Lots of indie devs making incremental games nowadays, because they’re easy, but I’m not sure if there’s actually a big audience out there for that.

Most of the predecessors that inspired the format are games like Cookie Clicker that were intended as satire about gaming itself. The goal was, as far as I understand, always to make fun of gaming while making visible and obvious to you, the player, the hollow core addictive loop that the game was using to keep you motivated.

The satire revealed something sinister: that you can show the player the precise mechanics of the dopamine button they’re pressing and some people (myself included) will still press it.

That reveals, at it’s core, what might be the simplest viable game, because it’s stripped of everything but a number that goes up, which can be used to buy things that make the number go up more and faster, but I want to believe in my heart of hearts that That’s Not Enough Of A Game, most of the time.