Oh man, I spent some time with this a while back. I remember finding it charming as rando idle games go; throwing in some actual physics on top of the Number Goes Up framework makes for a more entertaining fishbowl basically always.
posted by cortex at 12:05 PM on March 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

You can play it in the browser without installing anything.
posted by Foosnark at 1:47 PM on March 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks, this looks great. But man, I've got work to do.
posted by zardoz at 2:39 PM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wait so how does the "claiming gold" thing work? (I tried it, and my progress indeed did get reset, but I still seem to have 0 gold now?)
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:40 PM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

You claim gold, which resets the game. Then click Prestige again and you should have an inventory of gold you can spend on one of the prestige buffs.
posted by Nelson at 2:53 PM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

This seems like something you would let run on a second monitor. It was fun to play with, but at some point it looks like it becomes more about letting it run than something requiring active intervention.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:01 PM on March 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

I play a similar game on iOS for mindless fun, One More Brick 2.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/one-more-brick-2/id1476837847
posted by JoeZydeco at 4:21 PM on March 27, 2022

Progress will stall out if you just let it run but that's a good way to rack up gold, cash and black blocks, all of which you need to defeat the "boss blocks" you need to defeat to get certain skill tree upgrades.

And the boss blocks get rather difficult and some of them regen health so if you're not fielding enough balls and damage upgrades you'll never beat them, so there's some strategy there. Thankfully you can also exit the boss block stages so you don't get stuck there, but you lose the black block costs to opt into a boss battle and acquire skill points to spend on the skill tree.

I have no idea how many actual levels there are, but when you "claim gold' in the prestige tab it resets to you to zero, but you keep all of the prestige upgrades like the lasers as well as unlocked skills on the skill tree, and after a certain amount of upgrades when you reset and start from level 1 with zero balls you start blasting through the early levels faster and faster and it starts reporting your elapsed time to level 100.

I'm hoping I burn out on this game in the next 24 hours though. It's fun and a little addicting but not as grindy as kittens game and has a lower and more casual investment curve.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 PM on March 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

I seem to have difficulty actually activating the boss block fights ¡ª most of the time, when I click on the button, nothing actually happens. Any idea what might be going on there?
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:56 PM on March 27, 2022

Besides the expense, is there any reason not to make all my balls snipers? The snipers are doing most of the work for me.
posted by moonmilk at 9:05 PM on March 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

So... Plasma balls are great to start but yeah for a while having 30 snipers will be as good as you need until you start getting to... I dunno, the 5th level boss or so. I'm trying to get a couple of the higher skill buffs so right now I have 40 snipers, 35 cannonballs and 41 regular balls. Partly this is because the marginal cost of each additional Sniper is getting into the quarter billion range, but also because a lot of the boss defenses are aimed at freezing your most common ball, so having a lot of cheap... less effective.... balls isn't a bad counter to that.

I'm curious the effect of the poison balls on the bosses. Possibly the next time I claim my gold I'll add 10 or so Poison Balls to try it out.

From a coding standpoint, I'm curious what... 'optimizations' are used once you get 130 balls with fully upgraded speed.
posted by midmarch snowman at 9:27 PM on March 27, 2022

Upgraded to 90 balls total, 40 snipers, 35 scatterballs and like 10 poison for lol. It's like Langoliers, the barely interactive videogame.
posted by mcrandello at 9:42 PM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I finally got to level 100 in under two minutes. Solid game.
posted by solarion at 11:27 PM on March 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh okay I figured out that "black block points" exist, and that I had not gotten enough of them. Nice.

Now to figure out what "auto fight" does!
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:41 AM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

autofight starts another boss run as soon as one completes. which is good if haven't tried the bosses in a while and you have enough damage output that it doesn't take forever, but you're not earning money or levels (and thereby prestige gold) while you're on a boss run.
posted by juv3nal at 3:30 AM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Once you unlock the ability for plasma and scatter balls to damage black blocks (through skill points), they start leaving snipers in the dust.

