Thoughts on ITRTG's design and why I bounced off Idle Cooking Emperor

[Z]

So here's to hoping this will kick off something of a discussion. I've seen Ryu82 mention that ICE is basically below expectations (to use the friendlier language) a number of times and would like to offer my personal experience of why I didn't like it and quit really early. There are certainly other reasons too, such as an increased competition in the genre and what have you, they should also not be disregarded.
This also contains thoughts on ITRTG's design, thus I figured that this may be a better place for a discussion.
I have no doubt Ryu82 has plenty of thoughts of his own on the topic, but bear with me please.
Some of this may sound accusatory or hostile, I don't mean for it to. I quite enjoy ITRTG, and it's one of my favorite idle games period.


To summarize my notion, I'd call it an issue of "layers of indirection of progress".
ITRTG is surprisingly clear about how progress works. If you defeat more gods / defeat them faster, you have progressed. Every system feeds into this. Rebirth multipliers mean higher stats for more gods, monuments mean higher stats, pets (among more indirect bonuses through campaigns) mean higher stats, TBS is more combat power, Might very directly influences gods defeated, etc. God power is more indirect, about two layers depending on what you get, but still.
All of these function in extremely straightforward ways (once you read the help, this plays into UI design I guess) when it comes to figuring out how they help you (ATK > DEF, if we ignore regen, and DEF>ATK and you're good), and how much they help you. The one exception I can think of are the new pet dungeons. From the most indirect starting point, you get special pet levels and classes, that influence how well you do in dungeons, that get you drops, which you use for equipment forging, that can give bonuses to your stats or just influence how much better you do in dungeons. I think this is close to a line of layers of indirection that probably shouldn't be extended much further.

So comparing to my experience starting out with ICE.
Training your skills? Sure, pretty clear. And then feeds into stats. The actual stats aren't as straight-forward as plain old Attack and Defense.
Cooking Battles are plain obviously a lot more complicated compared to ITRTG's simple stat system. You need a recipe which has a dozen stats, and secrets (which are upgraded in a completely different way), and then manage your preparation stats. And you can do mid-battle actions. I also have a bit of an issue with this since you can just make the actions in a challenge irrelevant with better stats.
If you win you get fame, a restaurant, a cooking medal and each of these feeds into different systems all at once.
So then with a restaurant you must pick a recipe, with its stats influencing how it does while watching the restaurant theme. And you can pick up employees, with personal stats. And you have restaurant equipment and themes. And these influence how much money you get. And with the money you can then invest in the recipe training, which improves how many areas you can beat while having to work in conjunction with the stat training whose improvements primarily function on a different route via cooking medals and the like. And juggling these systems across nested menus (see below, bad GUI is a serious problem) is essentially what made me drop it. And that's not getting into the additional layers built ontop all of this via rebirths, pets and whatnot.

So in short, ICE, to me, has a problem of both the system being comparatively more opaque in how some of the stats help, and how many additional layers you need to manipulate for your measure of progress, beating areas, in conjunction with your GUI design.


There's no analogue for creating a recipe with all the stat weighing in ITRTG, I consider that in ITRTG's favour. It's purely an exercise in optimization that will be solved by reading a wiki for most players. ITRTG in general does not have this. Sure, there are challenges that are more optimal to do at certain points, but there's very little math optimization minutiae (Pet Clone Stats and clone distribution for monuments I guess?) Maybe sorting them into blocks and making better unlocking requirements is an idea here.

One thing I really like about ITRTG are the creative challenges, especially the creativity with the bonuses. While there're certainly a lot of similarities in goals, the rewards all tinkering with a different part of the systems that feed your power stats are nifty. Maybe except for AAC taking what, ~120 days reasonably optimally to max? Some challenge count limits are a bit silly. I don't think ICE is anywhere as well-developed in that regard, in part surely because of the difference in development times.

