Incremental

Incremental Games
aka Idle Games or Clickers

The most efficient of Skinner Boxes. There's usually zero or one buttons to press, accumulating score, and you occasionally make choices on what to spend your score on to accumulate more score. It's the exception that has a story or exploration, it's all about watching numbers go up.

Incremental games usually feature:


 * an active mode where you gain score by clicking repeatedly and quickly (thus the name "mousebreaker games") (autoclickers are cheating but everyone does it)
 * a passive mode where you just leave the game alone for hours or days to accumulate score for spending. Some games require you to leave it running to accumulate score, other games you can shut off and it uses the system clock to let you "catch up".
 * ascension events, where you discard all the progress you've made to start the game over with ascension-only advantages

jesus christ these things can get addictive.

The thread on /vg/ if there is one

Smartphone Games
note: we only have this ancient list from an /igg/ thread, but we're working on more.

Android

Apple

Making Idle Games
You'd think it would be damn easy, but it's hard not to make a clone of something already out there. Kongregate and Armor Games are flooded with idle games that aren't even worth your time to read the titles. It's worse than Flappy Bird.


 * http://dhmholley.co.uk/incrementals.html
 * http://blog.samgb.com/
 * http://orteil.dashnet.org/experiments/idlegamemaker/help