Yesterday I had completed all the achievements except the 1 million bricks. It was on about 808K when I went to bed and only about 860K when I got up. But prestiging one more time made a huge difference -- not just doubling in speed and power, but blowing through those first thousand or so early levels in a few minutes really cranked the rate up and helped me finish quickly.

I'm a little surprised there wasn't another level of achievements unlocked at that point. I've only fought 9 boss levels, but I'm going to quit the game now before "this is tedious and pointless" catches up to me like it always does with idle games.
posted by Foosnark at 4:41 AM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

When you get all the achievements, including the 1M bricks, you unlock new reasons to leave the sound off!
posted by cubby at 6:24 AM on March 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Accidentally left this running overnight, thereby maximizing the potential of the idle game.

I currently have 7 skill points and have fallen into a place where cannonballs seem optimal. At this point the boss blocks will millions of HP are the only challenge, and cannonballs have the best damage scaling. At $1B cannonballs have power 1050 (before prestige buffs), snipers hae power 220 or so. So each cannonball is doing 5x the damage of snipers. They're faster too (18 vs 11). Yeah, the snipers hit more reliably, but the bosses are so big the cannonballs hit pretty frequently.

But that calculation only makes sense for where I am now; early on when you're starting the Click X seemed super useful, then plasma balls, then the lasers. I see now there's a Prestige upgrade for basic yellow balls (tier 4) that makes it look like they might be OP.

I can't work out what poison balls are for. It's really not clear if the 2x damage debuff works on bosses or not. It doesn't seem to stack, so 2x is the most you'll get from it. So is it best to always have just one poison ball?

The way the game requires you to click a little during boss fights is clever; you can never quite leave this 100% idle. OTOH I just learned you don't have to click the Level Bonus box to actually get the bonus so that's nice.

If anyone wants my late game state, maybe this save game state will work for you. These seem to be shareable, here's code to create any save game state you want.
posted by Nelson at 6:33 AM on March 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Was I supposed to spend my gold before I prestiged? The text made it seem like I had to prestige first to claim it and then spend it, but now that I'm back at the start, there's no place to spend it and no indication I have any, which is pretty frustrating.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:40 AM on March 28, 2022

And if I look at my achievements page, my prestige count is 0, even though I prestiged once last night, and then again this morning.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:01 AM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

All achievements unlocked, hardest was closing the browser. 1 skill point per boss, and 75 skill points to fully upgrade, stopped at 18 after an overnight run stalled at I think it was a nurse?
posted by inpHilltr8r at 8:11 AM on March 28, 2022

Well I cheated my way to lots of gold and skill points and instantly drained all the fun out of the game. Which is fine, it was getting pretty grindy after 30 skill points or so. (Screw you, Count Blockula!). I was able to confirm the basic yellow balls get OP after you unlock their tier 4 skill. They outscale cannonballs for damage eventually.
posted by Nelson at 8:50 AM on March 28, 2022

my favorite random ball fact so far: The Flat Earth Society has many members scattered all across the globe.
posted by Kybard at 8:55 AM on March 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Truly embracing the idle: accumulated gold overnight after ten minutes of fiddling yesterday, prestiged, bought laser, and not gonna do anything this time around until it's failing to get through stuff in its steady, implacable fashion.
posted by cortex at 10:38 AM on March 28, 2022

Pretty engaging! I always have to remind myself that the ultimate situation these idle games strive for seems to be "you don't even have to play it any more" and that I can get the same effect by closing the window. Fun making numbers go up for a while though.
posted by rivenwanderer at 6:58 PM on March 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

I really need a "buy all" button for after I prestige.

In general - good concept, but not well balanced as you progress. Some of the skill abilities, for instance, seem pretty irrelevant by the time you've got the skill points to buy them.

