Hosted at https://xenkogames.gitlab.io/DIDOEN/
Hi everyone! In my spare time, I’ve been developing an incremental/idle browser game, working title: ‘Do Idlers Dream of Electric Numbers’, or colloquially: D.I.D.O.E.N. From the title, you can guess it is a cyberpunk themed game. It is strongly inspired by other similar games like ‘A Usual Idle Life’ and ‘Progress Knight’
Its currently just an Alpha version, meaning the core mechanics are pretty much complete, I just need to flesh out all of the content, the story, add an end game, and fix any remaining bugs after that.
Its currently in a playable state, but mostly just the early game things. Currently developed for desktop browser, but mostly works in Mobile as well, minus some UI issues. The general gist of the game, if you haven’t played anything similar, is that you slowly level up your jobs and skills over a lifetime, then when you die you start over, having gained permanent boosts to XP and various other things. And so you slowly improve every cycle until you reach the end game. Its mostly something you leave a tab open on in the background of your browser while you work or do other things and come back to check on and make changes and such.
Please let me know what you think, and if you find anything that looks like a bug. The game is entirely written in C# Blazor, compiled to wasm, so no javascript going on for game logic. I eventually plan to open source the game after a while, though, if you wanted to look at it.
I’m very welcome to any suggestions as well, especially regarding gameplay, the title (I’d welcome a better pun), or anything else.
Thanks!
Edit: Just FYI, i’ve changed the url to https://xenkogames.gitlab.io/DIDOEN/. I’ve also made a save-incompatible change unfortunately, so you will have to restart the next time you play. Going forward, there shouldn’t be any more breaking changes to saves.
it’s a nice incremental game that really hooked me in, although as is it’s really not a second tab game. if you really want it to be that then the balance should get a little easier because i was constantly monitoring my levels. you also don’t live long enough, for now without a lot of content it’s fine but i think you should either increase the default lifespan or increase the tick time when you add more. i also liked how you unlock the cyber skills, being hidden from your until you hit some insane goal, more of that please.
i haven’t encountered any bugs that other people have not mentioned (like investing being broken as hell). on mobile sometimes the information at the bottom of each skill and jobs gets rendered correctly, but otherwise they’re overlapping and it’s unreadable.
P.S: shame this is hosted on gitlab since gitlab blocks my country’s ip, but nothing a little VPN can’t fix.
thank you for playing and the feedback! makes me happy to hear people are liking it.
I do want to achieve a balance between idle/active play; there will be parts where i want the player to come and optimize things perfectly to get ahead (although, there will be an automation feature later to help that). Lifespan will increase as you increase Lifestyle bonus, so that will be more fleshed out as I add more content.
I would like if what changes was written on the things… uh, an example: Getting a tent decreases mortality, this isn’t written in the shop. Or being a beggar is more deadly than being a warehouse picker (increasing mortality).
Mortality is calculated by your lifestyle amount. Ill make sure this is cleared up in the UI in future releases. thanks!
Save exporting/important maybe?
What does “increase skill experience gain for X jobs” mean? I can’t see any difference
Yeah, import/export is on my todo list.
re: skill exp gain, i’m assuming you’re talking about the ‘Motivation’ skill? It increases the amount of xp you gain per day for all jobs. There is a little ‘xp per day’ ui element that details how much you get. Might not be visible on mobile yet?
I’m an elite hacker now. Mad deckrunning skills. But no decks to run. I am a hammer without a nail.
How do you get to be a hacker? I figured out that you can become a WorsaLife(?) employee with 40 Motivation.
Some thoughts.
- Retiring is rather idealistic for a cyberpunk game. I would name the button something else. “End life” would work but might be a bit bleak.
- Having 12 hours for recreation sounds really nice but I don’t think that’s really what’s intended. I think split it up into sleep, chores, and commute. Still the same 12 hours but now split into thematic components.
- All the lives are a bit samey. I think adding a random trait would really help things stand out. The random trait would be something mildly beneficial like reduced need for sleep, faster leveling for a specific skill, being healthier, or something like that. Early game you get one random trait and that’s it. Later you can get upgrades that let you select from multiple traits or even get more than one at once. Maybe you can even level the traits and that’s another method of progression.
Edit: It’s also a bit weird that you don’t need to eat. Maybe make a 0 cost default food? DoleStarch? AdvertStarch?
Edit2: If free time doesn’t give any benefits it should also be renamed. Maybe change it to “unallocated” time.
Thank you for playing and the feedback!
- Yeah, ill rename that i agree.
- The other game i based this off of, A Usual Idle Life, does split them, but gameplay-wise it doesn’t make any meaningful difference, so I just cut it to simplify.
I will be adding a 0 cost food for sure. and yeah, a rename of free time is also a good idea.
agree with your first point but for the second if it was up to me i would split recreation into sleep and chores, and rename free time to recreation (because nothing seems more dystopian than seeing 0 recreation time for your entire life lmao). your sleep would be adjustable down to a certain minimum like 4 hours (which you could decrease this minimum by having an item in the shop like caffeine pills or some kind of drug im not cool enough to know about), with less sleep increasing your mortality and vise versa.
i think traits are neat idea but you should be able to choose them rather than it being random.
