How much do you care about the resource consumption of incremental games?
Hey, thought I’d break the pattern of thepaperpilot being the only person posting. Now thepaperpilot and I will be the only people posting.
Yesterday, someone on the r/incremental_games Discord server asked if people preferred 2D or 3D graphics in incremental games. I responded with a preference for 2D graphics since I thought 3D games would be too resource heavy for my computer to handle.
This got me thinking, how much are people willing to tolerate heavy resource consumption in incremental games? I’d assume that incremental games are set to a different standard than other kinds of games since a lot of them are supposed to be run in the background.
P.S. if you’re that person from the discord, come and say hi once you’ve managed to join us! This place probably needs some simpler questions. I feel I’ve gotten too complex with this one.
This question makes me think about the games by Proton Studio Inc. I’ve enjoyed several of their games, including their 2 incremental games, Time Clickers and Time Warpers. They are both 3d games but with a fairly simple voxel aesthetic, and are fun to play actively/in the foreground, but provide mechanics to allow you to progress while idling.
In my opinion, the idling while still rendering all this 3d stuff feels awfully wasteful, but I do really enjoy the time I spent actively playing. And I think that’s what it ultimately comes down to - 3d can definitely be used to build engaging mechanics that are really fun, but if you go that route I’d actively discourage implementing idle mechanics (the genre has enough examples showing that you don’t need them, anyways!) or at least make it a separate mode where all the 3d stuff isn’t consuming resources.
Edit: it’s the factor that determines whether I’ll play it.
Low overheads, please. If the game is graphics heavy then I want to be able to disable everything possible beacuse I’m running eleventy games at any one time, so the more resources one game wants, the more games I have to close to be able to play that single game. And since I play on a laptop with inadequate cooling, they’d better all be light.
