Advent Incremental is an Idle Game by The Paper Pilot released throughout December 2022.
With Christmas 25 days away and Santa forgetting to prepare, you're asked to get everything that is needed. Throughout the 24 in-game days, you'll have to complete a quota for a resource or something related to management to progress to the next one. Almost every day provides a new minigame where you have to earn the resource (often through manual/idle production or resetting resources from a previous one), buy upgrades, and get milestones to make things go faster, with occasional extra mechanics to add to the variety.
The game is playable here
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This game provides examples of:
- A.I.-Generated Economy: Various buyables are handled by elves, who can buy them a certain number of times per second.
- Anti-Frustration Features: As the large amount of resource types being spread across 24 layers would make them nearly impossible to keep track of, the game writes the ones you lack in multi-resource purchases in red.
- Cap:
- The workshop is initially capped at 100% construction. A few later milestones and the Expand Factory buyable let you build some more, with the eventual limit of 2400%.
- Elves' levels cap at 3, then 5. This gets uncapped on Day 23.
- Processed letters and packed presents are capped at 8e9 because that's the entirety of Earth's human population, while solved cities are capped at 5,000,000.
- Completion Meter: The top of the screen shows a meter that indicates your progress in completing the day, which can use either standard or logarithmic proportions.
- Cooldown: Several actions have cooldowns before they can be done again. The longest is easily ribbon-making, but not a lot of them are needed to finish the game.
- Experienced Protagonist: Santa chose to ask you for help since you have a known history of finding large quantities of items within a short amount of time.
- Export Save: You can press a button in the saves manager to export the 38KB+ save file and paste it into an entry field. That said, it may not be that useful since there's an option to make a new save from any in-game day.
- Factor Breakdown: Clicking the "Check Modifiers" button above the completion meter shows the resource's/action's base and its multipliers/exponents.
- New Game Plus:
- Training an elf in Day 4 requires you to reset progress from the first three days, but you get an autobuyer and a milestone to make things go a little faster.
- Decorations in Wrapping Paper and Ribbon days let the player replay existent layers with some boosts (like small fires' price increasing far slower or ^2 effective box levels). Once completed, the decoration effects are brought over to the main game.
- Play Every Day: When the game was first released, the idea was to check back each day to unlock a layer, play through its content, and then come back for the next one, imitating an advent calendar. It's possible to replicate the experience if you set the option to not ignore the month and day.
- Reset Milestones: Several days starting from Day 2 have milestones earned for reaching a certain amount of a resource or percentage completion that provide either convenient features like not resetting upgrades upon training elves, raising coal gain to the power of 1.25, or unlocking a new elf to help with dyes.
- Santa Claus: Santa Claus requires you to do tasks for him to help him get ready for Christmas.
- Verbal Backspace: Day 21's ending mentions reindeer being given their steroids, before correcting that mid-word to vitamins.
- Worth It: At the end of Day 10, you slightly regret the environmental impact caused by using oil and plastic, but ultimately decide Christmas is worth it.
