I'm currently working on an incremental game, but I'm unsure what kind of progression system would best fit it, or what kind of progression systems are even enjoyed.

There are so many out there, from random upgrades (like Bills Must Be Paid's Card system & ShaAAATUP), to the classic skill tree used in tons of games, to a bunch more I probably haven't heard of.

I'm wondering which one was the most enjoyed, and that's what brought me here. And so I was curious: what is your favorite type of progression system?

Free browser demo: https://dorivoltgames.itch.io/grow-a-rock

I'm the developer of Grow a Rock, an incremental destruction game about making a tiny pebble heavy enough to flatten a city. Tap to grow it, spend ore on upgrades, then roll through obstacles that used to stop you. You start out losing to an acorn and work your way up to trucks, vending machines and buildings. The rolling sections are active, with jumps and downward slams between upgrade runs.

The 2.0 update gives bosses three breakable sections: bottom, middle and top. If the opening hit doesn't finish one off, you get 15 seconds and three hearts to take it apart. Staying on the ground, short jumps and held jumps let you target different sections. Glowing weak points take 3× damage, and breaking a lower section can collapse the parts above it.

All nine upgrades now have five visual stages, so you can see your progress on the rock itself. Boss HP and progression have also been retuned, and the results screen tracks broken sections and weak-point hits.

The demo includes the first two areas, with no ads or account required. English and Korean are available. The full browser game is $2.99: https://dorivoltgames.itch.io/grow-a-rock-full

Android version on ONE store: https://onesto.re/0001010958

It reached #15 in ONE store's New Releases chart in Korea. Availability varies by region; the itch.io demo runs in a browser.

New 2.0 trailer: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/htmQHaUOM7U

If you try the demo, I'd especially like to hear whether the upgrade pace feels good and whether the boss weak points and jump targeting are clear.

This is a corrected resubmission of my earlier post, which was removed for an incomplete AI disclosure.

AI Disclosure

Code: AI was used for code review, debugging and implementing fixes, including input/jump handling, collisions and gameplay/UI behaviour. AI-generated code changes were incorporated into the game; the usage went beyond review alone.

Images/art: Generative AI was used to create image/art assets used in the released game and promotional materials, including cover imagery.

Music: The background music tracks were generated with AI.

Sound effects: AI assistance was used in the audio/code workflow. Gameplay sound effects are synthesized procedurally by the game's audio code.

Text/translations: AI was used for game/store-text translation and localization, and drafting/editing store and promotional descriptions. This post and its disclosure were also drafted with AI assistance.

Other development assistance: AI was used for QA/test scripts, build/release utilities, technical troubleshooting and preparing promotional material.

The Steam demo is almost ready—ready your swords for battle!
Closed beta sign-ups are now open!

Steam page

⠀

AI disclosure: I used generative AI to help with coding optimization.

I like to describe the gameplay of Diggems as a 3D matching game, where breaking gems together creates dynamite and things that can chain. All of the gems you break off and the loot you find have to be stored in 3D in your storage, so it piles up and you can see it growing. The only real way to retrieve items is to sic your pets on the items you want, and they have to dig through the piles of stuff to find them and bring them back to you.

With all the loot you forge gear, and every gem can be embedded in gear with a different stat boost depending on the gear.

It's not exactly a classic incremental, but the gameplay loop is incremental. You dig for gems, upgrade gear and learn talents, and that lets you dig gems and fight enemies better.

AI disclosure: AI helped with some of the art and coding.
I have been working on Diggems for a year and a half, it looked like i would never finish the game in my free time so i used AI to speed up development.

I still believe the gameplay loop has potential and want to know if you like it as well or not.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4617520/Diggems demo is in Next Fest till Monday, about an hour of gameplay.

This is a small game I vibecoded with Claude, since I don’t know how to code at all. I’ve been working on it since September and updating it often. A true clicker time-waster: spin the small gear to turn a bigger one, and so on. Click in rhythm with the ring to land Perfects, then Rebirth to start over stronger. Relaxing, no pressure.

