software is about offering solutions. video games are about offering problems
– Orteil, creator of Cookie Clicker. March 13th, 2025 on Tumblr
Here is something you should know about me: I adore Cookie Clicker, the classic incremental game that defines the genre to this day.
I love unlocking new buildings; I love rolling my cookies per second over from 9.8 million to 10.1 million. I love idly reading through the flavor texts of the upgrades I have yet to unlock, turning to those of achievements when I still don’t have enough cookies to unlock the next thing. I love doing a bit of mental arithmetic to find that I left a building neglected for too long, and that now I can reap some low-hanging fruit (though part of me is sad that I didn’t grab it beforehand, when it would have been optimal). I love re-discovering parts of the game as I start new saves months apart, each time associating another layer of nostalgia to this game that I have been playing on and off for more than a decade now.
Here is another thing you should know about me: I cannot stand playing Cookie Clicker these days. Playing it is fun and nostalgic, sure, but also an exercise in frustration.
You see, the game presents many interesting optimization puzzles covered in cookie dough. I like figuring out whether return-on-investment is a correct heuristic for purchasing buildings, or whether it should be time-to-amortize. I enjoy making colorful spreadsheets that tell me what the next purchase is. It is genuinely fun to upgrade my spreadsheet to accommodate for new kinds of upgrades (say, the lovely grandmas). I like figuring things out, and Cookie Clicker gives me many things to figure out.
But that is exactly why the game is so frustrating! When I turn back from my strategies encoded into that spreadsheet with my answer, there is no machine mouth to feed my answers into! There is no way for me to express my solution. I am left a “reverse centaur”; menially transcribing the answers from the spreadsheet into building purchases. I like figuring things out, and Cookie Clicker gives me no (automated) way to translate my understanding of its mechanics to the game.
I could script my strategies in JavaScript. In fact, there are mods for the game that automatically figure out the optimal purchase for you and even execute it. With or without that, after a few decent days of progression, Cookie Clicker becomes another game entirely, one where you must “active play”.
You see, you thought you had been playing Cookie Clicker in your first few days. But really, you were on the trial period getting hooked to the usual speed of progress in the game. Then all of a sudden, you upgrade your Wizard Towers using one of your once-a-day sugar lumps, and you get your first hit of “active play”.
“Active play” is where you execute strategies involving waiting around for golden cookies and combine them with short-lived buffs from a few spells from your Grimoire. Even with mediocre execution, such a combo can easily yield hours or days of “idle” progress in less than a minute. Active play is simply too dominant a strategy; it is essentially required to reach the late stages of the content in the game.
I’ll grant that I find active play deeply exhilarating at times; there is something about randomness that is inherently entertaining. Every few minutes you get a random drop, and if the cosmic dice roll your way, you get to bake hours worth of cookies with each click! I think Orteil has done a great job in crafting that experience. In fact, I do respect Orteil for the game he has lovingly crafted.
Alas, the kind of game I enjoy is about solving problems. There are many games out there, and a majority of them, I know I wouldn’t enjoy. That is entirely fine. In fact, I love Cookie Clicker, because it begins as the problem-solving kind of game. But I also hate Cookie Clicker, because it shifts into an entirely different kind of game midway.
I start playing Cookie Clicker from scratch at least a few times every year. Each time, I enjoy a newly-fermented joy of nostalgia and Orteil’s oh-so-delicious pixel art. Predictably, however, I get to the limits of where idle play is viable, and soon after, I am left yearning for the sweet numbers-go-up premise that I was so excited to keep optimizing for.
Like any naive engineer, when I see software that isn’t “how I’d make it”, my gears start turning. Indeed, I have been passionately thinking about how I’d go about creating my own incremental game for at least a few years now.
Thankfully, I am not naive enough to believe that having thoughts will get me anywhere. If I don’t filter my haphazard ideas through the sieve of writing, I know that all my thinking will amount to exactly nothing. That is why I am starting this blog; to have a place where I crystallize my thoughts into a tuning fork that I can use to make an incrementals that offer both problems and solutions. Hopefully.
2026-06-14