Idle Rock Remover
Please try my second game, Idle Collapsing Dungeon. It was made in part with feedback from this and I think it turned out better.
This is also a small idle game in the time loop genre, more experimental.
Thanks everybody who tried Idle Rock Remover!
It wasn't very easy to understand.
If you are determined and you want some more help, here is a full spoiler guide for one way to beat it.
[Arrow keys]: Move/Dig
[G/H/F/B] : give NPC gift Gold/Heart/Fish/Bird
[space]: Interaction with the block you are standing on
[backspace]: delete action from queue
Important: Interact with the flowers, you can't progress without them.
1) Clear the grey rocks to get access to all the basic flowers. (10-15 minutes)
2) Clear the blue rock directly up from start (~5 minutes)
3) Clear the blue rock under that (~7 minutes)
4) Get the resource from under that rock and give it to the NPC to learn ROCK. Maybe try to optimize by getting fewer flowers or just use the extra mana to train STR by interacting with the NPC. Do some loops where you just do 1 training of ROCK. ~10 levels of rock should take about 20-25 minutes.
5) Stop training and use all the mana to clear the white rock. The flower under it has much more mana than the flowers before it, so get that and use it to clear the blue rock after it, then the blue rocks above and below. (~15 minutes, total play time for me is 1hr and 7 minutes so far)
6) Break the bottom 2 remaining blue rocks. (~20 minutes)
7) Break the top 2 remaining blue rocks (~20 minutes)
8) Break the last blue rock to reveal the merchant (~20 minutes)
9) Make a loop where you get all the flowers, then play with the monster, then give the heart to the merchant, then give the gold to the NPC to start learning MNST and use the rest of your mana to break the blue rock to the left of the first NPC. In about 15 minutes, the rock breaks and you should have 4 levels of MNST
10) Remake the loop so you play with both monsters and get 2 gold for the NPC, and use the rest of your mana to work on the rock above the NPC. ~30 minutes to break the third blue rock by the NPC and have have 10 levels of MNST to receive a free heart every day. Total play time 2h 52m so far.
11) Stop gathering resources for now and use all your mana to break the green rock on the right. There is a NPC under it. (~15 minutes)
12) Start getting the resources again and bring 4 gold to the NPC every loop to learn FISH. Use the rest of your mana to work on the green rock diagonally up-left of the NPC. 10 levels of fish is about 25 minutes. Now you will have a free FISH every day.
13) Trade the fish to the NPC and get all the other hearts so you can train ROCK 5 times a loop by giving hearts to the first NPC. Use the rest of the mana to work on the rock up and to the left of the NPC. Reach level 15 ROCK in ~20 minutes. Don't worry about the blue rock at about 1/3 progress.
14) Make a loop where you get all the flowers, then break the second white rock. Get the more valuable flowers there and use them to break the rocks above and below. (~25 minutes)
15) Keep going and break the top right green rock so you have access to 4 red flowers. (~30 minutes) From now on get these 4 flowers every time. This will make your loops quite a bit longer.
16) Make a loop where you get all the flowers, then play with the 3 revealed monsters so you have 1 fish and 4 hearts. Take all that and start hitting the blue rock you were working on before. It should go down fast now like 5 minutes. The resource under it will give you 2 hearts.
17) Take those resources too and use them to break the last 2 blue rocks so you can get all 10 hearts during your loops so you will have 11 total. They should take about 1 loop or 10 minutes each.
18) Having all of these resources makes the MNST skill stronger, so level that up a bit more by giving all your resources to the merchant and 12 gold to the first NPC. It should take almost all your mana. You want to be really strong right? Lets level that all the way up to 18 or 19, about 40 minutes.
19) Now get all the mana and resources so you have 11 hearts and 1 fish, and do the rock above the priest. Make sure you get the fish from the water there so you have 2 and do the green rock in the middle. Then do the green rock on the right with 3 fish. Then do the 2 rocks closest to the NPC, get those fish, and do the last green rock at the bottom. All 6 green rocks should take about 1 hour and 20 minutes so now you can have 11 fish and 11 hearts.
20) Give as much of these resources as you can to the 2nd NPC to train RSRC and FLWR at the same time. At first you wont be able to do all of them, but the skills will help you have more mana. You can have both of them at level 10 in around 40 minutes.
21) Now sell everything and give the 2nd NPC as much gold as you can to get the FISH skill close to level 20. I got mine to level 17 in about 25 minutes.
