CiviClicker

Year: 2014
Genre: General
Website: http://dhmholley.co.uk/civclicker.html

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Shane:

• Platform: Browser
• Hours logged: 10.0
• Playthroughs: 1
• Rating: 6/10

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Notes and Discussions:

• Shane (3/25/2014): I love finding this kind of thing.  I played the hell out of Cookie Clicker (also by Ortiel) and Candies Box in the past.  This game is in the same mindspace.  
  
  It starts with very few options.  Summarizing a quickplay would play out about like this:
  Click the resource buttons until you can build a hut.  Once you have a hut, click more resources until you can buy a worker.  Have the worker start collecting resources for you until you can buy more huts and more workers.  Keep this up until you can unlock stuff.  Build a military when you can.  Use that military to invade other towns, gaining you more space to build and more resources.
  
  There are some added quirks.  Things like dead bodies need to be buried in graveyards.  Graveyards are expensive because they cost herbs, which are a second tier resource which cannot be directly "mined."  You have a chance of getting an herb when you get a wood.  (Skins work this way with food.  Ore works this way with stone.)  If you don't bury the dead then your workers will get sick and not produce.  If you don't have enough space to build then your people get mad and produce less of whatever function you set them to perform.  
  
  The game is one of formulaic balance.  It... feels RIGHT to me.  I can sit in front of my browser and feel really good that I throw more workers at agriculture so that I can have more workers getting other resources so that I can have more soldiers so that I can raid bigger targets to steal more land to build more houses for more workers...  You see the cycle.  It makes me feel all warm inside.  Like there is an order to the universe.  Must be how the faithful feel. 
  
  Then we get to the other reason I love these games.  They are built with JavaScript.  I have an awesome job right now where I get to break things.  All day long, I am tasked with breaking things.  Software things.  High tech things that people poured thought, time, love, and other fluids into and most of the time they are really proud of those things.  Given that most of my job involves breaking things on the internet I encounter a lot of JavaScript.  Here is the problem:  When I started this job, I knew NOTHING about JavaScript.
  
  So then I found these browser games.  I play through, learning how the developer intended it to be played.  I give it a playthrough, because I owe the creators that, then I dig in and start mucking with the numbers.  I use this to learn stuff.  And I rejoice!  Messing with these games taught me how to use the console in my browsers to track which functions call which variables and where all of this is stored.  I had to learn how the DOM was built to know what I was looking at.  In order to "cheat" I had to study and that made me powerful... or something.
  
  Uh... Moral is... if you really want to do something, come up with a really good justification.  Then do it.  And make sure you learn something.