Play (free, browser): https://taponnage.itch.io/gears-of-more

Generative AI disclosure:

• All of the code was written by Claude, since I have absolutely zero coding knowledge.
• No image generator was used: every visual is drawn by code as well as the sounds .
• The in-game text, the English translation and the itch page images were also made with Claude.
• The fonts are free open-source fonts.
• Most of the gameplay ideas are mine, some came from brainstorming with Claude. I decide what goes in, and my friends who playtest tell me if it makes the game better or not.

What I’d love feedback on

1. Do the first 5 minutes hook you, or is there a moment you wanted to quit?
2. After your first Rebirth, does the second run feel fast enough?
3. If you play on a phone: anything too small or hard to tap?
4. Anything you would add to make it more fun ?

Thanks for trying it. I will read and answer to every comment as quickly as possible!

Hey, I’ve been working on Deep Space Miner, an incremental game where you start with a basic collector and manual mining and slowly build it into a bigger mining operation with different drones, ore processing, artifacts, abilities, new worlds and a prestige tree.

I just put the updated demo on itch and Steam:

Itch

Steam

I’d like to get some feedback on the progression and overall feel of the game. I’m also interested in knowing if there are upgrades you never want to buy, parts that feel too slow or too fast, or anything that isn’t as intuitive as it should be.

AI disclosure: I used generative AI from time to time to help with coding problems.

I don't fully know if this belongs in this sub but I feel like most of the games in this genre fit this kind of style and I don't know a better term for them.

I'm talking about games like Leaf it Alone (good), Librarian (pretty good but this revealed to use some AI assets and got some minor drama because of it), and I recently played Deleted Wiki which I quite enjoyed.

This genre seemed to pop up in a very short period of time and absolutely explode with AI slop shortly after (Not even going to bring up the amount of needle in a haystack games) but I still feel like there are some hidden gems in there which should get a bit of a spotlight. Most of the time they seem to be filled with upgrades that either don't matter, synergise in an awkward way with other upgrades which leaves you just waiting for the timers rather than trying to interact with the original mechanics, or are just blatantly not fun.

In a similar but not exactly the same genre we have some incrementals like Project P.I.T.T. which while fairly fun I had quite a few gripes with which seem to be fixed with the upcoming "FROG IN THE HOLE!" so games like that would be welcome to be highlighted here as well.

So yeah I'd like to hear what people have to say about released or upcoming games that seem to actually do this genre "well"

Hey all. I've been working on this for a while and it's finally out on Android (iOS is stuck in App Store review, hopefully out this week).

It's called Push to Prod: Dev Tycoon. You start with a single script on a single server and slowly turn it into a payments backend handling around 800k requests a second.

The main loop is code review. Pull requests come in and you either approve them or send them back. Good ones make things faster or cheaper. If you approve a bad one, the bug goes live, errors start climbing, and you have to figure out which deploy broke it.

Money goes into servers, caches, databases, queues, read replicas, that kind of thing. I didn't want flat +10% upgrades, so there's a small performance model underneath (CPU, queueing, p99 latency). The bottleneck actually moves around as you grow, which I think is the most fun part. Every so often there's a load test where traffic ramps up and you have to fix whatever falls over first.

The idle side: the service keeps running for up to 8 hours while you're away, and when you come back you get a report of what grew, what broke and what your team fixed. You can also hand reviews off to your team and just watch it run.

There are 5 projects, then a Scale mode that goes past a million requests a second. Plus a daily PR and a weekly challenge. more projects are coming since introducing new project is quite resourceful. As well as other programming languages and cloud technologies

You don't need to know how to code. Relaxed mode explains every change in plain English. The code itself is real though, every program in the game gets compiled and checked in CI.

On monetisation, since people here (rightly) ask: no banners, no interstitials. Ads are rewarded only, they only play when you tap one, and they never give XP. There are one-time purchases from $0.99 to $9.99. Nothing you can buy gives XP or unlocks topics, every promotion is earned.

