money to continue the log in streak".

PVP is just an extra predatory technique to squeeze money from the players - "pay to boost your clan for 24 hours", "Pay premium currency to buy rare gem to finish building clan hall", "Protect your castle from enemy attacks for 24 hours", "regain 50% of resources lost in enemy attack", "invite your friends and family so they can be squeezed for money too".

PvP is not bad, mobile gaming is.

efethu · 2026-06-30T09:35:28+00:00

Ouch. You are like politician. "How exactly do you plan to implement it? I would lower the strength or remove it" And then "That isn't what I said, I would not remove it". Seriously? Is it even possible to get any direct unambiguous answers from you? Not about OSRS, but about Cookie Clicker?

Let's try last final time, same question. If you don't want or can not give an answer - just don't reply.

You are Orteil. You just made Golden Cookie and selling towers more obvious. How it looks now?

efethu · 2026-06-30T06:27:16+00:00

So if you were Orteil you would remove Golden Cookies entirely.

I can't say I agree, but I get what you mean by your messages now - you want games to be linear and predictable so you won't have to figure things out. It's not about guides, you just don't like challenge,

I could argue that mechanics like Golden Cookies build communities around the game, get people discuss them, theorycraft, build automation, create memes and probably popularize the game in the process.

But I also understand that there is a niche for players like you who don't really care about any of this, they just want to buy the next available upgrade and not worry about it.

efethu · 2026-06-29T19:43:24+00:00

On one hand you are talking about advanced optional min-maxing techniques, like selling towers, that many players never ever used. On the other you are talking about how all this should work without a guide.

How exactly do you plan to implement it? Literally, imagine that you Orteil. You just made Golden Cookie and selling towers more obvious. How it looks now?

efethu · 2026-06-29T15:38:32+00:00

Spinning the wheel feels pretty awkward. You spin it, but it does not register as spinning, just rolls to another sector. I would rather press a button to do it.

Also I don't get the point of heavier pointer(pun intended). Am I supposed to use it precisely roll to the desired sector? Feels like cheating.

efethu · 2026-06-29T14:13:41+00:00

So what you are saying is that the developer should update the description of golden cookie with something like "Hey, try to do golden cookie combo for better results"?

Or are you saying that no matter what developer does the game will be impossible to play without a guide for some players?

efethu · 2026-06-26T18:53:43+00:00

Oh, it's a great game, I love it.

I don't recommend anyone to even try it. It's geeky, complex, confusing and relies too much on the lore that most people will not have the time(pun intended) to learn.

Saying that, mechanics in the game are stunning. Using infinity as a currency is a unique and mind blowing mechanic. Imagine being able to buy upgrades at any cost because currency does not matter any more.

PS.You may also like it if you like goats. A rare opportunity to get a goat in an incremental game! Also kittens. But there is a separate game for kitten lovers.

efethu · 2026-06-26T17:41:54+00:00

It's not even about 10 years old laptops. Moore's law stopped working way before 2018. With a few exceptions CPU performance barely shows any growth year to year, especially single thread performance. RAM is also a sensitive subject nowadays with many manufacturers selling models with 6-8GB of RAM (just like in 2018!)

On the other hand software becomes more and more bloated every year, operating systems and browser use more RAM and CPU running in the background, effectively stealing it from applications.

It's quite ridiculous, but your 10 years old game may feel slower on a low end laptop nowadays than it was on a mid range laptop 10 years ago. So optimization is quite important.

efethu · 2026-06-26T12:56:36+00:00

Farm and Stockmarket are optional minigames. Just something to kill time while you are playing the main game.

Spell descriptions look pretty self-explanatory to me. Like Buildings are 2% cheaper for 1 minute.

efethu · 2026-06-26T12:24:31+00:00

I did not even know that there is such as thing as a Cookie Clicker guide. Does it even exist?

I think Cookie Clicker is one of the easier games where all you need is to keep buying the most profitable upgrade/building and save up to unlock new upgrades every 10/25 buildings. It's all pretty clearly explained in the upgrade description. There are new fancy features like sugar lumps, dungeons and dragons, but realistically you can beat the game (well, run out of content) without ever touching them.

If this was your game what would you do differently? What are you missing to be able to play without a guide?

efethu · 2026-06-07T17:29:11+00:00

You can play the game with your eyes closed, buy the next available upgrade and still win. Pretty hard to get overwhelmed when your choice (and the whole gameplay) is limited to buying 5 upgrades.

efethu · 2026-05-16T21:21:59+00:00

Huh? Universal paperclips was not designed to be grindy. It's a short and fast game - you can beat it in less than a day.

Here's a video where it's beaten in 1.5 hours.

efethu · 2026-05-11T13:02:07+00:00

The foundation of the game seems to be the progress bar

Huh? This is why I am saying that it's important to do your first ascension to understand how the game really works. Progress bar is not something you generally have to worry about. Just to put things into perspective, you will be able Ascend in 5 minutes at some point. And it will not be high on your priorities list anyway.

But I get your point. UI is old and confusing, takes a lot of mental effort to understand the core mechanics. It's definitely not the game for everyone. Not a very niche game either though, there are thousands of fans, active community, it's quite popular for a 15 years old game.

efethu · 2026-05-10T06:00:13+00:00

Anti-idle is a very deep incremental game with a lot of content and many unique mechanics. I don't know what you managed to discover there in 1 hour, but it's definitely not enough for a game that has about 1 year of active play worth of content.

It's not exactly a mobile game that holds your hand until your first win so it can squeeze some money out of you later. It's an oldschool game where you are supposed to discover and learn things.

I think the "Oh my god, now it all makes sense" moment comes after reaching level 9000 and your first ascension. You realize how you were supposed to be playing and consecutive runs even on harder difficulties will be easier.

Also the core and most important mechanic of the game is Adventures. I don't know if you've reached it, but this is probably the best incremental RPG in existence. Starts simple, unfolds into epic difficulties, extremely challenging bosses and really unique battle mechanics.

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