It’s pretty normal today to have compelling games in just a web browser. There is a certain class of game that is causal, and while it may have achievements, it doesn’t require long periods of attention from you. I find these to be just the right thing to play in the background, a minute or two here and there over the day or week.
Array Game came to via waxy. This is like an earworm, but it’ll eat up your attention. If you visit the page, you’ll get a screen that looks like:
Nothing is happening until you spend the 10 points you have on a generator. The game play is very simple. Earn points, spend them on upgrades, continue.
At one point you’ll be able to sell all of your progress to get some B points. This opens up another level, for which you can slowly earn more points and eventually start earning those points directly. In the course of the game, there are upgrades which will automate some of the button clicking.
There are levels A, B, C, D, E and F. There seem to be placeholders for G and H but as far as I can tell no way to earn those. The game does get updates from time to time so maybe one day there will be more, and if you dig around you can join a Discord server to discuss it but that’s beyond my level of interest.
It took about a month of casual play for me to ‘complete’ the current version of the game. I don’t know if it was my approach, or if the game has these built into it, but there were times when the only thing to do was just wait it out (hours) while you slowly earned enough points to move to the next level. I don’t see this as a bug, but a feature – it in a way forces you to make this a more casual game vs. a furious button clicking effort.
Now this is just a simple JS based game, and it’s running entirely in your browser. You can open up the web development tooling built into your browser and go mess with the code.
Spoiler alert – here are some simple console scripts you can run to automate the button clicking. This is incomplete, but I hope it inspires you to mess around in the console. Remember, this is a game, sure you can take some short-cuts but will that ruin the fun?
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// Automate buying A things setInterval(function(){buyUpgrade(1,4);buyMaxGenerators(1,6)}, 1000) // Automate buying B things setInterval(function(){buyMaxABoosterators(); buyMaxGenerators(2,6)}, 1000) // Automate buying C things setInterval(function(){buyMaxGenerators(3,6)}, 1000) |
Shout out to Demonin and the other games and web things they’ve built, thanks for making a great time waster.