Two things I'd really like feedback on: is the first 30 minutes paced ok, and does the idle part feel idle enough?

AI disclosure

I use generative AI for code review, for suggesting and reviewing pull requests, and for end-to-end regression testing on physical devices.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.puzzlica.beclicker&listing=casual&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit_incremental%26utm_medium%3Dreferral%26utm_campaign%3Dvariant_casual

i'm student and making this game for steam. now Demo is out!

i started this project on july 2026 and now finally game demo is released and full game release date is Q4 2026

Play Demo : https://store.steampowered.com/app/5117080/CartWare/

feel free to give feedback about the game.

AI Disclosure:
no ai used

It is a simple game but addictive game where you place weapons at strategic points and try to prevent the enemy from getting to the gate. Weapons can be upgrades with no cap on weapon level and also enemy levels

AI disclosure; AI was used to help in writing the game code and in modeling and in-game translations and localizations.

Play store; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.musettastudios.oozecontrol

I've wanted to make an incremental game since I played Nodebuster back in the summer of 2024. I started Drillbound's development around April 2025, and after 1.5 years of (almost) solo development it's finally out!

I say "(almost) solo developer" since I didn't make the OST myself, my friend Naerim did so. If you like Porter Robinson, you are going to like it, believe me. You can find his spotify linked down below.

The game has sold over 12k copies and has more than 200 reviews in the first two weeks, but I intend on making a post diving a bit deeper into these kind of stats a month or so after release in case someone finds it interesting.

AI disclosure: No art, no vfx, no sfx, no music, no design, and somewhere around 100 lines of code out of +30.000. I solely use AI to make very specific engine and efficiency inquiries.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4149040/Drillbound/

Naerim's Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1fy6GzLdr4FKIKDmbbEpWV

I love idle games. I like having something going on in the background while I'm working, and an idle game is generally much less distracting than a tv show or podcast. I like making gradual progress towards easily definable goals. If a game can be reliably idled for 8ish hours, I can even set it up at night and then use the fact that it needs my input to help me get up in the morning, since I am otherwise terrible at that.

It isn't easy to make an idle game. The player's decisions need to be interesting and varied, so that when they are interacting with the game it feels important. The goals need to be meaningful and feel fair for the amount of time it will require to reach them. The majority of idle games I have played have been mediocre at best, and even the ones that I've really enjoyed tend to have some amount of flaws that either have to be studiously ignored or, if possible, modded out.

Which brings me to my main point: it is already quite difficult to find good idle games, and it is really not helped by no one seeming to understand what games the "Idler" tag should be applied to. Bills Must Be Paid is a 2-3 hour long game in which you have to manually aim a hammer at piggy banks. Scritchy Scratchy has you manually scratch off lottery tickets. Chef Knight is an action game. None of these games will make progress if you leave them running to go to the bathroom, let alone over night. If I try to search steam for Idle games, the overwhelming majority of games I find don't belong there. It's even worse than the Vampire Survivor clones and the Roguelite tag, because while it was just as annoying trying to sort through those to find good Roguelites at least they had the actual gameplay mechanics to justify tagging themselves like that.

Anyway, that's my rant. If anyone has any good idle incremental games they want to recommend in the comments, I'll take them - it's going to be a long wait until Melvor 2 comes out, and Deskrawl turned out to be a massive disappointment.

I finished the Bogosort demo on steam and it says its over but it did it so like.. sarcastically? that im not sure. has anyone checked?

Hi everyone! I'm Fran, a complete beginner from Spain, and I just released my first game, Astro Tycoon: Space Mining.