And jumping off from that, what I'd like to see for hopefully a third game would be something building off ITRTG's intricate challenges. Purely as an example, not a request, if you were to look at an Idle RPG, there's a lot of room for hooking challenges into everything, in a manner that is really straightforward. Similar to how pet growth works, if challenges increase growth rate per level, you already see a very direct connection to your speed of progress. And you could have equipment, perhaps unlocked with other challenges, that affects your stats and thus progress. Etc.
There are some neat ideas for twisting the gameplay around a little in ITRTG, and a game seriously building on that could be nice. Idle Wizard had some ideas for silly challenges (like blind challenges and what have you), but also some very poorly considered nonsense sadly.

What I'd prefer not to see is a game featuring "Builds" such as Idle Wizard or Realm Grinder. These run into the simple issue that you either play optimal builds... or slow yourself down, sometimes a lot, for no reason. And those optimal builds will get solved because a large mass of players will be smarter than any designer. Idle Wizard even has the problem of the Exorcist build being completely dominant for extremely long stretches (as of the patch I played it at).


Pricing thoughts: I would prefer a deluxe DLC on Steam of sorts, as one purchase, instead of mostly microtransactions I don't care for and consider overpriced for value. Not privy to your thoughts behind the pricing, but I enjoy ITRTG's pace and don't really want any of the big power boosts. And the lesser stuff I'd consider as a one-time "throw money at the dev" aren't things I really care for at their price point ($20 for unlimited gender/name changes?? EDIT: My bad, my memory is off, it's $10. I'd still consider that basic avatar customization that should be free.). A ten bucks, "Thank You" DLC, that does basically nothing (beyond cosmetics?) would be perfectly alright with me. And would not incentivize modifying the progression design or putting Quality of Life stuff behind a paywall. This is not a general argument against your MTX, things like the Daily Draws bonuses are fine with me. I'm specifically saying that the MTX you offer do not match what I care for.


Additional negative thoughts on ITRTG:
Your GUI Design is generally poor and could use real thought in advance with respect to how it can be expanded (instead of a weirdly-placed Pets button...). A good measure is the amount of clicks taken to accomplish a task with respect to how common it is. Even simple stuff like having a sidebar for the God Power purchase list that lets you jump to what you want, instead of scrolling, would be good. As well as further Quality of Life (QOL) aspects such as having a one-click default selection of campaigns that all available pets can go to in a priority order.
Or say, letting you hide away the Physical/Skill training tabs since I've got everything one-capped and practically only interact with those tabs to check how much longer it takes to unlock Might (maybe a single side bar symbol for which training is the last one unlocked). There are realms of improvement to be had, though with ITRTG being grown the way it was, I have some understanding for the outcome. Even a single list featuring all tabs, the way ITRTG-inspired games like NGU have, would be preferable to what we have. I am aware of keyboard shortcuts, but confess I don't remember any.
This all applies to ICE all the same, heck, ICE has even more nested menus if anything. Which is no small problem since as idle games are about optimization, you do feel a need to interact with them all.
GUI stuff is hard, no question, but you can definitely improve what you have. This can go all the way to reconsidering how systems work so they can be integrated better into the UI.

Quality of Life features are not things to be sold and unlocked, they're things that actively improve the game experience for your players and should be open for everybody. With all due respect, I think you have some plain wrong ideas of how you should go about QOL business. "Fun pain" you pay to get rid off is psychological exploitation.

Pet campaigns make you pick a specific time, with picking less being "waste" and more meaning you delay or cancel them, in addition to the max time limit. That is Facebook/mobile game behaviour conditioning / habit-forming garbage, instead of say, a continuously running system that you can stop whenever. Would also mean rebirths can just automatically end all campaigns and feed everything.
Really long actions required for things like forging work contrary to how a lot of challenges are best done (forging the second tier pot is 17 hours for me for example), and challenges are what you do to progress in the mid-/endgame. Maybe exempting them from rebirths resetting everything could be nice.



Now, I understand this is a really long post and thank you for reading this far. I hope other people will contribute their own thoughts and experiences and we can have an interesting discussion here.

