If you are an idle game enjoyer like myself, I cannot recommend Antimatter Dimensions highly enough. This game makes you do math, has deep lore, somehow, and is just generally an ode to game design. The core mechanic is based on 1.8e308 being infinity, too.<p>Here's a link, enjoy a mild, time-gated addiction: <a href="https://ivark.github.io/AntimatterDimensions/" rel="nofollow">https://ivark.github.io/AntimatterDimensions/</a>
I played an idle game on IRC called "idlerpg" around the year 2000 that was way less polished than this.<p>I'm pretty sure that the first idle games were just event hooks on IRC that made periodic, random dice rolls for each person who had been in the channel. Initially it was just XP for not saying anything, and subsequently you'd randomly find things that boosted some stats that didn't really do anything.<p>I remember thinking that idle games on IRC were a pun on the fact that you have dozens or hundreds of people who never say anything because their clients are perpetually detached because they obtained a life and never returned. So while your friend stop responding, you reward them for their quietude.<p>This game seems a lot more polished; a game that plays itself while you do nothing.<p>Much deserving of the title idle game, but perhaps only the original to some.
I'm (slowly) building an ~idle game with a twist! Here's the code: <a href="https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants">https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants</a><p>The idea is you're given a simulation of an ant colony that grows autonomously 24/7. You define a window of time each day in which you're allowed to make adjustments to the colony's strategy to help them live more optimally. This is paired with mental health exercises like breathwork and journaling.<p>The intent is to get people being more consistent with self-care by being motivated to care for a digital pet, but to not make it such an involved endeavor as to be time consuming like a traditional game.<p>I'm going to pair it with some chill lo-fi music so you can hang out and watch your ants do their thing when you need a moment to feel less frazzled while at your desk job :)<p>Still a long long ways to go before I have anything really tangible and useful, but feel free to follow along with the code or ask questions!
For anyone who is a fan of idle games, I highly commend Cell: Idle Factory Incremental (CIFI). There's a lot of content to unlock and it always feels like you're making progress toward something.<p><a href="https://octocubegames.com/cifi" rel="nofollow">https://octocubegames.com/cifi</a>
Maybe similar in spirit as idle games: I used to enjoy BoxCar2D where you just sit back and watch cars evolve using genetic algorithm. The original version[1] requires Flash, but looks like someone ported it to HTML5[2]:<p>[1] <a href="http://boxcar2d.com/" rel="nofollow">http://boxcar2d.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/" rel="nofollow">https://rednuht.org/genetic_cars_2/</a>
I had the desktop version of this installed on my Windows XP machine. So, to me this is the original idle game. But is it? What came before? Surely nobody created something so perfect from nothing.
Progress Quest is great. Learned about it on a MUD many, many years ago, ran it on and off for a few years as a kind of screensaver.<p><a href="https://trimps.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://trimps.github.io/</a> is my favourite contemporary idle:ish game, it requires very little activity and has a neat story.
The original idle RPG was sitting on a character creation screen re-rolling your stats for hours if not days on end. I'm pretty sure I played the character creation bit of MegaTraveller more than the actual game.
I've played some idle games just like this, though the name escapes me at the moment. I enjoy the checking in and seeing what's happening with these kind of games.<p>I made a container image to run the cli version, this way I can keep it isolated and also deploy it remotely.<p>PR: <a href="https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli/pull/25">https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli/pull/25</a>
Fork: <a href="https://github.com/BnJam/pq-cli/tree/main">https://github.com/BnJam/pq-cli/tree/main</a>
I love this, "game", in part because it's one of the few idle games where gameplay truly requires zero interaction, save for opening and starting it.<p>A term was coined for this called ZPGs (Zero Player Games).