I suppose the unlocked sound effects could be a clue to how the author feels about actually pushing through to the late game of this.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:22 PM on March 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Does the 0,3 skill ¡ª called something like ¡°Basic balls power multiplies for every basic ball you have¡± ¡ª actually do anything?

I got it before closing the whole thing down last night and it didn¡¯t change the power listed for the basic balls at all.
posted by danielparks at 7:35 PM on March 28, 2022

Is it just me, or do the balls affected by the "freeze any ball in the target for 15 seconds" attack actually never unfreeze?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:51 PM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

turns out fifteen seconds is a lot longer than you think
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:50 PM on March 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

If I leave the auto-fight boss button on and then leave it for awhile, will it stop auto-fighting if there's a boss I can't defeat without intervention? Or will it just keep amping up the number of times I have to beat the underbosses while never beating the current boss?
posted by jacquilynne at 2:08 PM on March 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Where can I find the instructions for this game?

(I could be going blind or losing my mind or both)
posted by MrJM at 2:32 PM on March 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

How do the bosses work? When I kill one, it just throws another one at me until I exit, and I never get any skill points.
posted by Naberius at 4:51 PM on March 29, 2022

Every time you pay to activate the boss fight, it gives you a queue of N+1 bosses, where N is the number of queues you've beaten previously. Beating the whole queue gives you one skill point. The bosses also get +X lives, where X is the number of times you've beaten that boss.
posted by rifflesby at 4:57 PM on March 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Oh God, that sucks. Thank you.
posted by Naberius at 5:12 PM on March 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

called something like ¡°Basic balls power multiplies for every basic ball you have¡± ¡ª actually do anything

It does work, and does eventually outpace the cannonball (not sure what the breakeven point is) but it is not reflected in the "power" mouseover text, but you periodically check the cumulative "damage done" section. The problem with it is that the cost scaling for buying more balls prohibits an "all basic balls" strat. I mean you can get there eventually, but it takes a long time. My current run is at 55 basic, 45 sniper, 45 cannon, 45 poison. I then delete one of the other ones to get another basic when I can afford it.
posted by juv3nal at 6:22 PM on March 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

It feels like the "Boss bricks lose all laser protection" skill also renders their shield ineffective?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:16 AM on March 30, 2022

Plasma balls far outpace everyone else for total damage dealt early after a reset. As you're in the area where a single hit from any of your balls is enough to kill a block, Plasma's ability to clear out more than one block at a time really shines.

They are probably less useful against bosses, true.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:44 PM on March 30, 2022

I think their damage really took off after I got the "plasma balls have a small chance of damaging all bricks at once" skill. So it seems like maybe the chance is per block damaged, including splash damage.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:49 PM on March 30, 2022

I've been pretty much using a 40% plasma / 30% sniper / 30% scatter build and ignoring the other 3 balls; but maybe getting the final skill on the basic balls alters that.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 5:40 PM on March 30, 2022

(not sure what the breakeven point is)

For anyone interested, after another run, and I think its roughly somewhere after 40 and before 44. Which is to say if you have equal numbers of basic & cannon with power upgrades for each close to equal in $ cost, at 40 cannon has a slight edge in damage done, but basic has overtaken it by 44.

What that likely means though is that cannon has built up a lead and it takes until 40ish for basic to catch it but basic is actually doing more damage before that point.
posted by juv3nal at 7:32 PM on March 30, 2022

It does seem like the "attack" that freezes balls for "15 seconds" doesn't actually unfreeze... But I discovered that if you click your frozen balls, they unfreeze!

God everything about that sounded wrong.
posted by biogeo at 8:30 PM on March 30, 2022 [2 favorites]

My experience is that they do unfreeze, but that the next freeze cycle is already nearing the end by that time so they tend to get refrozen pretty quickly. The unclicking thing I learned totally by accident, though. It does really seem like this game could use some instructions.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:07 AM on March 31, 2022

this is great/maddening. thanks!
posted by Eideteker at 7:37 AM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

The balls that are frozen by the "freeze your most common ball" attack do unfreeze; the ones that are frozen by the roving target don't, despite what it says about 15s, and this is annoying: it tends to stalemate unattended skill runs.

