Dopamine Clicks: A Game About Watching Numbers Go Up for Absolutely No Reason

Introducing Dopamine Clicks — an idle game that knows exactly what it's doing to you, and isn't even pretending otherwise.

There's something fundamentally ridiculous about idle games.

You click a button. A number goes up. You spend that number on something that makes the number go up faster. Eventually, you automate the button clicking, removing the one thing you were actually doing.

And somehow, that's entertainment.

Not only is it entertainment, but an entire genre has been built around it. Games where the primary objective is to accumulate increasingly absurd quantities of imaginary resources, unlock upgrades, and occasionally throw all your progress away so you can start again.

I've spent more time playing these things than I'd care to admit.

So naturally, I decided to make one.

Introducing Dopamine Clicks, a game about making numbers bigger so you can make them smaller again.

What the hell is an idle game?

If you've never played an idle or incremental game, the concept is almost offensively simple.

You start with very little. Usually a button.

Clicking that button generates a resource. Maybe it's cookies, money, gold, energy, or something equally meaningless.

You spend those resources on upgrades that generate more resources. Eventually, you unlock automation, and the game starts producing resources without you needing to do much of anything.

Sounds boring, right?

Well, there's a reason games like Cookie Clicker, AdVenture Capitalist, and Universal Paperclips have found such enthusiastic audiences.

They're surprisingly good at making progress feel satisfying.

In a conventional game, you might spend an hour fighting enemies, solving puzzles, or developing the skills needed to overcome a challenge.

In an idle game, you spend an hour optimising how quickly a number increases.

The strange thing is that both can be genuinely rewarding.

Why do we enjoy this nonsense?

I've been thinking about what makes these games so appealing, and I suspect it comes down to a few very simple things.

First, there's constant progress.

Most games have moments where you're stuck. You fail a level, lose a fight, or spend twenty minutes trying to work out where you're supposed to go.

Idle games largely remove that friction.

You're almost always moving forward. Every click contributes something. Every upgrade accelerates progress. Even when you're doing absolutely nothing, the game might be accumulating resources in the background.

There's something comforting about that.

Second, numbers getting bigger feels good.

Going from producing one resource per second to ten feels like progress.

Going from ten to a thousand feels fantastic.

Going from a thousand to several trillion should, by any reasonable standard, be completely meaningless.

Yet somehow, it's even better.

The actual numbers don't matter. What matters is the acceleration, the next milestone, and the little moment of satisfaction when something that once seemed expensive suddenly becomes trivial.

Third, there's always something just around the corner.

One more upgrade.

One more multiplier.

One more achievement.

One more milestone before calling it a night.

Idle games are exceptionally good at giving you short-term goals that lead directly into other short-term goals.

And because the next reward always appears achievable, it's remarkably easy to convince yourself to stick around just a little longer.

Finally, they respect your ability to be lazy.

This might be my favourite part of the genre.

You can play actively, carefully optimising every purchase, or you can leave the thing running and come back later to discover you've become a billionaire.

There's a certain beauty in a game that rewards you for not playing it.

Of course, there's also something deeply absurd about checking in on a game to see how successfully it's been playing itself.

And that's where Dopamine Clicks comes in.

What if an idle game stopped pretending?

Most idle games wrap their mechanics around some sort of theme.

You're running a business. Building a factory. Managing a civilisation. Producing cookies on an industrial scale.

There's usually an excuse for why you're accumulating resources.

I wanted to strip that away.

In Dopamine Clicks, you're producing dopamine.

That's it.

No factories to manage. No empire to build. No heroic quest.

Just dopamine.

You click a button and receive dopamine. You spend dopamine on upgrades that help you generate more dopamine.

Eventually, you automate the whole process.

The game doesn't pretend this is meaningful. In fact, it goes out of its way to remind you how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Click a hundred times?

Congratulations. You've demonstrated persistence. Not judgement.

Unlock automation?

Fantastic. You've successfully removed yourself from the gameplay.

Spend an hour playing?

That's an hour of your life converted into imaginary numbers.

It's an idle game that understands the joke.

And you're the punchline.

The game is self-aware. Unfortunately, so are you.

The idea behind Dopamine Clicks isn't simply to make an idle game with funny upgrade names.

I want the game itself to be a parody of the systems that make incremental games so compelling.

Achievements for doing things you were going to do anyway.

Progress bars that exist solely to show you progress.

