Video Game / Gods of Incremental

Game's thumbnail by Citrine/Niko.

Incrementals aren't as great as they were before.
After THEY took everything from us, nothing was the same.
The incremental power didn't work as well. We were all doomed.
I'm going to ask you a question. What are you doing here?
There is no point of restoring the balance of incrementals.
THE DEATH REALM took everything. It's all over.

— Opening narration

Gods of Incremental is a Idle Game made in The Modding Tree by Icecreamdude released in 2023 that is a sequel to The Incremental God Tree and could be considered the third installment in a series started by The Incremental Dev Tree.

With the failure of the previous game's hero to reunite the six realms because of the path of singularity being too weak to defeat celestials, it is now your job to use various paths to defeat them, all of which affect game balance and provide new features to the Incremental layer. Along the way, you also have to restore the Prestige Tree that had its 28 layers scattered across the paths. The game has a ton of lore even when compared to the previous game which can be found in different places (cutscenes, textboxes, buyable descriptions), so expect to look carefully if you want to piece the huge new story.

The game is playable on galaxy.click and GitHub.

Narrative spoilers will be hidden on this page, but expected unmarked spoilers for TIGT!

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This game provides examples of:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Most resources don't have an increasing cost the more of them you have, but anvil requirements do go up with each one.
• Ambiguously Evil: Platonic is described as being untrustworthy as he caused all nobles to get exiled in his attempts to use multi-dimensional cubes and wanted to use weakening corruptions in the standard path, but it's not clear whether he's doing this out of ulterior motives or incompetence.
• Arc Words: "The grind is on, my friend." This line is used by multiple characters to indicate you're about to do a multi-resource grind wall.
• The Atoner: Demonin decides to help you to erase the damage he indirectly caused with the dodecadragon.
• Become a Real Boy: Ce308's goal is to grant itself and all other machines a chance to live a normal life. Doing so would require your death.
• Boring, but Practical: The first two resources you find are simple scrap metal and wires. However, they do have the ability to contain prestige energy and are invaluable in crafting space metal as well as other advanced resources.
• Boss Warning Siren: The button for sacrificing incremental power says "Don't screw this up, please!", signifying you're getting close to the battle with Ce308.
• Breaking Old Trends: The third TMT game by Icecreamdude has made some noticeable changes.
  • This is the first game without an Achievement System of any kind.
  • The game lacks any segments that would cause significant numerical inflation, with all numbers growing at a natural rate (Standard Path ends with about 1e200 points).
• Cap: Solarity owned at one time can't go above 50 at first. The Solarity Capacity buyable multiplies the cap.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each layer has its own color to help distinguish them:
  • Incremental: White (cream if Standard Path, purple if Enhance Path, dark purple if jacorbian balancing is active)
    • Prestige: Teal
    • Celestials: Black with blue streaks
    • Quirk Energy/Quirk: Dark pink
    • Hindrance: Red-brown
    • Pure Machines: Glowing yellow
    • Jacorb: Light purple
    • Sitra: Dark red
  • Meta-Prestige: Purple and hot pink
    • Realm Travel: Avocado
  • Crafting: Red and orange
  • The Hub: Light blue
    • Counting: Tropical indigo
• Color-Coded Characters: Each character has some kind of color that shows up in their speech or upgrade buttons.
  • Red Diamond: Red
  • Jacorb: Purple
  • Aarex: Light blue
  • Ce308: Light yellow
  • Artis: Reddish orange
  • Sitra: Dark red
  • Downvoid: Dark gray
  • incremental_gamer: White
  • Ducdat0507: Blue
  • Flamemaster: Hot pink
  • Thepaperpilot: Very dark gray
• Damage Over Time: Ce308's boss battle has you take more damage depending on how much pure energy you have.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to The Incremental God Tree, the game feels noticeably more serious and melancholic. It's clear that a lot hinges on the success of your mission and the characters don't want you to fail it like the previous hero, leading to several moments of tension, especially when Ce308 threatens you with red text and later decides to kill you. The game also lacks achievements and most of the humorous lore found in its predecessor.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: Ce308's speech is occasionally censored, potentially out of being programmed that way. "m*** s*****" eventually turns out to be "Meta Studio" in a moment of being spoken properly, "v***" can be figured out to be "void" based on the number of letters and previous context, but "******* *****" is anyone's guess.
• Elite Four: The four incremental nobles from The Incremental God Tree return, though we now know that Yhvr is the ranger of numbers.
• Emoticon: At the start of Ce308's pre-battle speech, it makes a sentence with "It's about time we begin >:)".
• Factor Breakdown: The Meta-Prestige layer lists every factor that affects score in some way. The ones related to specific paths and layers are written in their corresponding colors.
• Flavor Text: Almost every buyable has some text that is shown when you hover over it. Most of the info is related to the buyable and its function, but some have lore-related info.
• I'll Kill You!: In its introduction, Ce308 says it'll kill you without a second thought if you fail to give pure energy. This is notably the only piece of dialogue that is written in dark red.