I didn't know you could click to unfreeze either!
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:31 AM on March 31, 2022

Also, suspect the game is mostly a vehicle for delivering the puns in the boss block names; although "BLACKARINA OF TIME" should surely be "BLOCKORINA", no?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:41 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is it not?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:07 AM on March 31, 2022

Super cute idea but n'thing the suggestion that the balance of gameplay in the later game is a bit weird.

In my run things went very quickly from frustratingly slow to, all of a sudden, breezing through everything without effort, other than the bosses, and even they weren't effort, just tedious.

At this kind of point idle games often throw a Whole New Thing Of Some Sort at you (or at least a hint that there will be one if you persevere), but it didn't - and after chugging through the first few bosses, I kind of stopped having further motivation to play on.

Also, once everything was suitably upgraded, it didn't half make my (older) laptop run hot, even on Numbers Only mode.

Did I miss a late game surprise?
posted by motty at 10:12 AM on March 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

it tends to stalemate unattended skill runs

...although eventually the short timer on the T-Block is worse as if you don't babysit it to add extra time it'll time out your skill run.

In my run things went very quickly from frustratingly slow to, all of a sudden, breezing through everything without effort, other than the bosses, and even they weren't effort, just tedious.

The "ripping through bosses" stage does eventually run out of steam: skill runs get longer and longer and start needing attention during the run, extra balls and power upgrades get more and more difficult to achieve, and the Ball Power Multiplier prestige upgrade starts needing deeper runs to gather enough gold for it.

Basically I think the late-game surprise is: it becomes a grind.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:02 PM on March 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

Heh, I broke it: last run went to about 13K and got stuck with no bricks on screen and an "UNDEFINED" message.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:18 PM on March 31, 2022 [2 favorites]

last run went to about 13K and got stuck
weird, my current run is at 24.8k and still going
posted by juv3nal at 11:01 PM on March 31, 2022

A lot of the higher skill point things seem really pointless, so having gotten the ones I think are interesting, I have decided to stop playing. This was fun, but the skill progression is odd, and the ever increasing length of the boss fights make them impossibly boring.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:17 AM on April 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

A couple more notes:

Total damage by powered-up basic balls versus cannonballs is affected by the cannonballs' special ability: smashing through bricks. When the Cannonballs have more than enough power to kill a brick in one hit, they'll continue through without bouncing, while basic balls will always bounce. That gives the cannonballs an advantage in the total damage score, and affects when you'll see basic balls start to pull ahead.

There's a total of 50 bosses, after which they wrap and add V2 to their names. The start of the boss run adjusts, so the first boss is always 50 lives, and you never have to fight the regular and V2 versions of a boss in the same run.

The bosses:

1. Block Head
2. Blocky Balboa
3. Blocko
4. D Block
5. Blockbeard
6. Plymouth Block (time limit 3:44)
7. Ice Block
8. Blockwork Orange (time limit 4:59)
9. Blocka Doodle Doo
10. Count Blockula
11. Blockodile (time limit 3:19)
12. Blocked Nose
13. Blocktopus
14. Block Holliday
15. Roblock
16. Z Block (time limit 2:54)
17. Code Block
18. Call the Blocktor
19. Writer's Block
20. J Block
21. Blocked Pipes (time limit 2:29)
22. Sherblock
23. Blocked Artery
24. Mental Block
25. S Block
26. Blocked Traffic (time limit 2:04)
27. Block Footage
28. Cell Block
29. Block Loaf
30. Road Block
31. Block of Cheese (time limit 1:39)
32. Blocktoman
33. Blackarina of Time
34. Blockenspiel
35. Block Noodles
36. T Block (time limit 1:14)
37. Knife Block
38. Ham Block
39. L Block
40. Shamblock
41. Combo Block (time limit 0:49)
42. Heliblockter
43. Blockchain
44. O Block
45. Block and Key
46. Block of Land (time limit 0:24)
47. Blocked Signal
48. Power Block
49. Blocked Vision
50. I Block

And yes, it does say "Blackarina of Time" which seems to be a typo.

