Earlier this year, the browser game Cookie Clicker swept the internet. It's an absurdly simple game: you click a giant cookie to get cookies, and then spend those cookies to get more cookies via upgrades. You quickly reach an absurd number of cookies, but there is by design no grander goal. Your entire purpose is to make more cookies. This is a game that sounds monumentally stupid on paper, almost like a parody. And yet, it's been a huge legitimate success. Many people play it and derive enjoyment from doing so, despite (or more likely because of) how silly it is. It's easy to simply write this game off as a novelty or a fluke, something that gained popularity simply through audacity that cannot be replicated.
However, if you look beneath the surface there's actually something here worth studying. At its heart, Cookie Clicker is a game about resource management. Your goal is to maximize your production of cookies, but you can spend cookies now to make more cookies in the future, and you can choose whether to spend them quickly on cheap items, or save them for something that will have a greater effect. Lots of games feature more complex versions of this same interaction, usually involving an additional variable, such as damage (do I spend 100 sun for a peashooter now, or save 200 for a repeater later?) or some other consideration (do I use star power to survive the tricky solo or on an easier section I know I can keep a good score multiplier through?).
This basic idea has applications for Sunbots. Currently, our game features only one resource: sun energy. You collect sun energy from planets, and use it to expand the sun and fight its decay (avoiding one of our game's lose states and achieving its win state) but also use it to more easily maneuver your character. A more recent feature involves using it on the planets as well, charging them to allow them to produce more energy over time. This is where Cookie Clicker comes in. Where Cookie Clicker first gets fun is the first moment you produce an 'absurd' amount of cookies. Where this point lays is different for everyone, but around 1,000,000 is a good benchmark. Progress in Cookie Clicker starts out very slowly; one cookie per click, no automatic production. Your first improvement (for your average first-time player, anyway) will be a cursor, which produces 0.1 cookies per second. From this slow production, you can build up auto-clickers, getting your automated production up to the point where you no loner have to obsessively click yourself, before you reach critical mass and revel in how many cookies you are now producing. From humble beginnings, you have wealth, an embarrassment of cookies. This is the fundamental emotional underpinning of the Cookie Clicker experience, the feeling of going from rags to riches entirely through one's own work.
This is what can be applied, not just to Sunbots, but any game about maximizing and managing resources. Starting small, making growth start slowly, but increase faster over time until you have more resources than you know what to do with; this is the core of an inherently enjoyable resource system. Cookie Clicker exemplifies it so well because it consists of the entirety of gameplay. It is a distillation of a common design element, all the more potent for the lack of filler. By looking at the fun in Cookie Clicker, we can apply a similar mentality to our burgeoning resource system. In general, all games can benefit from knowing what their individual elements contribute in a vacuum and how they best work on their own, so they might also know why and for what purpose they might be utilizing said elements.
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