Chapter 4: Idle Power v0.3.0

Idle games was a popular game genre within the mobile game industry. It was a type of casual game that any person could play anywhere they wanted. Most game companies also saw the potential profits they could gain from this kind of game because, in this day and age, people's lives revolved more around their phones and computers. Due to that, the market for this kind of game became oversaturated.

That doesn't mean it would make other new idle games obscure just because of it. This game was so popular that even in this year, so long as the developer publishes it on the right platform, they would easily get a thousand people to download their game. That's how much pull it had on casual players on mobile.

So it wasn't a surprise when people tried out this new game titled Idle Power. The description of the game was interesting enough. It promised content that would let players learn a lot of different powers and fling those powers on hordes of enemies.

Of course, most people were skeptical when they first saw the game. Even if they were addicted to idle games, with how oversaturated the genre was, countless amounts of cash grabs that only had an "idle" word in their titles littered the entire idle game community. They thought this one wasn't different because it was free, and the preview image looked smooth even with simplistic graphics in it. Game previews were usually deceptive like that.

So when they finally experienced the game itself, it shocked them how good it was.

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Let's go back in time for a bit.

There was a certain guy named Nick who loved to play idle games. Since he was in highschool, idle games intrigued him because the game itself was intuitive and casual, and sometimes it was immersive. What he liked the most were games that just let players fill in the blanks about what was happening on the idle game, creating their own narrative about why the character was doing whatever they were doing on the idle game.

He's one of those people who, instead of seeing the money it could generate, found the potential within the genre itself. Many games were restricted due to their rigid structures. FPS games could only be played as a shooter in first person because it was literally how it was called. RPG games limit the character from certain characters, and they couldn't freely do everything even if the game promised unlimited freedom. Sandbox games couldn't possibly do things at a huge scale because the player was the one who had to micromanage everything for it. Even simulation games, the actual origin for the birth of the idle game genre, were limited in what they offered. Every genre had the same thing in common. All of them had an end goal. Even something as mundane as dress-up games and other simulation games has an end goal.

Idle games don't have that.

In his opinion, idle games themselves had that unlimited potential where developers could focus more on anything they could think of. If they wanted to make a story-driven idle game, then it was possible. If it was simply a thought experiment that they wanted to see to the extreme, then someone can just make an idle game of it. If they wanted to make a pet simulator that had more features in it, then turning it into an idle game was a great choice. Anything could become an idle game if they just want to go beyond the limits of conventional game genres.

It was only idle games that could go on forever, and more features could still be added because they were that flexible. Even if it doesn't make sense at all, the developer could just add their wildest idea to a simple idle game concept, and it would still somehow make sense. Just like Idle Bakery, a popular idle game that started with baking bread and later turned an entire reality into dough just because. With such a wild potential for more ideas that could be realized in this genre, it became a staple for any game developers to dip their toes in this kind of genre.

Basically, idle games could go on forever, and it wouldn't get boring. That's the basic gist of how idle games work in this current age.

So Nick was here, browsing through the Woogle Play platform after he finished another idle game. Idle games might not have an end, but they were still limited to the update times of the developer themselves. Dedicated players like him could finish an entire idle game in a single week. He couldn't wait for the update to come, so while he was waiting, he was going to look for another idle game.

"Tsk... another cash grab." He shook his head, his brows furrowed.

He knew what to look for when he saw a game. He might be addicted to idle games, but he wasn't a sucker that would just play games and throw his money at them. With just a few moments of reviewing the image references and reviews for the game, he could immediately discern whether a game was trash.

And that was common to idle games. With many game companies and indie developers jumping on the bandwagon for easy money, countless amounts of poor-quality slop would litter the environment. It was why he carefully checked everything before committing to a game. He doesn't like to support game developers that were only there to rake in the money. Those kinds of developers would only make a game, make some token effort to update a game, and then quit after squeezing out everything they could get from the game.