[Fel]

(man it takes a while to read but it's not long just for the sake of it and it uses proper english)

For me the main problems with ICE are the hard to understand recipes and the "fights".
I did stick with it all the way to rank 50 challenges and untimate cook as well as unlocking all pets and clearing both challenges so the point of view might change because of that.
What you mentionned about many things not really meshing together is definitely not helping but for me it ended up being a minor concern.

For recipes, the ones you unlock by defeating each zone are much better than what you can make at that point (especially in the later zones when they have recipes that have way more ingredients than your current max), and the process of unlocking all ingredient is fairly long.
Earning enough medals to get your max ingredient up can also take a long time.
This leads into a situation where by the time you can finally make your own recipes that would be better than the default ones, your default ones would already have a massive amount of secrets, making them directly better.
As a result, you have to min-max your new recipes if you want them to be better, which results in most recipes being extremely similar in ingredients used.
This in turn breaks the interest the whole combination of ingredients should have.
The worst part about this is that it gets even worse as you progress, because between challengers and ultimate cooks, you can continue to improve your recipes, no matter how bad they were initially, into recipes that are many times better than anything new you could make, so there is no point in having fun making up recipes every once in a while.
For a game that revolves around those recipes and the fact that you can make your own from a large amount of ingredients, it certainly doesn't help.

The fights end up being "you leave making the dishes on auto and you click on defend and attack at the right time to reduce the amounts your enemy has but character and dish stats matter more than anything you could do so it's a mostly pointless waste of time".
The game even acknowledges that as it has a fairy that does the "defend" for you and you have an "auto fight" for the zone fights (through the afk menu) and for challengers (as long as you don't want to go up the ranks at least, unlocked by a challenge).

Fairies are a boring version of pets where you just feed them and decide on their evolution skills (and you are not going to evolve them often), they do the rest on their own.


Being a completionnist and thinking that a few updates could fix those problems I stuck at it but it ends up being fairly time consuming (challengers respawn every hour for example) while not giving you much of a choice on what to do.



For ItRtG it's very different for me because it is more or less all I ever wanted from an idle game, with how progression does have an optimal route but you have quite a few things to play with and choices to make, all of them rewarding you in some way (stupidly long rebirths, very short ones, doing challenges in a specific order or not, playing around with your clones on the various features...).
The UI is not optimal in a few places, and the dungeon feels a bit disconnected from the rest, but I never had any major complaints, unlike with all of the other idle games I tried before it (the only other that managed to keep me is NGU and let's be fair it's very inspired from ItRtG, jus with it's own take on how progress works and a lot more features that give permanent bonuses all over the place).


On the pricing I am definitely not among the majority of people, because the only way for me to spend money on a free-to-play is when I have played a lot of it without even being slowed down from not paying (and it needs to remain the same for the content that I haven't reached of course).
At that point I decide to put money into it if I feel like my experience so far was worth paying for (and if I intend to continue playing of course).
For this game, it wasn't always taunting me "you know that if you give me 50 cents you can have this right now instead of waiting 2 hours?" but the paid options are maybe just a bit too "good" to just be quality of life things.
The fridge, the improved crystal upgrade, the custom pet clones, the improved next at for challenges, crystal slots and pet token are not exactly things you can easily skip or get at a decent rate by playing normally (the first 300k pet stones take forever, and if you need to get all of your unlocks without paying even high stats pets are going to take a long time), and they are not just quality of life, but you can still do ok without paying for them.
The price being on the high side is a big plus for me, because in my mind it translates into "you can pay if you really want to, and Ryu will thank you for it as it pays for his bills, but if you don't have money to spare don't worry and just play normally".
Yes, I'm among the weird people that find the cheap but all-over-the-place micro transactions like a way to make people think "what are 50 cents even worth anyway, it's barely even money at that point, spend it 10,000 times this month as I will constantly be reminding you that you can and that it's nearly free, and you'll get a nice badge next to your name too".

