Tag Archives: incremental games

Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game

An emerging form of games, born out of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, has occupied my thoughts lately. It doesn’t seem to have a name yet; it grew out of some Minecraft mods and had its seminal work in Factorio. It’s a cousin, or even sibling, to the idle/incremental game, but usually looks more like a management or survival sandbox game. You could call it a resource management and automation game, or a factory simulator, but I’ll use the term “resource escalation game,” because its primary features are:

  • resources to collect, usually from a world you must explore
  • crafting of resources into more complex or rich forms
  • structures for automation of the crafting, allowing you to take a higher-level conceptual view where you are concerned with the logistics of automation rather than foraging
  • and an escalation created by those resources, where your initial low-level needs become inconsequential and the pace of progression is governed primarily by what complexity of resources you have instead of a more abstract research system1
Continue reading Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game
Show 1 footnote
  1. Factorio gates a lot of things behind research, but research is driven by manufactured resources, not the more typical research-over-time approach seen in strategy games.

Ludus Novus 025: Idle, Incremental

Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 025: Idle, Incremental



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In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast, I discuss incremental games, also known as idle games or clickers. How did a formula that started as satirical jokes from people like Ian Bogost yield things like A Dark Room? Games discussed: Cow Clicker, Progress Quest, Candy Box, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room.

The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon. The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter.