Xenobark (CONCEPT)

An idle clicker game where your goal is to grow a tree on a hostile alien world while protecting it against myriad threats to its survival.

Game Loops

1. Growth - The game contains a fairly standard core gameplay loop for an idle clicker: click the tree for a resource, use that resource to get upgrades, and use those upgrades to automate collection of that resource.  This, naturally, snowballs quickly, but the game will gain more difficult-to-automate resources into the loop. For the theming, these would be compounds a tree needs to grow and thrive.

   Comparable to games like Cookie Clicker, though that game only has one resource.

2. Defense - The alien world the game takes place on is fraught with danger, even to its flora. This loop is intermittent and involves a threat appearing (such as an herbivore that can hamper your automation by eating leaves, for instance), the player doing something to defeat that threat (either by manually repelling it or investing in some way to automatically repel it), and repairing any damage the threat may have caused.

   No real direct comparisons, but combat-type threats would be like Clicker Hero, in which the threat is defeated either by repeated clicks or by automated defenders.

3. Prestige - Even with multiple resources and the occasional setback, there comes a point where things will inevitably snowball into triviality. As such, this long-term loop serves as a "new game+" of sorts – by using it, the player is reset to the start, but with certain permanent upgrades retained and an artificial difficulty boost put in place. In the context of the theme, this would essentially be triggering the tree's reproduction and following its child seed.

   Comparable to many clicker games, such as Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist, which have such a prestige option.