If you commit to playing the gacha for an extended period of time, the system of:

- daily rewards that encourages you to play for a couple minutes each day to get enough currency to get good characters from the gacha

- newer characters being better than older ones (in visual design appeal and/or power-level)

- harder end-game content requiring better rosters of characters (or more grind)

- sales on the premium currency used to pull

- the ol' sunk-cost fallacy

all combine to encourage players to spend money over time

In this regard, the game in the post obviously does not have the scope of a game that actually costs money, and doesn't have the goal of getting you to spend money, but it does cover the grind and gacha part of pulling for different rarity characters and such.

Gacha is really just a monetization approach. The mechanics that accompany it are the real draw, and you can have card games, RPGs, tactics games, action games, etc.

In fact, I would describe this as an idle game, not a gacha game. In other words, a gacha-themed Cookie Clicker reskin. The emphasis is on the gacha, but in a real gacha game, rolling gacha occupies <1% of the playtime, and this doesn't adequately capture how the gacha model intersects with real gameplay mechanics.

Gacha is not related to battle systems at all. wordpad was referencing the random awards from the battle system as another funnel.

Constantly trying to no-true-scotman what Gacha means, is not definitive or compelling.

The specific type of battle system is not inherent to a gacha, but having a gameplay system of at least moderate complexity is. The one thing that virtually all gacha games share is that they have a large number of distinct game pieces of varying rarity. This lends itself specifically to deckbuilding/teambuilding. I've played dozens of gacha games and they all have teambuilding elements. I'm sure you can find some exception that proves the rule, but it is the basis for the genre, insofar as it is one. If you wanted to actually boil a gacha game down to its abstract essence to showcase what playing a gacha game is like to someone who had never played a gacha game before, you could not possibly give them an accurate experience without it.

It's really well done, and hilarious.

What I was wondering is what is the gameplay delta between this and a real gacha game. Some games, while basically a dressed up RNG, still give heavy weight to player input and decision-making in determining the outcome, whereas some games the player input essentially serves as the trigger to simply generate the next random number.

The idea of video games being the equivalent of coin pusher arcade garbage is a relatively new one.

If games were just non-deterministic randomized RNG generators than the entire speed running community (and the associated hand-eye coordination) would be pointless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_pusher

Even many tabletop games are really just interesting ways to modify numbers.

Though of course, it's the way you manipulate the numbers that makes it fun.

So you create these gross oversimplifications as numerical values that can be discretely manipulated, then toss in some RNG to make things a bit more fun especially in games like Dungeons & Dragons.

But I've also been DM'ing a D&D campaign for years, and I've found that the farther you can get away from needing to refer to the numbers, and instead rewarding player ingenuity is both more liberating and more fun.

In real gacha, the odds of pulling something good are generally super ridiculously low.

The odds are generally so bad that they will implement a "pity" system to avoid the awful PR from the common case of spending a ton of money and getting absolute garbage.

Edit - refresh fixed it?

https://youtu.be/0obMRztklqU?si=CA5NWDE6FVSSM5Ih

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

https://youtu.be/xph_VDc78Y0

[1] https://progressquest.com/play/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips

this game has been added to incrementaldb!

    index-BwvgcC1c.js:62 Uncaught TypeError:
      C is not a function at zi (index-BwvgcC1c.js:62:150798)

    for (var oe = [], ce = 0; ce < 10; ce++)
      oe.push(C());

This is the only (very small) blemish on an otherwise fantastic game.

I know this game is a satirical sendup of gacha, but in the same way that Universal Paperclips subverted the clicker game genre and made something fantastic, I find this stripped-down gacha utterly charming. Thank you to the dev!

This game is inspiring. And reinforces my previous view that gacha is a silly genre.

Yet somehow addictive. What a let down it was when I finally managed to unlock the best number, 69, and it was just another number like the rest of them, because what else would it be?

There are layers to this parody. Love it!