Laser power caps out at 10,000

Prestige caps:
Level Complete Cash Bonus caps at 256,000
Ball Speed Increase at 10x
Lasers at 4
No cap yet for Ball Power Multiplier at 2048x
No cap yet for Maximum Number of Balls at 240
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:41 AM on April 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

last run went to about 13K and got stuck with no bricks on screen

Seems to have been a one-off thing; subsequent runs got past it.

29. Block Loaf

This one claims to have the "freeze any ball in the target" attack but: no roving target.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:37 PM on April 1, 2022

Ball Speed Increase at 10x

Worth noting that the latter levels of this are largely pointless as speed caps at 40 or 60 with the 8 skill point upgrade, and the speed upgrade for individual balls goes up to at least 10 or so.
posted by juv3nal at 3:28 PM on April 1, 2022

the ever increasing length of the boss fights make them impossibly boring.

TBH though I think "bores you into submission" is kind of the natural end-state of all idle games: it's impossible to get the scaling just-so correct, so end-game progression becomes either way too grindy or way too easy. Maybe the best way to enjoy them is to see this coming and bail out early? I always tend to hang on way too long though.

Universal Paperclips avoided this by having an actual ending; Cookie Clicker by sporadically releasing new content that shifts the oh-god-what's-the-point moment of ennui a little further out.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:49 PM on April 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

I might soon hate you for reminding me that Universal Paperclips exists. I wonder if I still have a saved game on my laptop?
posted by jacquilynne at 4:58 PM on April 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

Pretty great -- it's almost hypnotic when it's at maximum frenzy -- but I can't for the life of me understand the point of the "12 Days of Christmas"-style boss progression, where you have to re-beat every previous boss (on a harder difficulty!) to get to the next one. And there are 50 bosses! That's over 1,000 extremely repetitive battles. Really saps the appeal.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:35 PM on April 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

The longer-than-it-is-interesting essay I'll might write at some point about the design patterns and common deficiencies of idle and incremental games will have a whole section on the way that the overriding endlessness/prestige construction of the typical idle game warps the way we look at clear balance issues and design flaws and lack of follow-through in these.

But the short top of mind version is: idle games have the same problem that games-as-service stuff like e.g. Destiny 2 or MMOs have: you need the game, by design, to keep going beyond a clear and satisfying end point, so you need to provide an endlessly escalating final game loop. Big MMOs and such treat this endgame as a large, complicated thing with a loot treadmill and periodic new content drops and depend in significant part on group play and social structures to keep people engaged past the "end" of the game. Weird little indie idle games don't have the resources or generally the intent in the first place to do that kind of huge unending content work; the just have a handful of systems supporting their basic conceit and then a Prestige system for doing it all again but faster/further/more so but usually without new content to support it beyond a couple of prestige loops.

So as a player you not only (a) run out of significant new stuff to do and see fairly quickly but also (b) run past the point at which the systems that make up the game have been tuned to be engagingly dynamic or allow a sense of progress even through the cookie cutter repetition of the prestige process or rebooting.

The seeming pointlessness or bad balance of some late-game feature in an idle game is basically never something that can be described through intentional design: it's almost always a simple un-design breakpoint in the development. It's an unsatisfying mystery because it's some inherent design problem beyond the border of where the dev still had energy/ideas/inclination to fix it.