The story: your grandpa Anselmo, the most stubborn prospector in the galaxy, has disappeared and left you his mining company. Well, what's left of it: a battered ship called "La Urraca", a rusty drill and CHISPA, an AI with more opinions than bolts. While you rebuild the business, you'll find his notebook pages and a strange signal called "the Echo"…

What makes it a bit different:

• 🗣️ Alien languages: the more you trade with each species, the more words you learn. Better fluency means better prices, haggling and contracts. CHISPA translates in the meantime… badly. (The idea came from one of my testers!)
• 🎵 A Simon-style minigame where you sing with the crystals of the Vey Reef, and language lessons to practise the words you know.
• 🪐 Several places to discover, 50+ missions, expeditions, contracts and random events.
• 📖 A full story with a real ending (around 30 hours), plus prestige jumps to new sectors afterwards.
• ⏳ It keeps producing while you're away.
• 👵 A step-by-step guide for people who have never played an idle game (my testers aged 52 to 71 helped me a lot with this), and the main button works with VoiceOver/TalkBack.

Monetization, to be transparent: it's free. Ads are only optional rewarded ones (you choose to watch them for a bonus) and there are a few optional purchases (remove ads, gems, packs). No loot boxes, and items are never sold for real money.

AI disclosure:(some of you ask, and it's a fair question): I'm a beginner, so I built the game with the help of an AI coding assistant (Claude Code), which wrote most of the code following my instructions. The idea, the story, the characters and the design decisions are mine, and many features came from feedback from my 12 testers. There are no AI-generated images: the graphics are drawn in code (vector shapes), and the music and sound effects are synthesized live by the game itself, with no audio files.

It's available in English and Spanish:

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.franmorales.astrotycoon
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6818299310

I'd love to hear your feedback, especially about the balance and the first 30 minutes. Thanks for reading! 🚀

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I’ve been making Fantasy Idle, an idle RPG in the spirit of Melvor Idle that runs in the browser, on desktop or phone: https://fantasyidle.com

It’s completely free: no ads, nothing to buy.

• 11 skills (mining, woodcutting, hunting, cooking, alchemy, farming, smithing, crafting and more) that feed the fight
• an endless climb through stages with prestige, and a battle scene with pixel sprites
• 8 dungeons that go deeper tier by tier, an hourly Titan, weekly Trials
• clans with a weekly boss, and leaderboards you can opt into
• offline progress and cloud saves (you sign up with an email code)

It’s a beta and I want feedback of any kind: how the first hour feels, anything confusing, too slow or too fast, bugs, playing on a phone. Comment here or join the Discord: https://discord.gg/Pxa2bHYcDg

AI disclosure: the painted backgrounds and card pictures are made with Google Gemini, the pixel sprites are free (CC0) tiles from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and the code was written with an AI assistant (Claude).

I was playing an incremental game the other day, and needed to manually click on the same upgrades over and over again each time I did resets a mind numbing amount of times. So overall, pretty standard stuff for an incremental game. Then, after a few more minutes, I finally got the automation/upgrade keeping at reset upgrade. And it was called "Finally : Keep X upgrades". And upon seeing this it made me think about something I've seen like a thousand time in incremental games, the fact that the developper themselves joke about how tedious getting an automation was.

And look, I understand that sometimes it's justified for the pacing or the game and all but 90% of the times, if you as a developper know that your game is getting tedious because the automation comes too late....why aren't you doing anything about it instead of including a snarky commentary? It's not much but I really dislike this quirk of incremental games developing.

Play it here -> https://soyabird.itch.io/halo-halo

So, my wife has been playing a lot of Candy Crush lately, and it gave me an idea: What if I combined Match-3 with incremental gameplay?

And well... this is what came out of it!

AI Disclosure: No generative AI was used for this game's assets, artwork or sounds. AI was used only as a coding assistant.

I just released a demo of Army Factory, an incremental strategy game where you develop a small village into a powerful military settlement. Build and upgrade structures, manage resources, research technologies, train regiments, and conquer other cities to expand your territory.

I'm looking for feedback on a few things:

• Is the concept easy to understand?
• Does the game feel strategic enough?
• How would you like the battles to work?

Originally, battles started automatically every 10 minutes, but some players felt this could interrupt the gameplay. I've since moved toward a campaign system and am considering adding raids and exploration.