What he was looking for were idle games that were made with love. The kind of game that, even if it was littered with ads, it could be seen that the team behind the game truly was dedicated to their own little fandom. That was the type of game he wanted to support.

"Hm?" It was at this time when he discovered Idle Power.

It had the icon of a diamond-shaped dot in the middle of a gray background. Such a plain icon would normally be ignored, but as an idle game enthusiast, Nick got interested. There was this hidden belief among idle game players that the more simplistic the graphics were, the more likely it was to be good. Most popular idle games have minimalistic designs. Common examples were Idle Bakery, Slime Idle, Grow Base, Godkin Ruler, and Idle Shapes. Those games might not have had much in the way of flashy graphics, but they more than made up for it with their sheer content and optimization. Idle games were, at the end of the day, games that could be played passively. Optimization builds were built into it, and if there were multiple ways to optimize their progress on the game, then the game was that good.

That's why, even if the graphics were trash, the game would still be a god-tier one so long as its content was robust and deeply thought out instead of just the usual slop that barely had any content in it.

Of course, he still wasn't sure whether this game was really good. Lately, other greedy game companies had caught on to the fact that players preferred more minimalistic designs rather than overly designed ones because most good games could be found there, so they were also cutting costs and adding their slops with both garbage graphics and garbage systems that looked good at first. So he tempered his expectations as he downloaded the game.

The game's size was surprisingly large. It was more than 200 MB in size. That made him a bit excited. With such a large file, that meant there might be a lot of content within the game. With his expectation in this game slightly increasing, he finished installing it. He quickly started the game after that.

After opening the game, he was first met with the same scene as the icon of the game. The only difference was that it wasn't just the diamond-shaped dot in the middle of the screen. Rather, it was a white-shaded stickman with a diamond-shaped dot on its head. Above the screen were two simplistic box counters, with the one above showing a capital letter P contained in a red square, while the one below was the blue version of that. Along with that, he could hear a calm, retro sound that gave him the impression of a calm, breezeless plain with how slow and long the notes lasted. He was a bit interested in the two icons on the box counters above, so he poked those icons, not really thinking much about it, but was surprised when a small tooltip actually appeared on the side he poked.

[Points: Indicate the amount of points you have. (Max Cap. 100)]

[Point Income: Indicate the amount of points you get every second. (Income. 1)]

That feature might be small, but it was a helpful tip all the same. This kind of feature showed that the game developer, while not directly spoon-feeding their players, still cared that they would leave tooltips like this in case the player was confused. It showed that the creator cared.

He tried clicking on the screen, but it didn't do anything, so he waited for a moment. When the counter for his point reached ten, he saw a tab appearing below the screen. That tab was called [Activity]. He poked that tab and then was met with another tab that covered the entire screen. In the tab, there was just a single option he could choose and another below it that was hidden with only "???" written on it. The first option was simply called [Daydreaming]. It wasn't just a simple word. There was also an icon on the left corner of that option that showed a simplified pixelated illustration of a brain colored in peach, and surprisingly, when he poked that screen, the entire option would light up and the brain-shaped icon would show an animation of three small circles appearing before a dialogue box commonly called a "message balloon" occurred on top of that illustration, then repeating every second.

"Wow, this new game has such smooth animation." He stared at the screen for a moment before returning his attention back to playing.

After that, he poked the upgrade button that was on the rightmost corner of that option. After pushing the upgrade button, a retro sound that was akin to a bell chime resounded on his screen. This added a single point of income for his points, which made it faster for him to accumulate points. He played for a few minutes, unlocking the [Knowledge] tab and the following options within it, which could increase the max capacity of points he could have in his point counter.

After playing for a bit more and getting to the point where he managed to accumulate enough points to upgrade the [Daydreaming] to level 10, two tabs suddenly appeared. These tabs were the [Status] tab and the [Power] tab. Along with that, a cheery retro sound played in the background as a prompt telling him he unlocked a new power appeared on the screen.

