The Incremental Dev Tree is an Idle Game made in The Modding Tree by Icecreamdude in 2022. You play as an incremental game developer who is coding them for a specific goal revealed later. You're going to get through layers based on other incrementals, make obscene amounts of money based on your points, join the military, take part in an ARG, and potentially even more...
In 2023, the game received a reimagining of sorts called The Incremental God Tree. The saga was continued later that year with Gods of Incremental.
It is playable on Github
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This game provides examples of:
- Achievement System: There's a list of achievements in the Hub, earned for reaching certain values for willpower, potential, Incremental Stones, points, and later some esoteric actions.
- A.I.-Generated Economy: There's a bunch of upgrades that unlock autobuyers for buyables. Some other upgrades which unlock features disables ones that are no longer useful to improve performance.
- And There Was Much Rejoicing: The Timewall Graveyard states that the timewalls will not be missed.
- Cap: Antimatter Galaxies are capped at 11 to ensure the multiplier per dimension does not go up too quickly. Some other buyables are also capped to not get too strong.
- Challenge Run: The Realm Grinder layer has a "Code the Game" challenge that square-roots Realm Power gain and tasks you with reaching 4000 Realm Power to unlock new stuff.
- Character Customization: The Profile tab in the Hub layer lets you select your name as well as favorite food, color, and activity. Progressing the ARG past a certain point requires you to use a specific name and preferences to become the guard.
- The Chosen One: As explained in Act 2, you've been chosen as the Gods' Servant and have been making idle games to power them up.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Downplayed as some layers are recognisable by their colors and the icons for them, but many of them also use different colors for menus.
- Incremental Game: White (later the node is rainbow)
- Cookie Clicker: Brown
- Life: Dark green
- Antimatter Dimensions: Lime
- Military: Sand
- Clicker Heroes: Dark blue
- Incremental Stones: Rainbow (the buttons are dark blue) (later the node is blood red)
- The Hub: Cyan
- Realm Grinder: Dark grey
- Social Credit: Red
- Ad Venture Capitalist: Light green
- Candy box!: White
- Incremental^3: Red and blue
- Cooldown: You can train in the military layer once every 10 seconds, which initially gets lessened to 8 with some badges before you get one that increases training time instead of decreasing, rendering it moot. Meanwhile, getting killed in the War benches you from fighting again for 60 seconds, which itself eventually gets fully disabled by an upgrade.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: At first, the game used the standard TMT graphic design. 1.5.1 replaced with custom CSS (more rectangular buttons, a different font, etc.).
- Export Save: There's a button that lets you copy the 29KB+ save file and another that lets you paste it in.
- Human Sacrifice: The Cookie Church tab has an upgrade sacrifice Cultists to boost Cookie Blood gain.
- In-Game Banking Services: In the Life tab, there's the option to deposit $ into the Savings Account, which boosts points.
- Improbably High I.Q.: You gain IQ as you type in words in the Intelligence Training tab. The Spelling Master II achievement requires you to reach 1e11 IQ.
- Leaked Experience: The 24 Potential milestone grants 2% of Armor EXP to pieces of armor that are not actively being given EXP.
- Ludicrous Precision: The Potential subtab in the Hub specifies how much Potential you have with six digits after the point, to show that it is increasing gradually.
- Megamix Game: Most of the layers are based on existing idle games, generally taking their elements from them while introducing new stuff every once in a while.
- Monster Compendium: Incremental^3 has a bestiary that shows available monsters, how many times you've killed each one, and the stat boost provided thanks to it.
- My Name Is ???: The player is too weak to know the name of a man who shows up in Act 3, which is why it's rendered as "?????". He says to just call him Bob.
- Permanently Missable Content: Some achievements can be missed if you don't get them while the layers are accessible. For example, "Why would anyone even do this???" requires you to get 1e10000 in the 2048 Minigame, which is removed alongside the Life layer thanks to the ARG.
- Point of No Return: Progressing through the ARG enough removes all layers dedicated to games and sidelayers, only retaining the Hub, Incremental Stones, and the Incremental^3 layer added shortly after.
- Post-End Game Content: The endgame is 1F10000 points and 27 Potential as of v2.0, but it's possible to grind to 1F100000 or more and the various systems that give the latter can easily increase it to 28. It's unlikely that you'll get every available upgrade by that point anyway.
- Procedural Generation: The Games tab in the Hub makes up game and buyable names from several premade nouns and adjectives in an in-game vocabulary.
- Schmuck Bait: The China minigame has an option to disrespect the Chinese Union, which reduces your Social Credit to 0 and provides nothing. The game even asks "Why would anyone do this?"
- Self-Deprecation: The China minigame has a bunch of references to China memes from the early 2020s, including Social Credit, Super Idol De Xiao, Fast and Furious 9 with a picture of John Xina, and Chinese Eggman. The changelog points out that it's not meant to be racist as the creator is Asian.
- Shout-Out: The Patreon tab has "SUS" written on it.
- Speedrun Reward: Once you get to the clock tab, the game shows you how fast you've gotten there. If your time played is slightly above 12 hours, you get a congratulatory message that states how you're a speedrunner. Take 2 days, and the game just states you've been playing for some time. Taking much longer than that gives you a message that's either reassuring, mocking your slow speed, or dumbfounded with how long you've been playing.
- Tech Tree: The Advanced Research tab has a tree for Basic Upgrades and Advanced Upgrades where you can unlock upgrades for Research Points and most of them require previous ones to show up.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: The Life tab affects how fast the time passes within a layer. Past a certain point, the game will starts counting exorbitant amounts of years.