22) You will be doing a lot of damage with 11 of both resources, so take them all and start on the green rock at the top on the right and then do the other 2 and if your skills are leveled up and you have all those resources then all 3 of them should go down very quickly I did it in less than 10 minutes.
23) Destroy the yellow rock at the top. This will reveal another NPC. Give that NPC all of your hearts. You will get birds in return. And give the first NPC all the fish too, then you can give the new guy 22 hearts total to get 22 birds. Give him all the birds to level up your STAT skill. With all those birds it shouldn't take too long to level it up. It's really strong and the rest of the rocks are very tough so lets get it to level 15. It could take about an hour or less if you optimize by getting fewer flowers.
24) Now get all the resources and clear the yellow rocks. It shouldn't really be that hard now. It will reveal more flowers and trees you can collect birds from. At some point before you reach the last white rock sell all your resources and learn BIRD from the NPC at the top. You will see your stat levels rise very quickly because of the STAT skill, and I was able to clear all of the yellow rocks top to bottom in 30 minutes without the bird skill.
25) With access to all of the resources I was able to level BIRD to level 15 in 15 minutes, but I still had 5 more minutes of the loop and just wasted it on the white rock.
26) With level 15+ STAT, MNST, BIRD, and FISH, and 11 of every resource, the rest of the rocks aren't too bad. It might not seem like it at first, but your stats will go up a lot over a loop, into the thousands. You can get the other skills too if you want. The NPC under the last white rock will end your day if you interact with it but it will speed up time so it may be worth it, especially if you have some LERN skill, since you only get to train it once per loop. I cleared all the final rocks in about an hour but the TIME skill can help it go faster.
27) Spend some time training with the third NPC to get your luck stat up.
28) For your final loop, get all the mana and break all the white rocks, then sell all the resources and trade the gold for mana. This should leave you with about 140k mana. With that and 87 permanent luck stat I was able to finish the rockomancer. It might not look good at first but as your luck stat goes up the progress should overtake your mana drain. I still had 1/3 of my mana left when I did this.
Comments
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Day 337
After creating a loop that trains all skill simultaneously, I have surpassed strength level 300,000,000 and then... nothing.
I woke up again the next day, only it wasn't. The day was still 337.
Any attempt at breaking the orange rocks ended the same way. A singularity event. The energy unleashed collapsing the timeline into a black hole, erasing it like it never happened. (game crash)
In my quest to remove the final rocks, I stared too long into the abyss, and it consumed me. I have failed.
This game should be x10-x100 faster.
not understanding why uncommon rocks are not easier after training up a bunch of rock skill and strength, the ones above the first npc are taking so much time, even starting them with 3k+ motivation 20 rock skill and 30 strength. whats the point of skilling up if the rocks of same quality scale up as well?
this is super fun! great work!
I'm enjoying the game, but notably, the bird associated NPC says that you can pay gold for FISH rather than BIRD. It does give BIRD the way it's presumably supposed to, but that was confusing.
What exactly does "efficiency" mean? Does it reduce time spent per action, or motivation spent per tick? Or both?
It's both.
Let me paste the equations I didn't post them on itch yet.
The efficiency bonuses from stats multiply the costs by 1 / (1 + StatLevel / 50)
The XP bonus from permanent levels multiplies XP gain by 1 + ((Level ^ 0.8) / 5)
Most skills multiply costs by 1 / (1 + SkillLevel / 25)
MNST, FISH, and BIRD multiply the cost of removing rocks by 1 / (1 + Level*ResourceAmount / 100)
The STAT skill adds a flat 4% of your permanent level to your current level for each STAT level.
By default you get 100 skill XP per learn. The XP cost starts at 30-90 and goes up by the original cost every level. LERN gives 4 extra points per level.
It doesn't sound like the bonuses reduce time taken. It also doesn't feel like it.
Yeah that's fair. If you don't find the power growth in it satisfying then you won't be the only one.
I don't know if it will help at all but I can explain more about what is going on at least. MTVN is spent at a constant rate so reducing costs does make it go faster. For the stats the permanent level is just a XP bonus for the daily level until you get the STAT skill, and at first the loops are short so the daily level won't go very high and it won't be very noticable, but when you get access to more flowers and can have longer days then you can see those stats build up and your speed increase more over the day.
That was the idea anyway. If I make something else it will be easier to understand and feel progress.