Upgrades that make numbers bigger because, apparently, they weren't big enough already.

Statistics showing exactly how much time you've invested in accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Even the interface gets involved.

Why should you automatically receive a fancy progress bar? Why not make that something you can unlock?

Why not introduce an achievement system that congratulates you for unlocking the achievement system?

Why not have an upgrade called Stronger Finger, followed eventually by Finger Replacement Surgery?

It's ridiculous.

But here's the important part: underneath all the satire, I still want it to be a genuinely good idle game.

The progression needs to feel satisfying. The upgrades need to matter. The economy needs to be interesting enough that you're making decisions rather than blindly buying whatever becomes available.

Otherwise, I'm not satirising a boring game. I've just made one.

That would be embarrassing.

Congratulations. You've completed the game. Now do it again.

Perhaps my favourite absurdity of the incremental genre is prestige.

For anyone unfamiliar, prestige is a mechanic where you voluntarily reset your progress in exchange for some permanent benefit.

You spend hours, days, or even weeks accumulating resources, upgrading systems, and building an increasingly efficient machine.

Then you deliberately destroy the whole thing.

And the game rewards you for it.

It's genuinely brilliant.

You've somehow been convinced that losing everything you've accomplished is a positive outcome.

So naturally, Dopamine Clicks embraces this wholeheartedly.

Eventually, you'll reach the final upgrade:

A Sense of Completion.

And what does this ultimate achievement give you?

The opportunity to reset everything.

In exchange, you'll receive a new currency called Regret.

Regret makes your next playthrough faster, so you can reach the same point again and throw everything away even more efficiently.

Of course, that's only the beginning.

Eventually, you'll unlock additional layers of prestige, resetting your previous resets so you can reset things you've already reset.

If that sounds completely insane, congratulations.

You understand incremental games.

The uncomfortable truth about the dopamine machine

There's another reason I find this concept interesting.

Idle games are an unusually transparent example of how feedback loops can influence our behaviour.

We like progress. We like rewards. We like seeing evidence that our actions are achieving something.

None of that is inherently bad.

But idle games take those preferences and reduce them to their most mechanical form.

Press button. Receive reward. Improve button. Repeat.

Take away the graphics, the narrative, the characters, and the challenge, and we're still perfectly happy watching a number increase.

It's fascinating.

And a little concerning.

Dopamine Clicks is intended to poke fun at that relationship between players and games, including my own willingness to spend ridiculous amounts of time optimising imaginary economies.

I'm not attempting to deliver some profound psychological revelation or scientific explanation of dopamine.

Despite the name, the game won't be measuring anyone's brain chemistry.

It's more of an observation.

We know these games are manipulating our desire for progress and reward.

We know the numbers are meaningless.

We know there's no actual achievement waiting at the end.

And we play them anyway.

Dopamine Clicks simply has the decency to admit it.

So why am I making this?

Partly because I enjoy incremental games.

Partly because I'm fascinated by their underlying economies, progression systems, and the challenge of balancing something that's theoretically endless.

And partly because the idea of building an idle game that relentlessly takes the piss out of idle games is too entertaining to ignore.

The plan is to build Dopamine Clicks for the web first, with the option of bringing it to mobile later.

I want it to start as simply as possible: one button, one number, and absolutely no explanation beyond the obvious.

From there, the game will gradually introduce automation, upgrades, achievements, increasingly absurd numbers, and multiple layers of prestige.

Ideally, the experience becomes more ridiculous the longer you play.

The challenge is making sure the comedy doesn't get in the way of the actual game.

Because there's nothing particularly clever about making a deliberately pointless game that isn't fun.

The goal is to make something where you're perfectly aware that you're wasting your time, but you're enjoying yourself enough not to care.

Coming soon: Dopamine Clicks

Dopamine Clicks is currently in development.

You can follow the project at dopamineclicks.com.

I'm aiming for a browser-first experience, with simple controls, satisfying progression, automation, offline earnings, and enough self-aware nonsense to make you question your life choices.

Whether it turns out to be a clever parody of the incremental genre or merely another example of its absurd appeal remains to be seen.

Probably both.

In the meantime, I'll be working on the economy, balancing upgrades, testing progression, and trying to create an enjoyable game about accomplishing nothing.

Which, now that I think about it, is a fairly accurate description of game development in general.

Dopamine Clicks.

Click the button. Make the number bigger. Question nothing.

Actually, question everything.

Then click the button again.