Feeling curious, he looked at the [Power] option first and was shocked to find that there was something in there. It was a power called [Thoughtography]. The icon of the power was that of a blue-colored illustration of the head of a person staring hard at somewhere. Tapping the only power he learned showed a tooltip describing it.

[By daydreaming hard enough, you acquired the power to burn images into solid surfaces.] (Unlocked by reaching "Daydream" level 10)

[Neutral Effect] Increased Daydream's effect by 100%.

[Status Effect] Increase Intelligence by 10.

[Combat Effect] None.

That made him confused. He could understand the increased effects for faster point generation, but he couldn't comprehend why it also had other modifiers that seemed to indicate there was something more to it. Despite the confusion, he closed that tab and put his attention on the [Status] tab.

Unlike the [Power] tab, [Status] showed a tab that displayed a status bar commonly seen on RPG games like Health Points (HP), Ability Points (AP), Strength (STR), Vitality (VIT), Agility (AGI), Dexterity (DEX), Intelligence (INT), Charisma (CHA), and Luck (LCK). He was honestly dumbfounded. He wondered just what the purpose of this status was when the game started like a typical incremental idle game.

Those questions were soon answered after a few minutes of playing more. After unlocking five powers in the [Power] tab, it suddenly appeared. A new tab called [Combat].

"... Is this even an idle game?" Nick wondered if choosing that tab would suddenly force him to actually play instead of just passively playing the game.

There were those kinds of games. They looked like idle games at first but were in fact hardcore games that barely had any passive gameplay in them at the later stages of the game. It was also fun, but he wasn't really looking for that kind of game. Right now, he just wanted something that he could play for a minute and just leave for a day without affecting his progress.

He felt it was a shame. He thought that, while the developer cared about his players, he seemed to lean on the hardcore players more than the casual ones. He could only shake his head, feeling it was a shame that it came to this.

There wasn't anything wrong with that actually, but for Nick personally and many idle game players, an idle game shouldn't be too hardcore. They had to be casual and passive for it to be considered a true idle game.

"Well, it's fine. I'm just trying this anyway to kill some time." With those words brimming with disappointment, he tapped the [Combat] tab.

And then his world changed!

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The combat system was Mike's greatest achievement within his three months of developing this game. It was a system where the character of the player would act depending on the powers that had been unlocked by the Player, and their own status. How does this actually work?

The system works where the player's character's status would be compared to the enemy's status in real time, every second as they moved on the terrain on the stage. Every tick, which was measured in a millisecond in this game, characters would move a pixel or more depending on their Agility score. Dexterity score would determine the chances of either hitting or avoiding attacks. Vitality acts as damage reduction and HP regeneration. Strength was the damage modifier. Charisma determines the chances of causing the enemy to either become an ally (Charmed) or instantly die (Escaped), and Luck determines the likelihood of something advantageous happening, like either avoiding or landing attacks even with a humongous status gap, critical hits, or even sudden activations of powers even when they were still in cooldown.

Though there was something more impressive he did than all of those. That was the implementation of the intelligence stat. Mike originally wanted it to be a simple modifier for psychic and magic damage but then thought of something better. This was also the cause as to why his computer kept crashing and why he had such a hard time making the combat system work at all.

He made the intelligence stat determine the actions of the character.

With a lower intelligence stat, the character would normally go straight and fight a horde of enemies, not even caring whether they get beat up or not. Though as their intelligence score got higher, their behavior would change until they could fight much better than a skilled player. He essentially created an AI that worked progressively better depending on the intelligence stat, and the more intelligence they had, the more they could trigger special actions that would quite literally baffle any players who first saw it. The AI would take advantage of the terrain of the stage, the distance between itself and the enemies surrounding it, and even the effective range of its power along with their effects.

In reality, the implementation of intelligence to the combat system was the majority of the entire combat system itself!

