Automating the Philosophers Stone
Automating The Philosophers Stone
An Incremental Game Jam 2023 Submission
If you like the game, you can review it for the next few weeks for the Game Jam which would be lovely <3
You ever wish you could keep more resources / upgrades on reset in your idle games?
You ever say to yourself "Damn, I should reset for rewards, but I'll have to go through long periods of grog again?"
Well I got just the game for you! Automating the Philosophers Stone is a game about slowly accumulating energy based off of your max resources across all resets, meaning there is no cost to do an use your energy in other upgrades
Most of the upgrades in the game cost this energy resource so if you feel stuck in your current run you can simply reset and get all your energy back to try another
Yes, this means the game favors active gameplay for parts where you can constantly upgrade your strategy, but there a ton of scaling upgrades which let you idle away for great rewards
Currnent content:
- 3 Basic elemental generators (Fire, Water, Earth)
- 21 Upgrades (including many infinitely repeatable ones)
- Energy Multipliers based on amount of elements sacrificed on resets
- 6 Milestones for sacrifice amount
- 7 Challenges (which give really good rewards)
- 3 Ultimate generators (Air, Space, Aether), which are unlocked through milestones and challenges which ramp up to do ridiculous things and should push you to the end
If you want to interact with others and help me balance out this game, join my server here: https://discord.gg/t75P8fNT <3 <3
There is also a github pages version which should be the same, but hosted on github instead of itchio: https://sophiewalden.github.io/AutomatingThePhilosophersStone/
This is all for a Jam, but if you would like to further support me: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/soapietomato
Comments
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Progress scaling seems kind of weird. I've reached 33% on the stone at one of my resets, and jumped my energy multiplier up to 1.1e4x...
Except I have no idea why it ended up that high, because now my MUCH superior upgraded setup is apparently only worth 1.4e3x
All of my elements have the most quantity they've ever had, so I'm clearly significantly further in all 4 elements than whatever reset let me hit 1.1e4, and every single buyable upgrade is certainly more upgraded than whatever that run had as well.
But I'm no longer progressing at all because somehow that run was worth e4 energy and the best I can do now with everything extremely stronger is only rating as being worth e3 energy?
Yes! This is a bit relating to the balance, which I can't really adjust right now because the game jam window ended, but I will be looking into it in the future! Currently you can be looking towards the challenge tab which will give you even more upgrades to overcome and get a stronger multiplier. The reason this happens is because once you unlock challenges I make it 100x times harder to fill up the bar, but give you a 200x mult which basically means you have to become 100 times stronger then you were in the pre-challenge era which can be hard to do. I want to balance this down to around 5-10 more likely, but that comes with some challenge rebalancing aswell because the reason this wall exists is to incentivize checking out the challenges tab before just pushing to reach the end of the game. Thanks a lot for playing the game and hoping to touch this in future updates and making user experience overall better <3
nice, i like incremental games like this
Thanks so much <3 If you want to you can rate and review the game right now for the game jam this was made for that just ended and also play the other entries which are lovely aswell
this gams is impossible, isnt it?
Like you get to like 39.25 or such but getting even any further, buying even one more level or uipgrade of anything is jsut impossible cause it's way too expensive.
must be either intentional game design.
or really untested bug mess kind of game.
not sure which one, but I'd hope the first
I pushed it down to 39 if you refresh it should be updated soon! Thanks for the feedback, it was sort of intentional because theres a puzzle like upgrade system where you could upgrade in a certain order to pass the timewall as it would give you higher values, but a lot of people were hitting the 39 timewall so I lowered it
ehm, you can and will click all the upgrades in like 0.5 seconds.
doubt that that short time interval will make any difference...
Softcapped right before challenges... someone help?
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Yep! Theres a bit of a timewall there if where you can either wait it out or look for a couple strategies interms of upgrade order. Maybe try getting as much terraform before trying some different upgrades and thats the start to the usual strategy, or you can join the incremental game jam discord where its talked about it a good amount or my discord which I can try to help, but just look around for which order your upgrading based on the terraform upgrades, good luck and thanks <3
This has been really neat so far, but the challenges are trivially easy, that doesn't feel right.
Yep I agree, due to the scaling multipliers energy can get out of hand and engulf the challenges, so I'm looking to up their requirements to reasonable numbers just dont want to scale it too high so I put it there as the base values for now and want to collect some data before setting them too high, thanks for playing! <3
Edit: Challenges are somewhat harder now, but still want to up the values, if anyone has suggestions for around what values they could get to in a reasonable time in a challenge that would be great!
Maybe it would make sense for challenges to use a separate "best x?".
Sure, I was trying to find a way which you could grind outside of challenges though to make challenges easier rather then just making challenges universally the same difficulty. I could make it so you have to re-earn the philosopher milestones which could be interesting, but might not affect much or maybe it would make sense to give a reduced version of your multiplier like challenge 7.
I suddenly had -6.08 water and did not go up :(
bizarre, I’m trying to research into why there’s negative values on the itchio page; if you want to export and import your save to the GitHub pages link below I think the problem is solved, but was there anythjgn specific you know that caused it, here to fix it! Thanks for playing <3
The stone is unattainable, a fitting metaphor for life.
haha yeah we’ll simply I want to add a story and have stuff at the end for it, but want the game to be balanced first and have it be unintrusive, but nice!! You’re the first I’ve seen make it to the end so far so you must be pretty good and quick!
EDIT: Seems to be fixed on the github page!
Nice but unfortunately it is buggy:
Oh? Thats a lot of fire! I'm guessing the - is because of a slight rounding error in cost of the 2x upgrades, surely since you had 1e450 fire it rebounded up quickly? Is there a certain upgrade that caused this, working to make sure all these bugs are gone! Thanks for playing!
I think I have an export with this error. Could/should I DM you this one somehow?
Yep! If you want you can add me on discord @soapietomato or join the game jam discord at https://discord.gg/uvqh7KQg where I'm helping some people with current save problems, itd be so much help to get that save (If you can dm me on itch thats great too, but not sure), or you can just link a pastebin of the save. Thanks <3
Here it is:
https://pastebin.com/F1YEXYfP
I'm stuck at 49 energy and unable to get a prestige mult.
Press that reset button!
Yeah, as the other person said resets are key to continually compounding mult, but also if you refresh the page (Maybe export your save first, dont know if updates will affect it) I updated the energy mult formula to maybe be more favorable especially early game!