How would you scale the rewards for ‘not playing’ over time? Diminishing returns? Would it stop completely after a set amount of time? What kind of time are we talking? Hours or days?
I would love to hear some of your thoughts about this.
While I hate these games because of their addictive nature, that’s what you are going for. You want players to get into the habit of opening your game once a day. So about 24 hours should be your limit on what you can gain. The simplest way to do this is simply to have a bank with a limited storage capacity. Players have to come spend some of their coins to keep earing. You can do this in a way that it doesn’t even look like a timer counting down to their next login, even though that’s what it is.
Played Goat Evolver, Adventure Capitalist, or Epic Dragon Clicker? I’ve played a hundred incremental games cause I love them.
I recommend 6-12 hours as the max time to acrue offline in order to encourage frequent return visits. Also, remember that actively tapping SHOULD be drastically better than not playing. (PS - I released Tap Happy for both iOS/Android - it’s a decent incremental, where I tried one innovation that turned out to be quite flawed.)
I think one of the incremental games I played actually let you upgrade the offline storage, which was in keeping with the design of the rest of it. Ideally, that should be 6-24 hours max, as others have said, but let the user decide to spend in-game currency on it, rather than just flatly assigning it. It’ll fit in much better.
Another one also let me buy better offline rates as well, which also fit in.
Maybe you can have the game match the number of clicks offline? Or maybe the user can establish a rate of clicks while the game is running that they can snapshot for offline use. If the user taps 20 times in 5 seconds (or whatever the recording timeframe is), then when the game returns it’ll take the time gone and calculate 20 taps for every 5 seconds since the app was opened.