malvasia bianca

DodecaDragons is a clicker game. Its distinctive feature compared to other such games that I’ve played is how far it leans into numerical growth; such games sometimes switch into numerical notation (1e9 instead of 1,000,000,000), but, in DodecaDragons, sometimes your exponents get large enough that the game switches over to exponential notation for those, too. (So you end up with 1ee9 instead of 1e1,000,000,000.) And, in the end game, it even triples up on exponents.

Which is a nice gimmick; still, not my favorite of these games. That’s partly because it’s a little graceless in how it handles that progress; some of the increase is decently well done, in that there are an unusual number of ways in which growth in one item scales based on the quantity of another item, and there are even loops of that, so you get nice self-reinforcing cycles that help numbers get big. But that has its limits; so, decently frequently, the game will have you struggle a bit to reach a threshold where you can purchase something, but once you’ve purchased that thing, some class of numbers magically gets multiplied by 1000, or whatever, enabling more purchases.

Another aspect of the game that felt a little off to me was its smoothness. They’d give you some new currency to earn; you’d have to deal with it manually for a while, to get a sense for it, but fairly soon, those clicks would get automated away. For example, the game has you resetting much more frequently than most other games in the genre that I’m used to; and unlocks that preserve some particular currency on reset, or unlocks that let you do mass purchase after reset, are both quite common. And, well, I feel a little funny complaining about that: doing the same thing over and over again is a little boring? But also, the choice of where to insert friction in your games is an important part of game design; I’m not sure that DodecaDragons made the right choice there.

One concrete downside of that, for me, was the tempo of the game. I was going to say that I’m used to clicker games where I get fairly soon to situations where I have to wait hours to unlock something, where leaving the game running overnight is useful, but honestly that might just be Kittens Game. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, Universal Paperclips has you buying stuff pretty often through the whole game; but that game is short (you can finish it in an afternoon), it’s very strongly themed, and even during its short length the nature of gameplay transforms noticeably. Whereas DodecaDragons has short enough loops that it’s reallly hard to do sustained work on something else with a window open on the game without have the game distract you; but, because of exponential growth, letting it just sit and run for an hour isn’t actually that much more useful than leaving it alone for three minutes. And the game still took me a week or two to finish, and it didn’t have nearly the narrative color of those other two games. (Actually, this kind of reminds me of when I stopped playing Kittens Game: I gave up when it started wanting me to click too often, because resets were having numbers get too big.)

I won’t say that I’m unhappy to have played Dodecadragons: ultimately it didn’t take that long to finish, the way exponentials on top of exponentials play out is kind of new, and I also appreciated it leaning into resets as hard as it did. And I appreciated it experimenting with visual design the way it did. But also none of those experiments had me really excited about their results…