(Complete-ish Demo) Cranker: An idle-ish clicker-like

Games
1

It's an idle-ish clicker cranker game.

I'm months away from having hardware in my hands but it's entertaining enough for at least 5 minutes in the simulator. Should be simple enough to understand what's going on - get cranking!

There's probably bugs galore as this is my first playdate game + I haven't really used lua before - you've been warned :slight_smile:

cranker-demo

I'm 90% sure I've bundled/uploaded it correctly but shout if not.
Playdate-Clicker0.3.1.pdx.zip (97.8 KB)

or on Itch if you think it's worth $1

6 Likes
2

Did I break it? :smiley:
Untitled

3

haha, nice. That's basically the end state at the minute, didn't bother with a "you've won" screen.

I also realised I accidentally left my cheat buttons turned on so I've swapped out the build in the original post with an updated one.

4

I’m getting a “The bundleID field is missing from pdxinfo” error when trying to sideboard this on the play.date website.

5

Playdate-Clicker.pdx.zip (40.1 KB)

Sorry it took me months to get back to you - I now have a playdate I could fix this for. This version should work for sideloading

Edit: Added saving too :slight_smile:

2 Likes
6

Made some extra tweaks. This will probably be the last update for this, unless inspiration strikes. I think it's ~demo level of polish, and the card artwork is beautiful. Still no game over screen, but you'll know it's over when the integers overflow and you get weird minus numbers everywhere :smiley:

Changes:

  1. Sound effects for buttons and crank
  2. Option to disable auto-sleep in the system menu
  3. "Global multiplier" is now "ascension", more closely matching other clicker games. On ascension, all purchases and accrued cnks are reset and a global multiplier is increased.
  4. Average cnk is now Estimate (Est.) and will project income in the next second and minute
  5. Pricing and scaling changes - I'd recommend resetting the save data in Settings -> Games -> Cranker -> Delete Game Data to take advantage of the changes, but you should be able to continue your current game if you wish.
  6. Exceptional developer-level of artwork for the main menu

I found I had to uninstall + resinstall with this version rather than the usual update.

Playdate-Clicker0.3.1.pdx.zip (97.8 KB)
or on Itch if you think it's worth $1

3 Likes
7

Awesome, thanks! Will definitely try this out!

8

Ahoy, @slord ! Can I ask, how are you handling very large numbers? Just using straight up lua numbers and ignoring precision errors?

9

Hi! I don't handle them at all :smiley:

Yep, just lua numbers and treat the overflow as a "game over" for the sake of this demo. If I were to build on it, I'd probably do multiples of 1,000,000 + remainder as two numbers instead which would get you into the range of (2^53)millions, which I would think would be big enough for most cases!

1 Like
10

Good to know, cheers. Yeah I have a bignum class that I found online, it can be used but it's a pain. Multiplying and dividing and stuff. For now I'm not using it and just using the low precision floats of playdate's lua.

11

Hey, I'm working on an idle game of my own, but I have very little coding experience. I'm trying to teach myself but would love a template code to work off of. If you don't mind sharing your code, I'd be happy to compensate you. Let me know!