In much the same way as Arcade Games are designed to counter 1-credit completion, or how console games later augmented playtime to surpass a standard weekend rental window, Gacha is something that compromises genres rather than defines one.

It really does distill the whole experience down. It’s so reductive yet somehow it makes me want to keep playing. Honestly the more I think about it the more impressive it is.

I love that you can solve math problems to unlock more rolls and that you can buy packs and then the "slicing" of the packs is very satisfying too.

That being said, I'm so plugging my proper gaming mouse (that's normally used on my gaming desktop as the elder gods intended) into my laptop to do battle as soon as i get home...

It's only rare cos they programmed the drop rate. Might as well sit rolling a dice and trying to guess the numbers.

Makes you wonder why they never added any rng into chess, ya know, to keep the player base "engaged"

arguably this is why Chess960 was created

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/

*gambling. It's been around centuries, nothing new

In genshins case, that's an alright game aside from the gacha mechanics. People like it because of the cast of characters that can only be unlocked via gambling for them. Everyone has a favorite and sees cool fanart online and then wants to have them.

Love and deepspace on the other hand, is pretty much propped up on sex appeal. Women will spend embarrassing amounts of money for media that prioritises their desires over what men think they want. I should know, I am one (despite not having played love and deepspace because of the gacha mechanics, I do like otome games)

Could use a little more color. Countdowns (like the ones for packs and events about to expire) should be red and bold when they get close to 0

Use different colors for each type of currency.

Locked battle levels should still show what the prizes will be to encourage players to unlock them early.

I've accidentally purchased packs I was trying to trash. Probably a good idea to keep that though!

Prices for packs, early refreshes/unlocks should be based on the amount of currency you currently have. Charge people more if they're hording wealth. They can afford it and you'll profit when they're hurting for currency.

The price for early refreshes/unlocks should gradually increase over time at first if they are affordable to the player to make them feel like it's costing them to wait to spend their currency and then the cost can gradually start to decrease after a certain point. This encourages players to spend fast, and can cause them to end up spending more if they strategically wait unless they are willing to wait for the entire cool down.

Having costs that are constantly fluctuating are good for getting people to play higher prices too

If two or more packs in the shop are waiting on timers and a copycat pack comes up lower the odds of the other waiting packs being good ones unless the player can't afford them. Increase the odds of good packs appearing in the shop when the player can't afford them so that they spend more money (or in this case, work harder) to get the currency they need.

Right now my maim strategy for battles was to just pump high numbers. Detect this and lower the odds of 80s/90s pack and the number of copycats when 90s packs (or anything that looks like it's being being pumped) were the last packs used.

Events should be less frequent if the player has rolls available.

Timers should be longer in general.

If you use progress bars instead of telling the player the exact number of seconds before something becomes available/unavailable you can mess with that. Slowing things down a little or speeding them up when its to your advantage. For example when you detect that player is away or too idle.

If I can, my only feedback is that the battle system is REALLY hard for me. If there were keyboard shortcuts to block I wouldn't complain, but having to mouse to block is too much. I ended optimizing by letting one on the left or right die and then praying I could block enough to kill the boss.

Really great work! Seriously love this stuff!

Keyboard buttons would be better or slightly more windup to the attacks to allow more reaction time.

But, I still found some tactics. Similar to OP, I'd send two sacrificial lambs up and focus entirely on a single decently-high (say, 70+) leveled-up number (minimum level 3). Let the other two numbers die, block on the focused number, heal as needed and hit that Divide as soon as possible. With 6 or 7 hearts I was able to finish levels 10 and 11 that way.

Or make it more predatory and up the price to a couple thousand.

