Click here to seize the means of production

January 29, 2014 9:55 AM

Now you can make your own clicky-idle-incremental-game-thingy with a text file, some simple commands and syntax, and Pastebin. Brought you to by Orteil, of Cookie Clicker and Nested fame.

The Idle Game Maker is still under active development. A number of IGM prototype games can be found here.

posted by Iridic (20 comments total)

I'm seeing Blue... Moderators.... Posts...Comments... Favorite Counts... Post Length...Interesting Links...Tags...Comments...Political Threads...PALIN!...Patriachy...MetaTalk...Deleted Comments...Banned Users...

If someone had the time.... someone could play the metafilter game and actually win.
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:18 AM on January 29, 2014 [7 favorites]

you play the metafilter game and you either win or you die.
posted by The Whelk at 10:22 AM on January 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

I had an idea for one of these that I'm never going to act on, so here you go:

Instead of having just one currency, you have many, interconnected in a complex supply chain. Like, maybe you have cats that produce...uh...cat fur or something, but you have to feed them milk for them to be productive. So you have cows to produce milk, but they require hay. So you have tractors, but they require gas...etc. And you can unlock different parts of the chain as you go.

Or something. Go build it so I can play it.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 10:25 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Click here to partake of the opiate of the masses.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:30 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Guys, I'll be right back, I just need to go wade into infinity for a little bit.
posted by cortex at 10:33 AM on January 29, 2014 [7 favorites]

This is really amazing, sort of like a short-attention-span Inform. Thing is, the games are all the same, more-or-less. I wonder if there's a way to "break" them, in a sense, while staying inside the framework.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:37 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

I think CivClicker proved the genre doesn't have to be short-attention-spanned. Which is to say, I'm still playing it, trying out different deity types, trying to understand how the different production modes work (especially how the game decides which resource is being used for the wonder at any given moment).

I'm really looking forward to how far the clickers can evolve.
posted by mittens at 10:41 AM on January 29, 2014

Oh god, if I weren't just about to participate in the Metafilter Interactive Fiction contest, I'd totally make Metafilter: The Game. But that would be hilarious.
posted by corb at 10:41 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

you know what this means right?

FANDOM SPECIFIC CLICKER GAMES.
posted by The Whelk at 10:55 AM on January 29, 2014 [6 favorites]

Damn...orteil is really talented!
posted by Our Ship Of The Imagination! at 10:56 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

In case you were curious about what the javascript console was good for: this.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:33 AM on January 29, 2014

Hm, this is... neat and all, but I'd really prefer to roll my own, I think.

Of course, I'm lucky as hell in that I have a great knowledge of javascript, but I *was* briefly tempted, I gotta admin.
posted by Imperfect at 11:35 AM on January 29, 2014

"I gotta admin."

This isn't quite "Best. typo. ever." Call it:

Pretty.
Good.
Typo.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:48 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

I really hate playing some of these on iOS. Can't wait for a Cordova port.
posted by oceanjesse at 12:51 PM on January 29, 2014

Imma build a clicky game about building clicky games. Your "resources" are all the users you've got spending their time clicking to increment their variables to make their variables increment faster, and if you get enough of those users it'll make your own resource variables increase too BUT HERE'S THE TWIST it turns out your meta clicky-game is just one resource in a higher-level meta-meta clicky game and so forth and so on you get the idea it's clicky games all the way up

until you die of carpal tunnel syndrome

that can kill you, right? carpal tunnel? right? you like get lost in the tunnel forever and can't find your way out, right?

Totally gonna make that game as soon as I finish clicking on all these cows there are so many cows to click on
posted by ook at 5:19 PM on January 29, 2014

Oh god, if I weren't just about to participate in the Metafilter Interactive Fiction contest, I'd totally make Metafilter: The Game. But that would be hilarious.

We'd end up calling it Favorite-Clicker.
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:32 PM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

• [+] Click to gain 1 favorite
• [10 favorites] post a comment (gain 0.01 favorites per second)
• [50 favorites] post a snarky comment (gain 0.1 favorites per second)
• [1000 favorites] flag a comment (reduces troll penalties)
• [2000 favorites] post an FPP (gain 0.01 comments per second)
• [6666 favorites] hire a mod (repels trolls, bonus to earnings from comments)
• [10000 favorites] build a best-of blog (bonus to number of comments per FPP)
• [13333 favorites] meet-up! (temporary increase in snarky comments)
• [50000 favorites] post to metatalk (gain 0.1 comments per second; mods temporarily more active)
• [99999 favorites] best post contest (gain 0.1 FPPs per second for next 1000 seconds)

posted by mbrubeck at 12:32 PM on January 30, 2014 [7 favorites]

I used Idle Game Maker to make a game. (It's in projects.)
posted by Margalo Epps at 1:18 PM on February 6, 2014

Julien Thiennot and Incremental Games

Cookie Clicker was created last fall by 24-year-old French game designer Julien Thiennot, who goes by the nickname Orteli. Thiennot has been making games since childhood, though ‟game designer” in the traditional sense may not be quite the best way to describe what he does. Like the post-modern playwright who can’t help but break the fourth wall every chance she gets, Thiennot’s games are all about pointing gigantic flashing arrows at gaming conventions most people take for granted. As much as the things Thiennot creates can be considered games, they’re also ingeniously twisted works of wry conceptual art.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:22 PM on February 12, 2014 [2 favorites]

Oh dear.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:37 PM on February 15, 2014