Post-mortem

How did it come to this again? This was supposed to be a game that could actually be finished — but alas, it was not meant to be.

It was purposefully designed to be a "stupid simple idler" game where all you have to do is watch a resource number go up and spend that gathered resource to purchase "updates" that make the number go up faster. And that’s exactly what it was — until the realization hit that nobody wants to play this. The gameplay is just too damn simple to be enjoyable.

What was it?

Cookie Clicker was the main inspiration for the idler mechanics, and Cultist Simulator was the main inspiration for the theme. The game ended up being a Lovecraftian-themed idler where the player recruits followers who generate essence, which can be spent to recruit more followers.

Analysis

On the mechanics side, only the bare minimum was implemented: tiered followers with increasing prices — no upgrades, prestiges, or other features familiar to Cookie Clicker players. On the thematic side, there's little more than the names and avatar images of followers to suggest anything sinister is happening — a far cry from the intricate lore of Cultist Simulator.

A crossroads was reached: continue developing by adding more mechanics and deepening the lore, or stop and move on.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this project was to implement a semi-generic mechanism that would function as a crafting system for something like Factorio or Conan Exiles, which could then be extracted as a Godot addon for future use.

That has been somewhat accomplished, and so it makes sense to stop development and scrap the project rather than try to force it any further. The game is just too far from having "it" — that special something that would make it enjoyable for players — and developing it no longer feels exciting.

On the positive side, the created crafting system seems pretty flexible. It consists of recipes that require quantitative input ingredients, take some simulation time to process, and result in other quantitative output ingredients.

The system still needs testing in a more demanding setup, but if all goes well, it will likely be published for anyone to use.