Mike was so fussy with the details that he was hyperfocused on this function. He made a lot of animations just for normal attacks like running, walking, punching, kicking, ducking, rolling, jumping, and many more. There were at least fifty different animations just for a normal one, and this doesn't include what they could do with powers in the mix. Each of these animations also had their hitboxes arranged so that they followed the same as their animation. There wouldn't be a moment where a character would be hit even if they clearly looked like they were away from the attack just because their hitbox hasn't been changed.

This was the reason why Mike's computer kept breaking down. Why his processors kept heating up and blue-screening. His game couldn't literally handle such a thing because there was a lot of processing happening in the background. If he had just simplified his system, he would have already finished a month ago. Though he hasn't. There was a reason why he called this his dream game. Because this kind of system was impossible to be made by a single person.

Mike was unaware just how ridiculously good he was since he got his improvements from his powers. After implementing the failed prototype for his combat system, he had acquired a huge boost in his improvements because the system itself was so bulky and refined that his power considered the profits he could earn from it as more than the typical idle game revenue and could even compete with major brands in the game community if he just marketed his game right. That kind of boost made it easier for him to just put all of this in, and his improvements were so much that work that should have taken him many years was shortened into a few months.

And now, Nick bore witness to that obsession in visual form. He could see his own character, the one that was just a still image on the homepage, moving smoothly. Its 12 FPS animation was barely noticeable because it was that smooth, and the way it moved and attacked enemies with countless variations of combos on its own, along with the enemies themselves trying to counter his character with their own movesets, mesmerized him.

"Oh my god!" He couldn't help but exclaim.

His character was currently pretty dumb in that it was just having an all-out brawl against the other mobs, who were black-colored stickmen. They barely dodged each other and just kept swinging their stick arms around. Despite that, it looked beautiful whenever a hit connected. The crisp sound that felt like wood banging, along with the hit animation, made it look as if he was watching a stick animation. They fought wholeheartedly too, making grunting noises each time they hit each other.

And when his character used his power, that crunching sound as if a bone was breaking felt so satisfying as the enemy inflicted by that skill was blown several pixels away from the player character. He had unlocked at least five powers, and one of those powers was called Rock Fist. It was a power he unlocked after reaching level ten on [Shadowboxing], an option available on [Activity] next to [Daydreaming].

"Just how many years did they take to make this game!?" Nick couldn't help but wonder.

He wasn't knowledgeable about game development, but he was at least aware that each animation and effect on the game would have taken a lot of time for a game developer. Even if they were a team of five, this kind of quality would still take them a year.

"And there are other enemy types too!"

Other than the black stickmen, there were also other enemy types that looked more polished than the stickmen he was using. There was a muscular-looking faceless guy, a very fast stickman with a scarf, a dog, other stickmen with bats or metal knuckles, and then more.

This was just the first stage. The stage was called the alleyways. Though there were already a lot of enemies since the game started. The terrain was also incredibly narrow. It was a top-down view of the stage, with the large squares indicating they were buildings and the narrow gaps being the alleys that the player could only walk around. It might look annoying seeing such a stage in a normal fighting game, but with this being an idle game where the character automatically fights someone, it became a blessing in disguise as it made it easier for his character to survive encounters that had more enemies spawning around.

His character still fell. Though after his HP fully regenerated, his character would automatically start looking for trouble again.

There was also an EXP bar displayed above the screen, which replaced the point counter and point income counter when he entered a stage on the [Combat] tab. Each time it filled up, it always gave him a prompt that stated his character's familiarity on the stage grew stronger. This system was made so that the character, even if they had a high intelligence stat, wouldn't just curbstomp enemies on newer stages. Mike's reasoning was simply for the game to still be grindy so Players wouldn't just be bulldozed through his levels like it was nothing, though for Nick, he thought differently.

"That's right. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger!" He was getting immersed in the game even when he was just watching, now projecting himself on this nameless stickman character with a diamond-shaped dot as its face.

His love for making his own narrative in an idle game with a vague setting made him imagine how this character built up his power, training by himself until he could fight against thugs and gangsters in the alleyway. It was like a classic superhero premise that made him cheer up whenever he saw his character beat up one of the stronger mobs and wail in sorrow when his character fell.

