Idle, and why?... because botting is fun!

I want to share with you my motivation for making an idle game, a quickly growing genre in the past several years. These are games that do not require a lot of hands-on time to play. To me it just all comes down to one thing: progression. And steady progression tends to feel rewarding and "fun" to the player. It can be addictive.

One of my favorite idle games is not even an actual idle game. It is Diablo II that still has a community of online players. The game gets very tedious near the end of the game, to further progress and find items. That is where botting comes in, using custom scripts. Basically you design a character, play through the interesting content, and then have a program do most of the rest.

Sounds ridiculous and pointless right? But it actually is fun, to check in and find that your character mindlessly found that extremely rare item with a 0.000002% chance of dropping, while you slept through the night. You can then further refine your character by trading items online and revising the script files to improve your character, in order to reach level 99 more quickly - this takes an insane amount of actual time even for a bot.

Wait, it gets better. You can buy additional CD keys and run multiple characters at the same time. This is not my video, but it demonstrates the point:

By doing this, you get to find those extremely rare items more quickly, to arm additional characters. This way of "playing" transforms the game experience from skill to optimization strategies. Like, being a coach rather than an athlete.

Global Game Jam 2017

Global Game Jam 2017 was recently held worldwide. The event just keeps getting bigger with more cities and locations participating each successive year. NYC alone had over 500 participants hosted in the Microsoft Building in Times Square.

I showed up and collaborated with five others (four, after one had an emergency the first evening). We used the Unity engine and Discord to communicate easily and share extra files. I was really impressed by Unity's collaborate feature - built-in cloud source control.

The theme was "waves", which was open to interpretation - especially for fluent English speakers. Waves may only translate to physics based waves suggested by the keynote video, and not the additional interpretation of gestured hand waves.

This was the first game jam ever where I wrote virtually no code. I was basically an assistant artist, filling in gaps, and hunting down audio. So, needless to say, it was fairly relaxed for me, with the exception of the 36 miles I walked according to Google Fit.

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