FLICKER
A small crystal hums under your hand. It has been waiting a long time.
FLICKER is a quiet idle game about gathering mana from a single luminous stone — and slowly discovering that the stone is gathering something from you in return. Kindle it, build the small structures that tend it while you rest, and let fragments of a story surface in their own time. There is no urgency here. The stone is patient. The game is, too.
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### What it is
- An idle/clicker in a contemplative key — closer to A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips than to most of the genre.
- Aetherpunk / magitech in tone. Imagine Hollow Knight's hush wrapped around a desk-sized fable.
- A short complete arc — about an hour to reach the first ending; longer if you walk with one of the five Patrons through their own Age.
- Saves quietly to your browser. Come back tomorrow; the stones will still be working.
### What you do
You kindle the crystal. You raise small structures that gather while you are away. You read fragments that appear in the journal.
You listen to Kyrin, who has been here longer than you. After the first Age, five Voices offer themselves as Patrons — each changes how the crystal answers, and each rewards a different way of being with the work.
### Why it might be for you
If you like games that respect your attention and your time. If you like writing more than spreadsheets. If you have ever left a tab open just to come back later. If you have ever wanted an idle game that actually says something.
### Notes
- A first run takes around an hour. Subsequent Patron Eras add roughly 30–60 minutes each, depending on how much of the writing you want to read.
- Sound is a soft chord progression; toggleable in Settings. Defaults to off on first launch — turn it on whenever you like.
- Built as a single HTML file. Plays in the browser. Save data lives in your browser; clearing it will reset the game.
### Made by
SidSummons — solo.
Feedback, bug reports, or quiet appreciations are all welcome via the comments below.
Development log
Comments
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i'd rather not have text than have the game stop me every minute with paragraphs of ai vomited garbage that holds no value at all
Thank you for your feedback. This game actually is not about just pulling of an auto-clicker and burst through this. It tells you a story, if you’d take your time to read. It was a decision that was made to slow people down and take their time. No hardcore grind.
The mana well, which should be an upgrade, is less powerful than the dripstone. That doesn't make sense at all.
I think the mana well needs a better description. I see what it's doing. It's massively increasing the amount of mana that should be the ceiling, i.e., the 'y' value.
But as I said already, your 'y' value ceiling is broken.
I got an upgrade that suddenly made the mana wells feel worth it.
It definitely needs a better description. Because it feels so broken for a very long time. I'm sure you didn't mean for this to be played with an autoclicker so I'm able to tell that a normal player will feel the game is really broken and abandon it.
Thank you for your mentions. Since this is v0.6 I have a lot to “fix”/adjust I guess. I did a lot of testing and for me the way forward was always clear. That’s why I posted it to let others experience this in their ways and give me Feedback.
I’ll collect the feedback and put it together to be considered in a future patch. :)
It looks like your mana meter has a broken ceiling. Even when you hit your max capacity (the 'y' value), the system doesn’t stop 'x' from increasing. This "over-clicking" allows you to stockpile infinite resources far beyond what the UI suggests is possible.
When combined with an auto-clicker, this completely breaks the game economy. Since you can accumulate massive amounts of mana in seconds, the cost of upgrades becomes irrelevant, allowing you to buy out the entire shop instantly. Effectively, the resource cap is purely visual and provides no actual limit on your purchasing power.
The point of the cap (y value) is as a softcap for your automatic production, as automatic production slows down significantly once you hit it, not an absolute cap for progress
Thank you for taking your time to test and give some feedbeack. :) As jonnynolegs already mentioned the bar is just a softcap so you can keep the tab open, but won’t farm this huge amounts of mana to insta-buy everything after a while. You still have 100% of your click-power tho.