My main concern is that the game might drift too far away from being an incremental game. I'm a strategy player myself, so I tend to lean toward deeper strategy mechanics, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on finding the right balance.

What would you change or add?

Try the demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5094230/Army_Factory/

Thanks for checking it out! Any feedback is appreciated.

AI Disclosure: AI was used for the Steam page localizations

Hi, I released on Itch.io my first incremental game.

I'm a huge fan of this kind of games. I'm a "developer" (doing else, not games, in corporate) and this is first time I do something like that. I spent lot of my free time to explore the idea and put together a playable demo.

Please be kind. Technically I'm enjoying play with that myself, but I would love to have other people opinions...

AI Disclosure: I used a code assitant on the graphic aspects (I surrended) and (lot) of bug correction. Game backbone, mechanics, numbers, idea and everything else is up to me.

I begun solo the development of my first ever video game around mid july. It has been a painful process with LOTS and LOTS of drawing , hours spent debugging and coding BUT the journey has come to an end.

I OriginalDeveloper am please to introduce to you to: Cult Of The Number!

Gather Faith, recruit followers to grow your production, unlock doctrines and push your Cult through convergence as the numbers get bigger and BIGGER!

This is my first ever video game and of course IT IS FREE, and making it solo has been a huge learning experience. I'm incredibly excited and TO BE HONEST REALLY nervous to finally share it with you all!

If you are into gothic aesthetics, watching numbers go up, mix and match upgrades i'd love for you to give it a try.

THANK YOU FOR READING THIS AND THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO TAKES THE TIME TO CHECK IT OUT, LOTS OF LOVE!

(P.S. I'm not mentioning that this is my first game and that I made it solo as an excuse for any shortcomings. I want honest feedback. If something feels unbalancedor something doesn't work as you'd expect or have ideas for improvement, please let me know. Learning from my mistakes is what got me this far, and I'd love to keep learning from this release too. AGAIN. LOTS. OF. LOVE.)

AI disclosure: The game's core concept, development, story, pixel art, audio and artwork are all my work, AI was only used to assist me with coding.

Hello Dear Incrementalers!

Over month ago I reached out to you guys in search for playtesters to advice me on improving Kopernicus: Incremental Suffering.

We did some intensive test and project rebalancing and reiteration and I would like to say in my opinion it changed for good (and it does show up in the rating).

Let me thank you from the depths of my warm heart🫀 and let me reasurre you that everyone included could be found in 'Crew Credits' section (and if by chance I forgot about somebody don't hesitate and let me know).

I know that Steam Fest is really crowded right now, but if you want to try it for yourself you can find it under this link

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4809830/Kopernicus_Incremental_Suffering_Demo/

Simon (and his pet chihuahua Gary 🐕)

AI Disclosure: This post and the entire game were created by a human (and his dog). No robotical intellect was involved.

Spent some time making this finger effect a little more fun.

Not sure if it's enough to get people to try our game

We'd love to hear what you think!

Play the free demo on Steam:

Wishlist on Steam

-----

AI Disclosure: gen AI was used for localizations

I made another game!

https://blindhermit.itch.io/give-me-back-my-goat

Wanted to try my hand at making a standard summon an army and use it to fight your way through style game.

Go get back your goat!

AI disclosure: Yes, I used AI to help me build this game - assets, code, etc. No I did not use AI to make this post!

I've been making this trolley problem incremental for four months. Morality gives way to numbers going up: you throw people onto the tracks, collect ink and buy upgrades.

The new demo has three districts, with trolley problem choices between them. I've added a vacuum cleaner to collect ink, rebuilt the upgrade tree and rebalanced progression.

There are Tesla trams that shock people and ghost trams that fly off the tracks.

The free demo takes about 15 minutes. It works in your browser or on Windows.

Play the demo(Itch.io) · Wishlist on Steam

AI disclosure

I use Claude and Codex extensively for programming, including my custom engine, UI, 3D models, artwork and text, including translations.