Electric Clicker

Electric Clicker is The Macinator's 2017 incremental about generating power, built on aldo111's open-source incremental-game-js framework: click for Joules, then work up through roughly forty generators, from a Wind Up Generator to a Large Proton Event Farm. Version 0.4.2 is the final build, and the idle-js-games mirror is its authoritative home.

What the loop feels like

You click for Joules, the Joules buy generators, and the generators generate. The first tier is a wind-up crank and the top tier is harvesting proton events at industrial scale, and the ladder between them is the whole game. That's Electric Clicker.

Then the automation compounds, the generator list stretches toward its forty entries, and the click that started everything becomes a rounding error in your output. It is a clean single-resource climb with a physics-flavoured coat of paint. That's Electric Clicker.

The systems doing the work

The named systems are the manual Joule click, the starter engine that pays for the first tier; the generator ladder, roughly forty machines from Wind Up Generator through the intermediate tiers to the Large Proton Event Farm, each automating what the last one made manual; and the exponential cost curve that spaces them out. It is a deliberately small design: one resource, one ladder, one page, and nothing hidden. The framework lineage matters too, because the game was built on aldo111's open-source incremental-game-js, which makes it a readable example of the genre for anyone curious what an incremental looks like under the hood.

Where it stumbles

The honest scale assessment: it is small. Forty generators and a single currency is an afternoon, not a hobby, and there is no prestige layer, no offline progression story and no meta to speak of. The original 2017 host was never identified and is recorded as such rather than guessed at, so the game survives by mirror rather than by home. Presentation is pure functional HTML, and the finality of version 0.4.2 means every rough edge is permanent. As a historical snapshot of the 2017 web-incremental scene, that is part of the charm; as a long-term game, it is a snack.

Playing it today

It is live at the idle-js-games mirror, verified rendered and playable, and open source on GitHub, so you can read the source of the game you are playing, which is a rare and honest pleasure. Free, browser-native, no account, no app. For bigger takes on the power-company theme, Electro Magnate adds maintenance costs and real bankruptcy risk, and Power Inc. scales the grid fantasy up properly.

The verdict

A clean, small science clicker: modest in scope, honest about its framework, and still running years after its scene moved on. A good first incremental, and a good last word on what a single ladder can do.