When designing the Four Divine Abidings, one of my goals was to let players experience the game in the way they prefer. While starting mostly active, like many other games of the incremental genre, I aimed to gradually introduce idle play options that would be not much less efficient compared to active playstyle.
Some notable features I integrated:
⬖ A tool which performs most manual actions for you, when unlocked and upgraded. At higher levels it even becomes more effective than clicking.
⬖ A long offline time upgradeable up to 52 hours with fair calculations: exactly the same as the game was running.
⬖ Idle rewards bonus that specifically applies when you don’t do most of the manual actions. And this bonus applies to offline time as well!
⬖ Click cooldowns: non-stop clicking is impossible. This allows to balance the game properly for any playstyle.
⬖ Non-losable progress: the game always moves forward. There are no situations where a full game restart is a preferable option. No matter the players' choices, the progress happens, though with different pace.
Another design goal was to make active playstyle engaging. Since the game length is measured in weeks, pure clicking as the main mechanic can’t hold its place for that long. So I introduced features to keep players’ experience engaging throughout the whole game:
⬖ For the early game: 3 distinct mechanics for clicking: actual progress, energy restoration and stats boosts. A total of 9 clicking areas make the process more diverse. At the same time all of these mechanics are optional and it’s up to you when and how to engage.
⬖ For the mid and late game: 202 milestones to complete and dozens of narrated tasks to follow. All of these activities favor mindful engagement, build customization and planning. This is the spot where players who like crunching numbers can engage the most.
⬖ Several layers of intertwined game mechanics to experiment with. Through some months and many rounds of testing these are balanced to keep you trying different ones and feel rewarded most of the time.
⬖ Evolving game loops. There is no single most effective setup for the whole game. At different stages, and for different tasks, some setups and play approaches are more effective than others.
⬖ As support for the broken mouse convention: optional 2x game speed. If you really want, you can click A LOT :))
Summary: the game can be very idle and very active. One can turn it into a meditative experience with very little active engagement, or make active actions almost constantly, or a mix of both. It’s up to you to choose.