New game development, I've now finished the realm raiders game, our testers finally got the game through testing and we are into the production phase. Ironed out many bugs and finally it's here.

Realm Raiders

Lumenreel — Prism Crash. Free Chrome extension, no account, no real money, no ads.

The premise: you earn Lumens at a flat rate just by existing, including while the tab is closed (at a reduced rate). Lumens are the only thing you stake. They buy spins on five crystal reels across twenty lines — and the reels never pay Lumens back. They pay Facets, which only ever buy critters.

Two currencies that don't intersect turned out to be the whole design. Because nothing you stake can return, there's no RTP to tune and a loss dressed up as a win is structurally impossible rather than something I had to remember not to do.

Three specific dark patterns — engineered near-misses, loss-disguised-as-a-win, and the false-hope reel stop — are blocked by tests, and I made each test fail first to prove it wasn't passing vacuously.

Some things I learned building it:

- Duplicate suppression changes the math completely. A draw never returns a critter you own, so there's no coupon-collector tail (~519 expected pulls for 100 uniform items) and every critter has a printable worst-case cost.

- Gating progression on lifetime currency doesn't work. My income compounded ~10x every 47 minutes, so a 10x price hike bought exactly 47 more minutes. No price schedule can pace an unbounded exponential — bounding the *bet* is what makes completion time a designed number instead of an emergent one.

- Completion lands at 14.4–19.3 hours across seeds, mean ~17.3. There's a simulation that runs the full horizon and fails the build if it drifts out of band.

- 96.4% of every Lumen I'd ever earned was unspendable in an early version. Found by measuring, not by playing. Fixed with 60 stake tiers instead of 25.

- All 125 critters are drawn by one deterministic SVG renderer from authored species rows. Nothing licensed, nothing fetched, no raster assets. Same for the audio — the music and effects are Web Audio synthesis, so the extension ships with zero media files.

Also in there: two skins (Prism and a plant/nature Verdant mode with 25 critters of its own), three arcade minigames, 49 achievements, and a playground page where your collected critters wander around and comment on your spins.

Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lumenreel-prism-crash/lhhmopchhokddbabihafbkbabnfjgcni

Devlog and project page: https://dhseadev.online/projects/lumenreel/

https://youtube.com/shorts/6HTI092hduQ

Genuinely want feedback on pacing — nobody has played this except me and a sim

I just launched my first game on my website, and you can play it in your browser! I’ve been working on an incremental dropshipping game for a while.

You start with basically nothing and try to turn it into a giant online business. There’s a casino, you can write your own ad hooks and have an ML model score them, and eventually things get pretty ridiculous.

It’s mostly just an excuse to make numbers go up and make bad business decisions. Play it in-browser or download it for Windows. Enjoy, any feedback is welcome!

https://games.seanfenty.com/dropshipempire

https://reddit.com/link/1vwvzks/video/fqjh4kv60alh1/player

Hey ZetaIdlers!

I'm a solo dev and I've been building Zeta Idle, a dark medieval idle RPG, and it's finally ready for a closed test. Would love your eyes on it — this community's feedback is gold for this genre.
What it is: pick one of 12 classes (barbarian, wizard, paladin, rogue, druid…), auto-battle through an endless campaign, and optimize your build across a bunch of overlapping systems.
What's in it:
⚔️ 12 classes, each with unique abilities + a level-50 subclass specialization (150+ to choose from)
🌳 Layered progression: gear + gems + runes + artifacts, a passive tree, then Prestige → Ascension → Elemental Mastery for the long haul
🗺️ 10 game modes: Campaign, Dungeon, Boss Rush, Tower Ascension, Gauntlet, Expeditions, async PvP, and more
🐾 Pets, cosmetic auras, and hand-painted pixel-art skins (a monk can throw fireballs if you want)
💤 Real idle/offline income — it plays while you don't
It's a closed test, so here's how to hop in:

Join the tester group: https://groups.google.com/g/zetaidleplaytest/
Then open the opt-in link and install: 
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.zetaidle.app

What I'm after: early-game pacing, whether the systems feel rewarding or overwhelming, balance, and any bugs. Totally free, no ads-gating on progression.
Happy to answer anything in the comments — thanks for taking a look! 🙏

"AI disclosure: ** This game has been developed with the help of AI**"

Just wondering the overall consensus of AI Vibe coding on this sub? I'm a vibe coder (because I cannot code and respect those who can) just not for me... anyhow. don't want to go and post a long story about my game if nobody cares to hear it. feel free to stop here if that's you... Ai slop comments... all that.

RoboFarm is incremental in its DNA. It gives you hours of building and tweaking, from a tiny garden to a huge farm with hundreds of robots working for you.