I might be misremembering but your characters also had "spells," a menu for attacks but each attack was a random string of characters.

unless i just got incredibly lucky and all of the numbers I rolled were movie related and other numbers have quotes from other places

Ive added this to the HN Arcade https://hnarcade.com/games/games/number-gacha

Curtis' summary at the conclusion of the series works just as well as a chilling indictment of Gacha Gaming and the self-imposed Skinnerbox of the microtransaction era - "Although we feel we are free, in reality, we - like the politicians - have become the slaves of our own desires."

on level 10 this statement starts to feel truly evil, wish i could just use a touchscreen instead

On the topic of incremental game gacha parodies, I couldn't help but think of the recent game One Trillion Free Draws (https://duducat.moe/gacha/), the premise of which is that you need to use your draws to get upgrades to use up your 1 trillion free draws faster. I've come across a few others in my time but I don't quite recall the others.

Good job OP!

I think the Sunset Boulevard quote is used twice: for 32 and 40.

- Used hnfong's script [0] to make it easier to block

- Wrote a script to auto-heal and auto-divide (might need to be smarter about only auto-healing when hearts get low as to not use up all your hearts on healing when you need some for dividing)

- Wrote a script to power-level my cards (just rolling and occasionally solving the math, all automated)

- Wrote some code to slice open packs but never got around to writing code to click on the packs (I just did that manually)

I got up to level 31 in the fighting and leveled all my cards to 10. I'm trying not to fall into the rabbit hole of "Can I write some JS to level _and_ fight from 0 with no interaction from me?" - I mean I know it's possible, just would take some more time. I never wrote an auto-blocking code but I'm sure that would be possible, probably just need to watch for classes on the boss to indicate which direction it's attacking.

I greatly enjoyed the game in "manual" mode and in my automated mode. I love things like this (and Universal Paperclips, and Kitten's Game, etc).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191366

I thought both Factor and Divide were interesting twists to the battle system, but neither were given enough room to breathe. With different boss numbers in the early progression, Factor can be tuned to make battles winnable that otherwise aren’t. That saves Divide for later in the progression. As it is now, they both surface around the same time and crowd each other’s debut.

It’d also be good to highlight new developments by making them unlockable in the Clubs skill tree. E.g. make an unlock or unlocks for “2-star numbers auto attack”. And “Unlock Factor where factorials of boss numbers get huge stat increases.” It mostly gives you a way to spell out and educate new mechanics, but also it pads out the Clubs skill tree which is a bit thin comped to other games like this.

I hope you keep iterating on it, it’s a really good game!

Opened everything possible, I still have 3 locks to open, battle at 2001 (level 6), the attacker movement is just too fast to be able to react.

Would be probably doable by keyboard but with mouse I just closed the browser tab as with 3 more locks to go, it just doesnt make any sense to even try.

Meanwhile some things just dont let me sleep... it was more fun while decompiling games and trying to understand a logic in good ol' times...

(function() { let itbe = 99999; let rawSave = localStorage.getItem('gacha'); let decoded = atob(rawSave); let saveData = JSON.parse(decoded); saveData.clubs = itbe; saveData.spades = itbe; saveData.hearts = itbe; saveData.diamonds = itbe; let reEncoded = btoa(JSON.stringify(saveData)); localStorage.setItem('gacha', reEncoded); location.reload(); })();

The QWE is a charm shop item and at the end. Also the update made the other piece of JS below that added 1,2,3 stop working.

So I'm afraid I cheated to give myself the clubs to enable key block...

106 rolls

160 packs

1,769 numbers

36 battles

and 1 day, 20 hours, 18 minutes

You reached level 11 in battle. Try pushing yourself higher!

Some feedback:

  - The battle reward scaling falls off a cliff after the main game (after around level 10 or so).
  - There is a bug that can eat card packs if you spam click them while either a 10-pull or another card pack is finishing up (I don't remember which one it was, since it occurred sporadically).
  - 6 appears disproportionately often compared to every other number, seemingly because it is the only "common" in the first row. I'm not sure if this needs fixing.
  - In battles, if you "divide" while the boss is winding up, the animation cancels, but the attack still invisibly proceeds.