• Item Crafting: The aptly-named Crafting layer has various items that have to be crafted with other resources and waiting for enough crafting power that is gained every second. Basic resources are found by getting other layers' stuff while meeting specific conditions (like accumulating prestige energy while lacking machines).
• Job System: The Incremental layer lets you choose one of several paths that provide different mechanics, upgrades, balancing alterations, and potential gains for the main game. The only way to change the path is by performing a Meta-Prestige reset.
• The Mole: As revealed in Chapter 1's ending, there is a traitor in the hero's team. Red Diamond was to focus on the quest at hand, but Aarex assumes that is something a traitor would say.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The galaxy.click community managed to turn counting into a multiplayer incremental game, with counting power and various points earned for each user.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups:
  • Once you unlock energizers, you can only have one of them active. You can switch to a different one (or none at all) upon a pure energy reset. That said, there's little point to doing so once you have passive pure energy, as it's easily the most useful.
  • Only one spell can be selected in the Magic layer to last through the entire meta-prestige run.
• My Name Is ???: A lot of the names in the logs and cutscenes are written with different amounts of question marks.
• New Game Plus: In addition to the typical reset-based progression found in The Modding Tree games, the Meta-Prestige layer has you reset the entire game to get incremental power to use for upgrades and other boosts, potentially also letting you choose a different path with perks.
• Noob Bridge: Most of the early game simple requires progressing or grinding to get past any requirements. Challenge task 2 would also seem like it'd allow players to get past it through grinding, as the goal is reaching 1e64 points without pure energy, but the best available setup would go up to about 1e44 and beating it is required to unlock any more help. Instead, the player has to use strategy by gaining that pure energy and superifying it so it drops to 0 while keeping the points. It's only the first section that requires Loophole Abuse and strategic resource management.
• Not His Sled: There are Subspace Buildings, despite them being originally impossible and the game being dumbfounded that they exist here.
• Power at a Price: There are many features that improve something while worsening something else.
  • Each path boosts something related to it while also nerfing something else. The Standard Path gives you a x1.25 multiplier to prestige points, but a /1.25 divisor to points. The Enhance Path triples Meta-Prestige time, but applies a ^0.95 power to prestige points.
  • Producing prestige energy makes you gain even more prestige points, but there's an increasingly strong point divisor as well. Then prestige machines provide an additional boost to prestige energy and prestige point gain, but make the former's downside even stronger.
  • Each energizer comes with a boost like multiplying prestige energy by 8, but also squaring its downside. The last energizer grants you an incredibly useful passive 100% pure energy gain each second, but lacks an overall strengthening or weakening effect like the others.
  • The enhance beacon lets you produce incremental power while idling instead of requiring manual resets, but it makes you lose 40% of points every second and quickly locks it at a stable amount.
  • Jacorbian balancing deducts incremental power every econd while providing jacorbian energy on each beacon fill.
• Random Drops: When a character counts, there's a chance a piece of solarity coal will show up. You can claim it by typing "-2".
• Reset Button: The game justifies the ability to full-reset it as using THE ANCIENT TEMPORAL POWER OF THE VOID to go back the point here the events of the game never happened.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Artis and Sitra are brother celestials, with the latter's name being the former's backwards.
• Shout-Out:
  • When the prestige tree was destroyed, its 28 layers are described as scattered and lost, which is mentioned to be a "celeste ost reference" underneath.
  • Aarex says that once life becomes normal again, you could watch BFDI.
  • Counting has an upgrade called "Pape" with the description "Curse you Perry the Platypus"!
• Story Breadcrumbs: Numbered logs written by Jacorb are scattered in random places in the game. A lot of information is censored in them with question marks.
• Super Mode: Whenever Thepaperpilot's counting power fills up, he turns on "NO RULES", with every character getting to act at the same time and doubling their counting power.
• Superior Successor: Compared to the previous hero who made it through the path of singularity and ended up defeated by a celestial, you manage to get through multiple paths and defeat a pseudo-celestial without much issue.
• Token Heroic Orc: The death realm is described as ruthless and its inhabitants are fought in a war, but one of its mages named Demonin is considered trustworthy.
• Warm-Up Boss: The Chapter 1 boss is Ce308, the Pseudo-Celestial. There is a slight Unexpected Gameplay Change due to needing to dodge bullets, click on green orbs, and get buyables to produce 1,000,000 true machines, but the bullet patterns' only threat is that they can be hard to predict and the battle should otherwise be straightforward, especially if you had grinded up incremental energy.
• Warp Whistle: You can turn a dimensional realm ticket into 10 dimensional realm travels, letting you go from the home base to the Hub. Returning to the base doesn't cost a use.
• What Could Have Been: In-Universe, v1.4 of Prestige Tree was meant to add Meta-Prestige and Hub layers. The real game ended at v1.3.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Once you get to Enhance Path and unlock some upgrades, you can make the game think more time is passing in meta-prestige than in real life. This is used for a score factor.

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