.You start with a lemonade stand. Click it to earn one dollar per sale. Buy more lemonade stands with the proceeds. Expand into newspapers, pizza delivery and all the way up to becoming an oil baron. Hire managers to automate your facilities and upgrades such as sports pages, online ordering and combustible lemons. In addition, you can reset the game to attract angel investors that multiply your investments' profits even further.
The net effect of all the upgrading and multiplying is an Arbitrarily Large Bank Account in the millions, billions, undecillions, octovigintillions... the sky's the limit. Did we mention the game is a great way to learn the proper names of really huge numbers?
The author originally intended AdVenture Capitalist as a quick "practice" game to learn Unity programming, but it unexpectedly exploded in popularity, and has received multiple updates keeping it fresh.
It is available for free on Steam and mobile devices. The game used to be available as a web app, but it has since been made unplayable.
A sequel, AdVenture Communist was made in 2016 for both Steam and mobile devices, and it differs in gameplay by being resource-oriented with higher tier buildings that produce lower-tier ones.
Tropes:
- Achievement System: And it's not just for looks, achievements increase the profit multipliers of your businesses.
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Your first lemonade stand costs dollars. Your thousandth costs nonillions of dollars. Transactions in the the Phase 1 endgame are in trigintillions of dollars (if a billion is "2" and a trillion is "3," a trigintillion is "30").
- Ad Reward: On the mobile version of the game, you can watch an ad which doubles your income for 4 hours, with a limit of 5 times per planet per day.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: As your riches expand, your avatar dresses up in a suit and hat and becomes surrounded with the trappings of wealth.
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: How arbitrary? This article discusses how silly 2 undecillion dollars is. With enough angel investors, your first lemonade stand will be charging more than that.
- Artistic License – Economics: Core economic principles, such as supply/demand and market saturation, are glossed over, if not completely ignored.
- Awesome, but Impractical : The later investments make more money but will take too long and often outclassed by much lower investments.
- Boring, but Practical: Lower investments may not make as much money at later ones, but are quicker and can outclass the later investments.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: The game has a small cash shop to make your money accumulate faster.
- The Cameo: The "Excellent AdVenture" event has Sasha, one of the heroes from fellow Idle Game Crusaders of the Lost Idols as a manager.
- Crapsaccharine World: Despite the cheery exterior, the quality of life is called into question with hyperinflation, and some questionable enterprises on the moon and mars.
- Expansion Pack:
- You can take your financial empire to the moon upon reaching a Decillion dollars (and waiting for 200 Real Life hours.) It's mostly a reskin, but there are a few more references such as the Moon Express and the fact that the "Gravity Booth" item looks like a TARDIS, and the added wrinkle that the progression of which items are more profitable to invest in than others is very different from said progression in the Earth interface.
- And now there's Mars. Which is also basically a reskin, but with new shout-outs and a new system that allows for a X2 money multiplier every 3 hours.
- Infinite Stock For Sale: An example of Artistic License – Economics. You can never run out of product; it just keeps generating the same profit until you do something to raise the price, in which case, it continues to sell just as quickly.
- Magikarp Power:
- Originally, the Lemonade Stand is pretty much of a sucker but later becomes a cheap expert investment later on.
- It should also be noted that the Moon Shoe and Red Dirt are both weak only to get more powerful to keep up with other investments.
- New Game Plus: Angel investors provide this functionality, increasing the profits you generate in a new game. Multiple restarts are necessary to reach the game's highest echelons.
- Planet Heck: Mars has its share of allusions to Doom, including a building called "Portal to Heck".
- Play Every Day: The game gives you gold, Mega Bucks, and even a x3 multiplier as a reward every day.
- Power Creep: Each update introduces new upgrades that massively lift the game's "ceiling".
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: Some upgrades require permanently sacrificing angels. Since angel investors are your base for building your profits you (initially) need to be careful about these. Eventually, you'll have so many angels that the game won't even bother with the warning dialogue.
- Shout-Out: Now with its own page! Bordering on Reference Overdosed territory, even. Many of the upgrades, achievements, and managers reference other games, TV shows, animes and movies. To name a few, Cabe Johnson manages your lemonade stands, along with his accountant Gladys Caroline, and you can upgrade with combustible lemons. All of the car wash managers are named after characters from Breaking Bad. Most of the moon delivery-related achievements, managers and upgrades (As well as the moon delivery concept itself, for that matter) are references to Futurama.