(and yes, I am that guy that ends up buying enough slots in warframes to get all frames and most weapons just because I am enjoying the game itself, I know it's trying to get me to pay for it but the many hours spent without needing any of it made it feel worth it)

[Ryu82]

Thanks for your feedback.

As for ICE, the reasons for its small success I thought of was mostly the progression and also that I made too many stats for everything. This made it complicated to programm and balance and hard to see through for players. I probably made stuff in overall too complicated for what it can do. This also increased the cpu usage a lot which caused lag mostly on browsers. 30 restaurants with each 10 recipes, 5 staff and other stuff was a lot to compute and lots of different stats which interacted with each other. I should have made less stats, simpler recipes, maybe a base recipe you get which has clear and easy stats and maybe only one restaurant which you improve after every boss instead of 30 restaurants which are all similar.

Also the cooking battles can become boring after a while and the stat increase of bosses is too low and your own stats is too high for adding a "finger flick" a like like in ITRTG. That would mean you could just retire, finger flick, reach the end, retire, finger flick.... So speed running would be even more if a problem than in ITRTG. And this would make it even less fun for players.

So it wouldn't be something I could easily change as I would basically need to change half of the game to balance it better. The secrets which were pointed out from Fei is actually something I didn't think about, but adds up to that I guess. But the problem with the secrets could be easily fixed if I give a new recipe already some secrets based on how many total secrets you have. The hard to understand recipes and balancing of them is really hard to change and improve, though so I likely won't do that anymore.

Challenges and fairies are only a few and a boring version of the ITRTG ones, true. But the main reason for that is that I just didn't invest a lot of time into it to make more of them and to add more value out of them. That is mostly because the initial success wasn't good so it was hard to justify me working on it a lot more and I made dungeons for ITRTG instead. The ITRTG dungeons were probably worth it more than adding more stuff to ICE.

I didn't think the UI is as bad as Z wrote. For me the UI is clear and fits to the stuff, but if you have suggestions about how to make it better, feel free to do so. Mostly for ITRTG, though. I plan to do some UI improvements for ITRTG in the future, for ICE not sure if I want to invest too much time in it. There is too much stuff going wrong which would require too much time to fix and rebalance. So I likely keep ICE as it is and take the experience to make my next games better instead.

If you click the ? on the left you have info about shortcuts and on Android they are clickable buttons which lets you go to the specific points ingame. I guess I could also add the buttons for other platforms so you can reach most stuff with 2 clicks, or one shortcut key to open menu and one click on a button to move there. Currently it is not much different to click on a main tab, then on a different sub tab, though.

As for the pricing stuff, I won't change it now, it was like this since a long time already. Some players like it, others hate it, but if I change it, others like it and others hate it. What counts for me the most is that players buy it and I still make enough money with ITRTG to pay my monthly living cost out of it. ICE does much worse, but that is most likely because it is less popular so players spend much less time playing it.

[Fel]

Well, ICE not making much in term of money might also be because there is nothing "fun" to buy.
You can buy fairy dust which mostly gives consumables and a single must have "feed all" button that you can get for free by the time feeding multiple fairies becomes an issue (you can also indirectly buy medals because you can get them with fairy dust).
Or you can buy a starter pack that gives you things you get from fairy dust at a cheaper price but without letting you decide on what to get.

So basically there isn't anything that really improves your experience in there, nothing that would make us think "you know what, it's a bit high on the price side but I want that now and not after a month or two of feeding fairies for dust".
The only people that would spend money in ICE would be those that want to advance faster by buying medals (that portion is there in ItRtG as well with GP and pet stones, but there are other things as well for those that want other things).

But it's not like I could come up with something that would be both optionnal enough to not hinder progression while being worth grabbing for those that have a bit of money to spare for ICE (most of the "convenient" things would break the pacing way too much like the "click to beat all 30 zones right away", being able to manually target a specific rank of challengers or being able to challenge higher ranked challengers automatically to unlock higher ranks until it reaches a defeat).


