Hosted at https://xenkogames.gitlab.io/DIDOEN/

Hi everyone! In my spare time, I've been developing an incremental/idle browser game, working title: 'Do Idlers Dream of Electric Numbers', or colloquially: D.I.D.O.E.N. From the title, you can guess it is a cyberpunk themed game. It is strongly inspired by other similar games like 'A Usual Idle Life' and 'Progress Knight'

Its currently just an Alpha version, meaning the core mechanics are pretty much complete, I just need to flesh out all of the content, the story, add an end game, and fix any remaining bugs after that.

Its currently in a playable state, but mostly just the early game things. Currently developed for desktop browser, but mostly works in Mobile as well, minus some UI issues. The general gist of the game, if you haven't played anything similar, is that you slowly level up your jobs and skills over a lifetime, then when you die you start over, having gained permanent boosts to XP and various other things. And so you slowly improve every cycle until you reach the end game. Its mostly something you leave a tab open on in the background of your browser while you work or do other things and come back to check on and make changes and such.

Please let me know what you think, and if you find anything that looks like a bug. The game is entirely written in C# Blazor, compiled to wasm, so no javascript going on for game logic. I eventually plan to open source the game after a while, though, if you wanted to look at it.

I'm very welcome to any suggestions as well, especially regarding gameplay, the title (I'd welcome a better pun), or anything else.

Thanks!

Edit: Just FYI, i've changed the url to https://xenkogames.gitlab.io/DIDOEN/. I've also made a save-incompatible change unfortunately, so you will have to restart the next time you play. Going forward, there shouldn't be any more breaking changes to saves.

  • MoreAmphibians [none/use name]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Some thoughts.

    1. Retiring is rather idealistic for a cyberpunk game. I would name the button something else. "End life" would work but might be a bit bleak.
    2. Having 12 hours for recreation sounds really nice but I don't think that's really what's intended. I think split it up into sleep, chores, and commute. Still the same 12 hours but now split into thematic components.
    3. All the lives are a bit samey. I think adding a random trait would really help things stand out. The random trait would be something mildly beneficial like reduced need for sleep, faster leveling for a specific skill, being healthier, or something like that. Early game you get one random trait and that's it. Later you can get upgrades that let you select from multiple traits or even get more than one at once. Maybe you can even level the traits and that's another method of progression.

    Edit: It's also a bit weird that you don't need to eat. Maybe make a 0 cost default food? DoleStarch? AdvertStarch?

    Edit2: If free time doesn't give any benefits it should also be renamed. Maybe change it to "unallocated" time.

    • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
      ·
      6 months ago

      agree with your first point but for the second if it was up to me i would split recreation into sleep and chores, and rename free time to recreation (because nothing seems more dystopian than seeing 0 recreation time for your entire life lmao). your sleep would be adjustable down to a certain minimum like 4 hours (which you could decrease this minimum by having an item in the shop like caffeine pills or some kind of drug im not cool enough to know about), with less sleep increasing your mortality and vise versa.

      i think traits are neat idea but you should be able to choose them rather than it being random.

      • MoreAmphibians [none/use name]
        ·
        6 months ago

        I picture choosing them as being something you unlock through some sort of metacurrency pretty early on.

    • makotech222 [he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Thank you for playing and the feedback!

      1. Yeah, ill rename that i agree.
      2. The other game i based this off of, A Usual Idle Life, does split them, but gameplay-wise it doesn't make any meaningful difference, so I just cut it to simplify.

      I will be adding a 0 cost food for sure. and yeah, a rename of free time is also a good idea.