It reminds me of Cavernous, but not as fleshed out. Does it save progress?
Thanks for the fun game. I love action queue management. Here is some though I have when I play the game:
1. In my opinion, the action queue could have a textbox that the player can modify. When a new day begin, the game should be able to read the textbox just like it read the keyboard input. It is easier to control the game.
2. Currently, the game control description are in two different info pages and the comment setion. New players are confuse because we don't have simple list like this:
[Arrow keys]: Move/Dig
[G/H/F/B] : give NPC gift Gold/Heart/Fish/Bird
[space]: Interaction with the block you are standing on
[backspace]: delete action from queue
In my opinion, this list would be much more valuable then a offical walkthough
Thanks I've added your instructions. You are right people have been getting stuck on that.
how to collect the flowers
space
Continuing to grind a little bit past endgame is pretty fun! Amusingly, I think the endgame would be a bit better without the time mage; it took like 3 minutes to get to this point past when I actually won, and with numbers going up as fast as they do it's perfectly fine if you have to do it 10 times slower while also controlling how many mana flowers you pick up (as you do in the loops before you're strong enough to visit the time mage). At these levels of stats, the game lags too much to keep playing, but that's not really a surprise.
Wow yes that was totally untested territory. Thanks for sharing!
TBH I'm not sure how much potential this idea really has. I could try to smooth out the progression curve by making a larger world, then what, you end up doing 200 movement commands to follow a giant path of flowers? In another game you can just add a gather command and set the number of times and at this point I'm thinking that was better.
I think the size of the world is fine as is. The progression curve doesn't seem like it'd be resolved with a larger world; it feels like basic numerical tweaks would be enough. (Mostly doing something to make the earlygame faster (faster stat level gain?) but nerfing the lategame skills (LERN/STAT/TIME) and/or making them available earlier.)
Well the part that supposedly drags on for so long is like 1 hour to get rid of all the blue rocks in the middle. It's actually kind of hard for me to empathize with that since 1 hour in the other game is like, 6 soulstones to add to my 1.2k and half a percent towards talking to the witch. If that's really so long, and I make it even shorter than that then there's barely any of the game left after that, and the whole thing will be over in like 3 hours or the wall will feel even bigger and more sudden.
The problem comes in sooner than the blue rocks. The problem is the lack of choice in the earlygame.
Not having meaningful choices is the *sole* reason why your earlygame is boring, and that's easily resolved by adding new earlygame content, making the existing earlygame content more interesting, or quickening the earlygame to get to the interesting non-earlygame parts faster. Your lategame is not boring, and it would not be boring even if significantly slower than it is now, because you actually have meaningful decisions to make in lategame. Interesting parts of a game are allowed to be slow (and I believe they actually should be), but it is a problem if uninteresting parts are.
You can get reasonable choice in IL pretty early - do you want to do wanders, short quests, long quests, or combat/magic training? You know exactly what the reward for all of those are and can choose between them fine, and all of them have their own merits for precisely what they'll do and how it benefits you to do these grinds. In your game, you... can break rock A, or rock B, or rock C, or rock D, and they're all the same difficulty (or if they're not, you have no way of knowing that, so you can't use that to judge your choices) and you already know they're all going to give the exact same reward so that doesn't even count as a choice. And while you do it, none of this actually feels like it's speeding anything up because all the numbers are hidden and the difference is minuscule anyway.
It would be fine to make your game one that expects long-term idling. If you want, you don't actually need to speed up the earlygame (although you should probably add to INFO that you can and should prepare a loop that walks through a large amount of rocks in sequence so that you can AFK break them all, in that case); it's just that that particular gameplay loop is still less interesting than the rest of the game. If you do want to make long-term games, you should look into implementing the QoL features that games like Idle Loops contain, such as the ability to edit your next loop while the current one is running, to make it more about preparing your loops ahead of time instead of the game's current implied expectation of active play and making almost every loop different from the last.
I dont have arrow keys, so pretty much unplayable. GGs
Cool game! The beginning feels really bland because of how simple it is, but once you get into the thick of things it starts to feel really interesting. I had the most trouble near the start before I learned how the game mechanics worked.
Explicit feature request: Pause after loop. I don't want to reset the full queue since the start of the queue is fine, but you can't edit during the loop so I end up needing to delete the last action of the queue to make sure I can be watching the game at the moment the action ends.