And you are right, there is no "right" way to monetize, some people prefer the cheap but repetitive purchases, some prefer the higher price for a larger thing, some prefer the donations (like the dlc that does nothing mentionned by OP), some are fine with monthly subscriptions too.
Look at how Paradox does things, they continue to develop their games for years, releasing free updates a few times a year and financing it with higher priced DLCs for those that can afford to pay (basically a portion of the players pay for the development that everyone gets and they get a bit of extra content for it) and there are a whole lot of people ready to take arms against it along with other people that are fine with it (both among the ones buying and those that just buy the base game).

The worse thing would be to change (lower) the prices because it would alienate those that paid at the higher prices without necessarily bringing enough extra people to make it financially worth doing.

[Ryu82]

Yes making the prices cheaper is not a good idea. I tested this at the beginning of ITRTG a bit on Kong. Not exactly cheaper prices but you got twice the god power for the same price and made it a 2 week long event. At that time, the game only had god power purchases and not much else. But even now, god power purchases are still what makes the most money.

The result was that within this 2 weeks I made about 20%-30% more from purchases and the weeks after that much less than before, resulting in a total loss.

[calcnerdm]

I agree with the analysis of ice. I did not like it because of the recipe system myself. I think a simpler core gameplay setup that is easy to understand is a good thing to build a game around.

As far as ITRTG goes, I dissagree with the statement that in general ITRTG does not have much math optimization. Most of my play is just a big math optimization with the constraint of life. I do agree that challenges are what really makes ITRTG fun. The ITRTG GUI does need some work imo too clicking into several tabs to do a few things is not ideal but also not that bad.

I think it would be more interesting if pet camps did not have a set time but with the curent meta you would have to be careful to not make short runs overly boosted by doing that. Curently you can't speed pets. I 100% agree with forging being a bit over the top. When you can spend days to get an F t3 equipment it just feels bad. It feels like one of the mechanics I did not like in ICE but i can't put my finger on why. To this point mathing it out to get 45 sets of t3 equipment (assuming no pots, hammers and sticks) it would curently take my best BS 6.6 years of time minumum to complete (lvl 22 with a t3sss+14 hammer atm). With the curent number of pets in game to keep 18 in dungeons and 21 on camps (item+growth+food) you only have 6 pets to play with total for crafting. I think we need the update to pets to help make crafting smoother but that is mostly a patch

[Star_Guardian]

I can't play ICE for as long as I like at any given time because of massive resource drain. ITRTG is much more resource friendly and I can actually have it running in the background without affecting much if anything.

[Z]

So since you asked for suggestions for GUI changes, I'll post what comes to mind during a rebirth. Some obviously involve a lot more work than others.

In general, I'd consider a sidebar / bottombar that rolls out when you mouse over it and lets you quickly jump to a tab nifty. Everything is two clicks deep by default (One for general category, one for specific tab), but that's really just for people like me who don't learn keyboard shortcuts *cough*. Could also show some easily accessible information I guess.
Learning keyboard shortcuts would be a bit easier if say, they were shown next to each tab in the button text of said tab. See near the end for additional thoughts.

We've finally got a button that auto-assigns clones to training and monsters. While I don't agree with it being unlockable as it's a QOL feature more than anything, I understand that you need things one-capped for it to be really useful, and would likely have enough CP to get it at that point.
So why not have something like that for pet training? Click a button and on rebirth whatever you put down for clones to distribute among all pets could happen the same way. There're challenges where this is pointless, so it doesn't need to be active at all times and should be togglable.

God Power/Money purchases: These could really use a sidebar for quickly jumping to entry categories such as buying clones with GP instead of having to scroll.

Maybe a button that hides your avatar, and instead puts current stats + rebirth tab on the same tab.

