Howdy! Happy New Year's Eve! I'd like to end this year by announcing a new update to my engine, Profectus! For those who don't know, this was an engine inspired by TMT but with a focus on empowering the developer to make more interesting and customized features. It includes a lot of cool systems that make developing Incremental Games easier and better to play, like the formulas system that can handle calculating how many times a repeatable purchase can be bought without having to worry about geometric series or derivatives. Or the modifiers system, which allows players to see break downs of all the things currently effecting resource gain or other modifiers. If you've played Advent Incremental, Planar Pioneers, Universal Reconstruction, Primordia, or any of the entries from the Profectus Creation Jam 2023, you're already familiar with the high quality games that can be made with Profectus.

Today's update includes a huge overhaul of how custom features are written. making them much simpler to write. This improvement also extends to the new "wrappers" and "mixins", which replace the previous decorators system as ways of modularly adding functionality to features. This update also includes an overhaul of the "board" system, through which you can make pannable and zoomable canvases. Previously it was restricted to diamond shaped nodes, circle shaped nodes, links between nodes, and some extras like labels, progress bars, and action lists. It was very difficult to extend this to other nodes or elements (although escapee managed to introduce square nodes and other designs in Nanite). Now the system is much more generic and can include any SVG or DOM elements, including any existing features included in the engine or created by the developer. I'm pretty excited about the potential of this!

To celebrate this release, I'm putting on another Profectus Creation Jam! It starts in mid February, so you have some time to prepare (and take a break after NYIGJ). There's a cash prize and several art commission prizes provided by my wife, myotherheart. It should be a lot of fun, and I encourage anyone to join, even if you haven't used Profectus before. It's well documented, and you can always ask for help on the Profectus & Friends discord server. There's also some resources available on the TMT forums you might be interested in using.

Thanks for reading! Like usual, you can read the full change log here.

Howdy! Happy New Year's Eve! I'd like to end this year by announcing a new update to my engine, Profectus! For those who don't know, this was an engine inspired by TMT but with a focus on empowering the developer to make more interesting and customized features. It includes a lot of cool systems that make developing Incremental Games easier and better to play, like the formulas system that can handle calculating how many times a repeatable purchase can be bought without having to worry about geometric series or derivatives. Or the modifiers system, which allows players to see break downs of all the things currently effecting resource gain or other modifiers. If you've played Advent Incremental, Planar Pioneers, Universal Reconstruction, Primordia, or any of the entries from the Profectus Creation Jam 2023, you're already familiar with the high quality games that can be made with Profectus.

Today's update includes a huge overhaul of how custom features are written. making them much simpler to write. This improvement also extends to the new "wrappers" and "mixins", which replace the previous decorators system as ways of modularly adding functionality to features. This update also includes an overhaul of the "board" system, through which you can make pannable and zoomable canvases. Previously it was restricted to diamond shaped nodes, circle shaped nodes, links between nodes, and some extras like labels, progress bars, and action lists. It was very difficult to extend this to other nodes or elements (although escapee managed to introduce square nodes and other designs in Nanite). Now the system is much more generic and can include any SVG or DOM elements, including any existing features included in the engine or created by the developer. I'm pretty excited about the potential of this!

To celebrate this release, I'm putting on another Profectus Creation Jam! It starts in mid February, so you have some time to prepare (and take a break after NYIGJ). There's a cash prize and several art commission prizes provided by my wife, myotherheart. It should be a lot of fun, and I encourage anyone to join, even if you haven't used Profectus before. It's well documented, and you can always ask for help on the Profectus & Friends discord server. There's also some resources available on the TMT forums you might be interested in using.

Thanks for reading! Like usual, you can read the full change log here.

I've released a new major update to my game engine, Profectus! I'm announcing a new game jam for profectus projects alongside it. Details here: https://incremental.social/m/incremental_games/t/71723/Profectus-0-7-and-Creation-Jam-2025

#incremental_games

Roughly 2 years ago I started work on the Guide to Incrementals, and most notably wrote a page on Defining the Genre. One part of it defines a incremental games canon - a selection of games that are definitively incremental games, and exhaustively illustrate the common elements of incremental games. When writing the list I tried to ensure there was nothing too redundant, preferring newer titles. So I mention clicker heros instead of cookie clicker, ngu idle instead of itrtg, etc.

But its been a couple years, I think its worth taking a critical eye on this list. What was missing, which games now have newer games to use as representation, how do we get a profectus game in the canon /j.

For reference, here's the old list:

• A Dark Room
• Clicker Heroes
• Crank
• Increlution
• Kitten's Game
• NGU Idle
• Realm Grinder
• Synergism
• Universal Paperclips
• Learn to Fly

And here are my thoughts on changes:

• I think clicker heroes and realm grinder have too significant of overlap (they're both what I would classify as "cookie clicker"-like in their central design, and even branch off into many similar mechanics). I'd suggest dropping CH, due to RG's additional focus on per-run decisions which I think should be represented. This does mean we don't have the "level up to cap then ascend" mechanic present in CH and games like revolution idle, though.
• I think Universal Paperclips and Crank are both on here for the same reason - they're both strong examples of paradigm shifts with very dramatic changes to gameplay. I'd suggest dropping Crank
• Unnamed Space Idle is a new very popular title, and has the "unfolding collection of interconnected incremental minigames" aspect very popular amongst these titles, so could theoretically replace any of a good number of these. I think what would be the cleanest replacement would be a dark room (as ADR ultimately doesn't have that many other elements of incremental games), although I went back and forth between that and NGU idle in my head.
• I think Evolve Idle could fully replace kitten's game as a newer title that covers the same elements of incremental games.

So with all my changes, the new list would look like this:

• Evolve Idle
• Increlution
• NGU Idle
• Realm Grinder
• Synergism
• Universal Paperclips
• Unnamed Space Idle
• Learn to Fly

I'd love to hear y'all's thoughts. Do you agree with my proposed changes? What changes would you suggest instead or in addition?