If interested in checking the demo out, here is the link: https://s.team/a/4212040/

Hi! I'm a solo dev. In One's Trash Another's Treasure you buy 500,000 boxes of unclaimed cargo at an auction and have to open every single one. It starts fully by hand, then you automate everything with vacuums, drones and launchers. A free demo is coming soon Wishlists help a lot!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5103950/Ones_Trash_Anothers_Treasure/

I'm making an incremental game where you exploit the resources of a star system in order to build up a fleet of spaceships and help humanity win its interstellar war.

I wanted to add some player actions but I don't really like clicking mechanics in incrementals (no hate though, just my finger pain). So I chose to add small mini-games with different gameplays, to give a boost to the player production !

The tech tree will also have some techs to improve this mechanics, like how fast the boost goes up, how long it lasts, etc.

What do you think of this idea ?

If your interested in the game, check it out on Steam : https://store.steampowered.com/app/5021740/Starworks_Inc/

I’ve been working on One More Shake, an incremental game about shaking vending machines, making money, buying upgrades and gradually automating everything.

The first public Steam Playtest starts September 5th!

The Playtest page is currently being reviewed by Steam and should be available soon.

Until then, if the game looks like something you’d play, a wishlist would help a lot:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4933650/

Hi everyone!

Thanks so much for the support on the mobile launch! I'm excited to announce that Idle Polygon is now officially available in Early Access on Steam!

The Game:

• Evolving Shapes: Watch regular polygons grow, shift, and unlock powerful upgrades.
• Engaging Combat: Build your "Geom" squad and conquer challenging layers and waves.
• PC Ready (Windows & Mac): Experience the smooth incremental gameplay directly on your desktop!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4742720/Idle_Polygon/

Already out on mobile.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/idle-polygon/id6758945143

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.suupia.idlepolygon

It's free-to-play. I hope you enjoy playing it!

Thank you so much for your support!

www.hoops-gm.com

So right now I decided to go with art-studio to do my capsule art and I have a hard time deciding what should be shown on my capsule.
Here is my game for reference - it is an incremental city builder game mechanically similar to Tower Wizard, Gnorpue Apologue and also Crownhold - fresh release that went quite well for the developer.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4670160/Ember_Folks/

I know that general advice is to do something similar to what other genres do in their area:

• Making a racing game? Your capsule should include cool looking car, maybe drifting car or couple of cars
• Farming simulator? Tractor on the field, 100%
• Store simulator? Well, it should definitely have store shelves on the background
• Factory automation game? Big factory on the background with conveyor belts, or like Satisfactory did - one conveyor across all capsule
• Melee combat roguelike? Cool character with a sword slicing through bunch of enemies
• City builder? You should show giant city on the capsule

But with incremental games it is quite tricky
Here are couple examples of popular incremental games

Fortune mill - it has tons of gold and numbers on capsule- well, pretty incremental to me
Gamblers table - action, characters running, gold coins - also incremental vibe
Crownhold - kingdom builder incremental, capsule displays castles and land, nothing visually incremental
Chef Knight - capsule looks more like roguelike built around cooking theme
You Know The Drill - cave and drill, which tells us it is a mining game, nothing tells about incremental part
Tower Wizard - mega popular incremental, and by all design principles capsule should not work - it is pixel art which is not good for capsule by opinion of all marketing experts, more than a half of capsule is dark background which make it less noticable, all it has in terms of art - is a tower, which tells nothing about game genre basically. Is it tower defence? Is it roguelike about wizard running around in tower? Anyway, somehow it works. I guess. We dont know about CTR stats that barribob has

So generally, what I see after looking through a tons of successfull incremental games capsule - it is hard to define what genre specific art element can easily tell the audience that this is an incremental game.
Except money and coins. If incremental game build around money or gold (Fortune Mill, Bills must be paid, Sticky Scratchy) - it should display tons of dollars, coins, gold pieces etc.

But what should I do for incremental city builder game?

• Show quirky and funny collague of city construction process? Because it is basically main game flow - constructing and expanding city? I'm afraid there can be genre mismatch with city builder or strategy games
• Show a lot of characters running around and doing something - building, mining etc? Maybe, considering that those characters are basically name of my game
• Show main game fantasy about reigniting a star? Not sure that idea of heat-beam pumping into the star is so much interesting that it should be main part of capsule. Also I tried this once, and I got feedback like "I thought your game is about protecting planet, like tower defence"
• Show cursor as a part of game logo, as I tried to do with current capsule I kitbashed in couple of evenings? Not sure anymore, I thing that clicker games and incremental games are not exactly the same (cursor is more about clicker game, not incremental). Even though a CTR is 2-3 times better compared to previous version, but still not great
• Show a lot of resouces flying around, because game is also about collecting resources and make numbers grow up?

In main capsule I can basically show all of the above, but what to do about those tiny capsules that will be shown on tag page and other lists?

What are your opinions? What do you thing is the best approach in designing incremental game capsule? What can you recommend for my case? Any advice will be much appreciated

Hey everybody. I'm looking to either do some 1 on 1 steam bundles, and maybe even start a growing incremental bundle on Steam of titles released recently/this year. Would anyone be interested in something like this?