Build tab I think works fine. They're different features, can't really be rolled together.
Planet could probably see a redesign to fuse UB v1 and UB v2. And if you add in say, small crystal icons and tinier bars, you could possibly even put the crystal factory stuff on the same page.
This could get small to read, so I'm uncertain if this is really sensible.
It would mean no longer having a click depth of three for the planet stuff.
Having Autofill behave in the same way as the auto-assigning from earlier, as in that it persists across rebirths and triggers once you hit the clone count threshold, could be handy.

Train: I got everything one-capped. I don't need the Physical/Skill tab beyond seeing what's currently unlocked, with the remaining clone count telling me how much longer until might. It just serves little purpose anymore outside of specific challenges. And what's currently unlocked can just be a tiny GUI entry. Perhaps even in a folding-out bar, eh.
TBS could be redesigned to be a minigame you could play on the AFKy screen. Now, I'm just a single point of data, but I don't bother playing TBS actively and just rely on the challenge bonuses to maintain a certain level.
And thus we could almost entirely empty out a main tab.

I'm wondering if Physical/Skills/Monster should basically be its own tab that you hardly interact with past a certain point. There're special purposes such as pet unlocks for which you need it, or the CBC, but I just ignore it almost all the time. Incidentally, the CBC would make it handy to have a "remove all clones" button for those tabs. Or maybe a keyboard shortcut? There's one for the other tabs already...

As for pets, beyond the above, I'd really like a "default assignment" button. You could enter a priority list of campaigns / dungeons to run with the same timer for all of them, and it would go down the list and perform what the "Auto" button does next to each campaign. And perhaps a "Finish all campaigns and feed everything" button. Or as I wrote earlier, perhaps go beyond fixed timers into a rolling state you can end whenever. This is a bit iffier for dungeons, in addition to people wanting to modify items and whatnot instead of a default, though.

Instead of something like 10 clicks each time, it'd be one. Crafting obviously can't work like this, but I'm hoping this will see some redesigning anyway, as alluded to in my first post.
Completely unrelated, but a bit of interactivity akin to those timing minigames from games about forging weapons could be fun? I always go with Stickman pets, so making stickman weapons would be silly in a good way. Perhaps decoupling it entirely from pets being present and put to work so it always runs as its own thing (but getting benefits from having the respective pet classes) could work better in general. Or fractional progress. Or resource preparations as progress, with the actual forging then being instant. I.e. you use a blacksmith pet to transform an ice cube into, uh, "tier 1 water forging power", and when you have enough points, you can make something instantly.

Other tab: The new statistics redesign is clean, easier to read and find information you want, I like it.

Challenge points being hidden behind God Power and yet another click is maybe not ideal? On the other hand you don't need it much. I guess it's possibly a discoverability problem for new players? I know it's a reasonably big button, but people are surprisingly capable of not noticing those when they're in a corner.
From a menu consistency point of view, I find it a bit odd that God Power / Real Money purchases are off to the side unlike the other main tabs, and that they only have icons.

Keyboard shortcuts addendum: Since the normal keyboard buttons aren't used apparently, why not try the following layout: Each group of tabs is its own group of keys in a row.
For example, build is Q, Create is W, Monuments is E, Div is R and Planet is T.
The row of keys below could then be for the next like Train or Fight. It should be easier to remember to press the third key in a group to enter the second tab since you see it all the time and automatically remember its position. Or you drop the key for the main tab since it just opens sub-tabs anyway.

Well, that's about what came to mind in 15 minutes, see which parts you like or consider feasible.

[Fel]

I would personally very much dislike seeing more and more "auto" things appearing (like the auto on campaigns/dungeons you mentionned), because one of the good things this game has is that it is not one of those idle games where you don't need to do anything.
Even the recent addition of farming UBs while offline (which is nice since not everyone can let the game run 24/7) is asking you for quite a few more clones since it doesn't account for crystals so it's less optimal than being online and putting just enough in defender clones.

For the training tab, the default could just be Might (because let's face it it's the tab we access the most), with a right click on the "train" button taking you to that even if you were on a different sub-tab previously (left click woud take you to the previous tab).
You personally might not need the training tab but I know I am using it fairly frequently during my rebirths to check how close/far each entry is from the next achievement to maximize multipliers before rebirthing.