This made him immersed for a long time until the part. Whenever he felt his progress slowing down, he just went back to the home screen and upgraded the options from his [Activity] and [Knowledge] options. This let him unlock more powers, which helped him progress with the first stage a lot faster. He could just leave the combat section from running independently. The game seemed to process what was happening there even when he was on the home screen.

After an hour of going around the home screen and the combat section, he got a prompt that told him his character met a dangerous individual. He immediately tapped the [Combat] tab and saw one of the most detailed-looking mobs in this game.

"Wait... am I even playing the same idle game? Why does this guy look more detailed!?" Nick exclaimed in shock.

Facing his character was a guy in a brown trench coat and a hat. His face was entirely obscured, or maybe he was the same as those black stickmen, with the only difference being that he had two glowing orbs visible beneath the covers of his outfit. Just below the EXP bar for his character, a red bar was visible along with the title of the boss.

(The Hitman)

The way this guy was drawn was intimidating. Both of his hands were hidden in the pockets of his trench coat, and the way he moved was a lot smoother than the mobs littering the entire stage. His character, having a decent intelligence score, now moved with some thought on its movements, but it still wasn't enough because as his character rushed towards The Hitman, it suddenly did a backstep that left afterimages in its path before suddenly showing another animation of it revealing one of its gloved hands and pointing a gun at his character.

With a clear sound of gunshots, his character's HP fell to dangerous levels instantly, and status ailments showed on top of his character's HP bar atop its head. Before he could even move to the side, another gunshot caused his character to fall on the ground, lying in a pool of its own blood as his screen showed the same message of "You've been defeated" that he had been getting every time his character fell.

"That's... so fucking cool!!"

After a short shock, he immediately felt more hyped at that. It was a kind of animation that could only exist in adventure-based, action-packed games. To see it being implemented in an idle game of all things was such a surprise, and all of it was done automatically without player input. It felt like he just watched a villain be introduced and the hero being defeated due to its overwhelming power.

It's the best feeling in the world seeing such simple scenes create multiple meanings. At least, to him, he felt like he just watched a villain introduction in a movie.

"This is what an idle game should be!"

With such an exciting experience, he became more enamored of the game.

In the end, he spent an entire day playing the game until he reached the later stages of the game.

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"... Hmm, yeah, if it's like this, then I'm convinced. This game is really incomplete..."

After playing for a while, Nick calmed down enough to see the lacking parts in this game that had rich content even in its current version. The things he had discovered were easy to notice after he got past the first stage and defeated the boss on the Alleyways. The following stage immediately showed why there were at least three stages in the game.

All mobs, other than the boss, were just recolored versions of the mobs from the first stage. This happened because Mike, with a lack of time, decided to put that first and update the game before changing it later. Of course, Nick doesn't know that, so he thought it might be a way to cut costs.

The second reason was that there was an extreme lack of features commonly seen on most idle games. He hadn't seen any prestige options, nor had he seen any drops from the enemies after he defeated them. His character was still the same naked white stickman and nothing more. There was also an EXP bar, but no level ups. The EXP bar only increased the character's familiarity with the behavior of the mobs in a stage and changed its actions accordingly. His character's status was linked with the levels of both of his [Activity] and [Knowledge] options. They don't just increase point income but rather certain status depending on what kind of option they were.

If there was a shop in the game, or another currency or equipment that mobs would drop, he was sure the game would feel more complete than this one. As of now, the game looked solid in the first part but showed how it was lacking beyond those parts.

"Even if that's the case, this game is amazing as it is! And the version is... still at 0.3.0?" He nodded his head. "That's it! This is the kind of idle game that I want to support!"

With that declaration, he immediately browsed through the game until he found the settings option in the top right corner of the home screen. When he got there, he raised an eyebrow at a tab called "Shop" at the bottom of this panel. He chose it, and then another panel opened, now showing a single choice that only costs him $1.