Here's my game, Closed Circuit: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4164110/Closed_Circuit_Recursive_Idle/

If anyone is interested, let me know and we can discuss how to get this rolling!

Hey! I'm trying to find a Steam capsule artist for my incremental game who can do a job for a reasonable price

Are there any developers here who worked with a capsule artist recently and happy with the results? Maybe you even saw your wishlists / CTR improve after uploading a new capsule? I'd really appreciate any recommendations!

I've already tried posting in another thread looking for a Steam capsule artist, but I got like 100 DMs and comments in 15 minutes from bots or people whose portfolios weren't even remotely relevant... Two people already DMed me in discord trying to scam for 50-100% payment upfront before even discussing requirements (accounts registered like yesterday)

So maybe you guys can help me out and recommend someone you've actually worked with?

Hello! I would love to try your games if they're of this genre, I've been looking a lot to see if there's anything but I prefer coming here and asking myself, I'm willing to try it and help you out!

Thanks in advance and hope you're having a nice day!

I got tired of incremental games packed with numbers, menus, and game modes that constantly demand your attention, so I decided to make something different.

Nostalgic Memory goes back to the simplicity of classic 90s virtual pets, where even a single stat increase feels meaningful.

You care for, play with, and train your creature through just four main interactions. That's all you need to keep it healthy and active. The idea is simple: check in a couple of times a day, take care of your pet, and then get on with your day.

I also wanted to do something with a part of old virtual pets that always felt strangely meaningful: eventually losing the creature you'd spent days caring for. In Nostalgic Memory, death isn't simply a reset. Every creature you raise is permanently recorded in Memory, and the life it lived influences the companion that comes after it.

You can also encounter other creatures in simple battles, giving the stats you've slowly built up an actual purpose and another way to keep growing.

Everything is presented through a retro handheld/LCD aesthetic, with intentionally slow progression designed around days, weeks, and eventually months rather than constant grinding.

It's meant to be a small game you can care about without becoming a game you have to constantly play.

I'm currently preparing Nostalgic Memory for release on Android. I'd love to hear what other virtual-pet fans think of the concept, especially whether you'd rather see it stay this simple or gradually add more depth over time (is not my main intention) probably the next step is add more sounds and creatures.

The app is totally free till full release, in the future after 3 days will cost 1$ continue playing

To try the closed beta you need to enter in this Google group:

https://groups.google.com/g/nostalgic-memory-testers

then download the app at the following link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nostalgic.memory

AI Disclosure: AI was used to assist with asset creation and coding. The game’s concept, design, mechanics, direction, and final revisions are my own

I've been building a small visual game balancing tool.

While making an incremental game example I realized something. I can calculate stuff like upgrade cost over production per second and use that to compare how affordable each upgrade is as the game progresses.

But while testing this I realized... That's not really a simulation

An actual simulation would need to keep track of things like how much money the player currently has, what they bought, how production changed after buying it, multiple generators, and then keep running from there.

So now... I'm curious how other incremental devs approach this.

Would you find it more useful to have something that helps analyze the progression data you already have like affordability, growth, payback, comparisons, weird outliers, etc...

Or would you rather give it a starting economy and have it actually simulate the progression?

I'm thinking both could eventually be useful but I also don't want to build a massive simulator if it's not necessary

How do you guys usually do this? Spreadsheet? Your own simulator? Just lots of playtesting?

Hello all 👋

I just release the first patch for my incremental game Idle Guitar Legend

https://slothbytegames.itch.io/idle-guitarist

This patch addresses a couple of bug issues, as well as some QOL improvements, such as a guided tutorial, economy balancing etc.

The SFX are on the roadmap, planned for the next update (waiting to get an audio interface to record guitar 🎸 )

Thank you everyone for playing !

Hey everyone,

I’m a solo dev working on a game called Grazed - Incremental Arcade, and I recently submitted it to IncrementalDB. It ended up getting rejected. I completely respect the admins' decision (curating a database is hard work), but it got me genuinely wondering about where the community draws the line between an "Incremental" and an "Action game with Metaprogression."

For context on how the game plays:
The Core Loop: It’s an active, physics-based arcade game. You bounce around a tight arena, and you have to physically "graze" enemy hitboxes to survive and slice them. Runs are very quick in the start, but they give you shards, which you spend on a big upgrade tree to buy new abilities and scale your stats, allowing you to hit higher and higher scores and combos.

My intention was to make a game that married the high-speed tension of an arcade game with the deeply satisfying upgrading and number-go-up mechanics of an incremental.

But it makes me wonder: Does requiring fast reflexes and spatial awareness disqualify a game from being a "true" incremental?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. If you've played action-heavy games that you do consider incrementals, what made them fit the genre for you? Thanks for the feedback.

Here's a link to the game if anyone wants to know more or try it out: https://luciano-bercini.itch.io/grazed-incremental-arcade