For the pets I would really like a "loadout" type thing to assign pets to campaigns (with a slider for duration), but I'm not sure if I would want it to include dungeons (with a single dungeon team you will have to switch which dungeon they go into every now and then to get the materials you need for the consumables and such).
A first step was done in that direction with the prefered campaigns (both favourite and hated), if you use those properly you can use the auto selection so it's less of a problem compared to before.
The next step would be to allow multiple "hate" campaigns for those that run more than 2-3 campaigns but the system already allows you to sae a lot of clicks if you just want to send the same pets over and over.


For shortcuts, your suggestion might be because you didn't notice that most of the keyboard is already used for the skills in special fights.
It might sound like a small thing but you can continue to press the keys and continue to fight those even in other screens, which is really helpful in a few situations like needing a lot of divinity quickly and during the first phase of the game and UAC to reduce the cap much faster.
(no clue why there isn't shift+ 6 to 8 to access the other pet sub-tabs)
The shortcut could (should) be shown when mousing over each sub-tab

[Z]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Fel:

I would personally very much dislike seeing more and more "auto" things appearing (like the auto on campaigns/dungeons you mentionned), because one of the good things this game has is that it is not one of those idle games where you don't need to do anything.
Even the recent addition of farming UBs while offline (which is nice since not everyone can let the game run 24/7) is asking you for quite a few more clones since it doesn't account for crystals so it's less optimal than being online and putting just enough in defender clones.

How are mindless clicks you repeat many times a good thing? You still need to plan out what you do, you just need to do less busywork. I'm always going to run a growth campaign by default, and items, so having to fiddle with that each rebirth is simply wasting time.

Ursprungligen skrivet av Fel:

For the training tab, the default could just be Might (because let's face it it's the tab we access the most), with a right click on the "train" button taking you to that even if you were on a different sub-tab previously (left click woud take you to the previous tab).
You personally might not need the training tab but I know I am using it fairly frequently during my rebirths to check how close/far each entry is from the next achievement to maximize multipliers before rebirthing.

I didn't consider that, fair point. But having the full list doesn't preclude having a quick piece of info too. For your case, it would probably be helpful to have some indicator how far away you are? An icon to the side of the training bars or so?

Ursprungligen skrivet av Fel:

For shortcuts, your suggestion might be because you didn't notice that most of the keyboard is already used for the skills in special fights.
It might sound like a small thing but you can continue to press the keys and continue to fight those even in other screens, which is really helpful in a few situations like needing a lot of divinity quickly and during the first phase of the game and UAC to reduce the cap much faster.
(no clue why there isn't shift+ 6 to 8 to access the other pet sub-tabs)
The shortcut could (should) be shown when mousing over each sub-tab

I had no idea whatsoever those actually worked outside of the special fights page. That certainly means they're all used, a pity. Mousing over isn't the same as constantly having them in your sight as far as a training effect is concerned.

[Fel]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Z:

How are mindless clicks you repeat many times a good thing? You still need to plan out what you do, you just need to do less busywork. I'm always going to run a growth campaign by default, and items, so having to fiddle with that each rebirth is simply wasting time.

I like to see it the other way around, games that let you automate most things end up in a state where you just watch them play and just do the whole rebirth once in a while.
The main reason I picked ItRtG was exactly because there are things to do, if I wanted to just watch bars going up I would play adventure capitalist, realm grinder, whatever hero clicker is popular right now,

Obviously I am just one player among many so there might be more people wanting to just watch the game play itself compared to people that want to have a few things to do every now and then.

(it is even more the case in my current extra long rebirth where the only thing I can do is to refresh the campaigns/dungeons/crafting, refill the generator and spend afky exp while mindlessly waiting for my planet multiplier to continue to go up)

[Ryu82]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Star_Guardian:

I can't play ICE for as long as I like at any given time because of massive resource drain. ITRTG is much more resource friendly and I can actually have it running in the background without affecting much if anything.