"Supporter pack?"

He tapped it and saw the message.

[Supporter Pack]

If you'd like to support me, purchase this pack and acquire the title of Supporter! ($1)

(Gains): "Supporter" title, a title that gives a 1% boost to everything in the game!

He stared at the pack for a moment, then looked around before quickly realizing that it was the only option available in this panel.

"... What the heck!? How can I support the developer if it's only like this!?"

This was the first time he saw something like this. An in-app purchase that only cost a buck, and it only gave a title that barely gave any advantages to the buyer?

What kind of game developer would do that?

'No... I refuse to give up!'

He knew how hard it was to develop a game. Even if he sometimes felt disgusted at most idle game developers due to their money-grubbing tactics, he could understand where they were coming from. That was their source of income. Making a game couldn't be done in just an overnight after all. So, even when a game was filled with ads or other microtransactions, if he found that a game was decent enough and the creator had some genuine love for his game, he would still try to support them.

But this game? It goes against the norms of idle games!

Why put an in-app purchase option at all? That's basically a free giveaway to anyone who even cared to pay!

"Does... Castro Games hate money?" He just checked and saw the company name of the game developer of this game at the bottom corner of the settings menu.

While checking that, he noticed that there was an icon to some site also included in the settings menu. He clicked that, and suddenly a pop-up warned him that it would bring him to another site. He just clicked okay and saw his game tabbed out as his default browser opened in exchange for it. It only took a second before it loaded.

The witch.io page for Idle Power.

"Why put me here... oh..." A single scroll down let him see it. The link to the developer's PayBud account. "Tsk. This developer is too shy, hiding the donation button in all of that." He shook his head, feeling as if the man behind the game was playing with him.

"Too bad, I'm definitely going to support you, so continue making the game and update as soon as possible!"

With those genuine wishes leaving his mouth, he entered that site to start supporting the developer.

_____________________

And the rest was history.

With a sudden grand falling on his lap, Mike got the time to do something he always wanted to do.

He took a break and went outside.

He had been staying cooped up in his house for months now, barely going outside just to buy something he could cook rarely. He would have chosen food deliveries if he wasn't just lacking in cash. He was working on sheer enthusiasm and desperation to finish it so he could at least market the game as a free game with a very cheap in-app purchase.

Even a single dollar was a decent amount for him. That was enough for both lunch and dinner.

With 50,000 pesos now in his account, he went on a trip to Quezon City to take the order he made online that was there. He had spent 9,000 pesos to buy a new computer, and then he went to the largest mall near the workshop to buy the necessary paraphernalia for his new computer. In total, he spent an entire 15k, including the delivery to his home address, before he came back to his home.

The next day, he finished moving around the stuff within his small living room and then moved the table where his old computer was formerly put before putting the new table, ergonomic chair, and all the brand-new keyboards and monitors on this new table.

"Finally, I have a proper workstation!"

That is right. He only bought all of this just for developing his games.

All of those fifty thousand were relegated for improvement to his workstation. He wasn't just going to stop at just his computer. As for his old computer, it would be used for his personal entertainment. That was the original purpose of that computer before he decided to use it to make his first game.

"Next is updating my internet plan, and I need to buy the license for the full versions of my art tool and sound design tools too."

As for what remained of the money, he would just save it so he could use it when he needed something else to help him make games. Excluding that huge donation that became his expenses for game development, his entire budget was still small but enough for him to survive for a month. It was also gradually increasing because, surprisingly, at least ten percent of the thousands of people who tried his game decided to purchase the Supporter Pack. There were taxes and some cuts as it was under Woogle Play, but overall he still got more than $100 throughout this week before the hype died down.

So he had no reason to worry about his life now. His income was enough that he could survive on a day-to-day basis if he lived frugally. With that in mind, he could focus his entire attention on just game development once more.

"This is great. Now I can finish the regression system!"

His days of development continue!