So you're not missing point the point of e.g. the triangular number series of bosses; that's just something that worked well enough early in the endless prestige cycle and decayed badly and didn't get balanced later on. It is, in fact, just a bad solution for an endgame. But this is random idle game on the web, not a AAA service game, so that's basically how every one of these decays. Because if you fix this boss sequence so the next few cycles feel better, the ones after that will drag; if you fix the drag problem, maybe it converges the wrong way and it becomes and endless pointless drag of killing them TOO fast; if you fix that, it's probably another balance problem a few cycles later; and so on, and all of that coming down to the difficulty of making simple acceleration curves feel like long-term satisfying content.

Our expectations that games will be designed and balanced to a degree proportional with their playtime falter on idle games because they're a handful of math equations dressed up as a game. It's the rare and exceptional idle game that either ends concretely or does a genuinely good job of introducing new things to think about after the first hour or loop. But we've been trained to think of games as designed in a more explicit journey than that, so boggling design problems and balance issues feel like a mystery or a puzzle to be solved rather than just The Point At Which The Game Got Essentially Terrible.
posted by cortex at 8:58 AM on April 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

(I also don't want my thesis here to be "idle game designers are bad developers"; it's more that idle games are hard to balance by definition, and the weird free ones on the web especially tend to be hobby projects (there's a lot more aggressively, mercenarily designed and more polished IAP-driven bullshit on iOS, by comparison), and a dev reaching the point in working on that project where they say "this basic design is broken and I don't see good ways to unbreak it, time to stop and move on to the next thing" is actually smart and healthy and will lead to a next, better game in general. But there's the problem that the credits never roll for the player; you pay your nothing and you take your chances and you're left deciding when the show is actually over. And optimistic/completist idiots like me will tend to stay in the dim, post-show theater for hours or days afterward because by god we're gonna make SURE there's not another post-credits sequence coming up. And then we do that a hundred times and start threatening to write essays.)
posted by cortex at 9:06 AM on April 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thank you for your erudite description of the problem of designing a game that never ends.

That's what makes Universal Paperclips such a standout in the idle game genre; it has an end and a great little story to go with it. You play it and then you finish with a satisfying conclusion.
posted by Nelson at 9:40 AM on April 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am that completionist idiot. I really should learn to bail earlier, at the "whew this is becoming really quite grindy now" point, rather than bitter-ending to the "this is intolerably grindy."

The logical "you have finished the game, nothing more to do" point here is probably "unlocked all the skill upgrades" but (a) that's an awful lot of grind as the V2 blocks get tougher fast and (b) some of them seem utterly pointless: the 8-point hold-to-click update but there's really no point in clicking on blocks outside the very early game...

There's some nice/annoying emergent behavior in the long boss block fights: the scatter mini-balls tend to self-organize into a criss-cross pattern that bounces at the bottom corners, sides, and middle-of-top, entirely avoiding the boss block.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:40 AM on April 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Universal Paperclips is a standout in many ways, having an end being one of them, but it's pretty short as far as these things go. What's the longest idle game that has an end?

I suspect it may be NGU Idle. I'm technically nearing 1000 days on that per the in-game stats, but I think there's at least 400 days of that that I wasn't actually playing and I also wasn't deep enough in for that offline idle time to be meaningfully beneficial in any way.

When you think about about how often these games are poorly balanced, that this one is still engagingly balanced after maybe 600 days of playtime is a real accomplishment. I recently leveled up into the third and final difficulty setting.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:52 AM on April 11, 2022

The balance in NGU lasts through most of sadistic, but it starts falling apart as you get to/near AMALGAMATE.

Somewhere around then you'll hit the hardcaps for energy and magic capacity and power, you'll have bought all the wishes that matter, you'll hit the hardcap on most/all your hacks, and your adventure macguffins will be deeeeeep into diminishing returns.

Not much left but grinding out long rebirths and buying adventure stats with xp.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:47 AM on April 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's an Android version (no iOS version), which is nice because I can split screen it and still use my phone. Oddly the Android version runs much more smoothly than the desktop version. My PC is a little old but not that old.
posted by Tehhund at 7:44 PM on April 13, 2022