The whole game has a bit more complicated calculations, especially if you have all 30 restaurants with 10 different recipes each and research many of them. But even then, the cpu usage shouldn't be that much more than ITRTG. For me it is only 50-70% more.
But did you try the afk mode? The afk mode in ICE uses very little ressources. Even less then the afk mode in ITRTG. For me the afk mode in ICE only uses 0-8-1% cpu while ITRTG costs still about 3% with 15 fps.


As for too much automation stuff, I agree a bit with Fel here. Some of the ITRTG players are quite active and play a lot. If I would automate too much stuff and stuff would require almost no player input, then players would talk about it less and less and the game would die much sooner imo. I also think that some requirements of planning is a good thing.

Like set a campaign for 10 hours > player comes back in 10 hours.
Have a campaign finish whenever and you get rewards independend on when you finish it > player forgets it and might not come back.

Of course that is really simple and not true for everything. If there is too much different stuff to do, it can be more bothersome, but having some stuff which requires some input once in a while is needed to keep the game alive imo.

But well I plan to do some UI optimations this year, probably at the end of the year when I add the SpaceDim tab and see what I can do here. I personally never had much issues with a bit of scrolling, but some people seem to dislike it, so adding buttons to jump to x and some of your other suggestions might be possible.

[Robstradomus]

I like the UI for ITRTGs. I still click fight to look for pets, but I understand that most people prefer it moved. I'm just an old man who doesn't like things to change once I learn them.

ICE really picks ups speed when you can fight challengers and earn secrets.
I hate to admit that I ended up playing it a lot more than I intended, but I stopped playing before I bought all of the pets. I'm still three short.

[Kitsunegari]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Robstradomus:

I like the UI for ITRTGs. I still click fight to look for pets, but I understand that most people prefer it moved. I'm just an old man who doesn't like things to change once I learn them.

ICE really picks ups speed when you can fight challengers and earn secrets.
I hate to admit that I ended up playing it a lot more than I intended, but I stopped playing before I bought all of the pets. I'm still three short.

I have the exact same habit for the pets tab. Anytime I achieve something and the menu bar changes to reflect that I'm clicking where fight > pets normally is and get confused as to why it isn't switching.

[masterjunko]

I have to agree that the UI is pretty bad for ITRTG. The logic/design could be much better. Although I cannot offer much help in terms of solution.

[muljostpho]

For pet campaigns and changing them away from the 1 hour intervals... This is probably an "easier said than done" thing, but what if they were changed to 15 minute intervals to line up with how we can handle dungeons BUT the new formulas for campaign results are heavily penalized within the first hour of a rebirth (kind of like how short dungeon runs within the first hour limit rewards by excluding events)?

Suppose that it was handled internally with pets earning some sort of "rewards token" for each minute of campaign time. (Or a more complex payout scheme that scales up with longer campaign duration.) But then the payouts could be something like 75% less for campaigns completed within the first 20 minutes, 50% less within 20-40 minutes after starting the rebirth, and 25% less within 40-60 minutes after starting the rebirth. No loss for campaigns completed after the first 60 minutes. Although you can lose your first hour's worth of these tokens any time you use the Improved Campaign Cancel to get out of a campaign earlier than what you'd sent them out for. Once you've got the "rewards tokens" paid out, the pets trade them in for the rewards, and you scale the campaign rewards with the number of tokens each pet trades in.

Hmmm... Just had a thought for a joke pet. Sanic pet. A very poorly drawn Sonic the Hedgehog, like the Sanic meme. Its special power is that it has no loss of rewards tokens in a speedrun... but all other pets with it in a campaign lose an extra 20% (so 95, 70, or 45%) from their own rewards tokens. (An intentionally pointless / worthless special power.) After evolution it naturally uses a strong "training sword" type of effect when doing short dungeon runs that end within the first 60 minutes of a rebirth.