I think the game would benefit greatly from showing more hard numbers, most importantly knowing how much each thing actually speeds things up by (I know I can get to level 20 by training on the NPC, but how much better is being level 20 compared to level 10? How much does having one extra LOVE actually help?) but also smaller things like an actual value for the amount of MTVN performing an action will take (you can estimate this by trying the action once, but it's hard to remember all the numbers) and the amount of actions needed to destroy a rock (you can estimate this by hitting it once)
Awesome, my first positive feedback. Thanks for this!
I would like to make something with better queue management.
Very promising game. I agree with everything the above user said, had the exact same thoughts. This comment is going to be me largely repeating them in my own words (started writing prior to reading theirs)
For the early game, the things that I initially struggled with understanding were needing to interact with the flowers to recharge (I thought the flowers were water drops), confusion over why symbols were appearing in the queue for WAS keys but not D (At times when tabbing back to the game, I was trying to do WASD to move and didn't fully understand the resources yet), and confusion over where the NPCs mentioned in the guide were (didn't realize until the uncommon rocks that there were things other than flowers "under" the rocks; flowers under rocks was intuitive enough, people I didn't expect)
Pause before loop is the most needed QOL addition, and reworking queue management in general is probably second.
"Exposing more information" is the biggest thing the game needs though, period; not in a QOL way, but in terms of being able to enjoy and know how to properly play the game on a fundamental level. I want to be able to mouse over my stats and resources (STR, ROCK, LOVE, etc) and see how much exp it'll cost to level up, what multipliers they're applying to things, how those multipliers are calculated, etc, and hover over tasks to see their costs.
It's hard to make informed decisions about things without that information, for example:
I haven't read the guide you wrote in the description, but I imagine some of the game is easier for you to understand what the best course of action is, primarily because you know that underlying math. If we knew it too, we'd be able to figure out the optimization puzzles much easier, without needing guides or tips.
im pretty early so maybe thats contributing... but i feel like there is a huge jump between the common rock and the uncommon rocks? it feels like it will be completely impossible to clear some of these rocks in a timely manner so it gets boring insanely fast. maybe i missed something somewhere? ive been interacting with the flowers and i finally got to the npc right after the 1st white rock but the game so far feels very time consuming. it definitely has potential though
Well there is a NPC under the blue rock straight up from the start it can teach you a skill that will let you remove the rocks faster.
I did aim for it to take about a day or two to finish.
I think you are right about a sense of progress though, it would probably work better in a bigger world where it can ramp up more slowly.
I'm.... not convinced about that skill trainer. I found him, I set it up to loop on him, and left it for most of the afternoon. Got up to something like 18 strength and I don't think I'm doing any more damage to rocks than I was when I started (I say something like 18 because I don't remember, but by the time I broke the white rock I'd looped enough times more that my strength was 21). I'm not even sure I'm doing AS MUCH damage as when I started. But each full action bar adds maybe two pixels to the progress bar.
I also have no idea what the different impacts of strength vs "today" strength are - but "today" strength always starts out at 0 - not sure if they're supposed to be added together, or how I'm supposed to understand those stats.
And, if I'm being honest, the looping mechanic doesn't really seem to add anything to the game. It just makes it have to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, which granted is kind of the definition of idle games - a repeating game loop. But the "time loop" mechanic (which isn't really even a time loop for the most part - even the tips largely dismiss it by describing it as simply "not remembering" the previous day... which is funny given that you exactly repeat the previous day - except where you've actually made changes that aren't reset.. but I digress) doesn't even provide that "numbers go up" psychological reward loop/dopamine hit that idle games normally would. You just pick the next rockyou want to beat on, and then watch the same loop happen over and over like 100 times until the rock is smashed. I think it's an interesting mechanic, I'm just not sure this gameplay loop realizes its potential.
Ok I hear you and I think you are right. It's not obvious enough at all how the stats work.
If you want to keep trying, the way to benefit from the skill trainer is to uncover one of the nearby blue rocks (the one below him is easiest) and you can get a resource to bring him from there, that will teach you a skill that will give you a bigger immediate benefit.
As for the stats, the permanent one is just an XP multiplier for the stat. The daily level is the only one that impacts your power level (until you get the STAT skill). So, the permanent level makes a bigger difference in longer loops which give the stat more time to build up.
I'm not telling you to accept any of that as a solution, I would definitely do some things differently now.