from Hacker News

Universal Paperclips

by TheLocehiliosan on 12/9/21, 12:28 PM with 82 comments

  • by d_silin on 12/11/21, 11:15 AM

    I played Universal Paperclips until the end, and the game gets more interesting at later stages. Also, this is one of the rarer occasions when playing it once is enough.

  • by z3t4 on 12/11/21, 11:13 AM

    Clicker games are basically just core essential game mechanics. If you are new to game design and programming and wish to make a game I recommend making a clicker game. When you master game design you can basically make any "game engine" fun. There are many great programmers and artists that make advanced game engines but they do not master game design.

  • by Andrew_nenakhov on 12/11/21, 3:14 PM

    I remember getting a cold introduction to Universal Paperclips just from a link in someone's Twitter, without mentioning that it is a game.

    So i opened a link an clicked. And clicked again. And again. And a few dozens clicks later I was hooked for the next 5 or 7 hours or so.

  • by dane-pgp on 12/9/21, 1:01 PM

    > Lantz enlisted fellow game designer Bennett Foddy to create a simple combat visualizer for late-game battles

    That's a name I wasn't expecting to see. (But that's not you, you're an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.)

    Anyway, I think what Universal Paperclips is missing is a pacifist mode where you manage to contain the AI and decide to only convert, say, one third of the universe into paperclips, leaving the rest (containing Earth) as some kind of cosmic nature reserve.

  • by simonh on 12/11/21, 10:39 AM

    I’d like to submit Don’t Shoot the Puppy as another interesting branch in the evolutionary tree. It takes the clicker trope and… well, hard to say anything about what it does with it without spoiling the joke.

    I came across it purely by accident with no clue it was even different. Figuring out what it was about almost broke me with laughter, but if you even have a clue going in it would probably fall flat. It’s the thought of thousands of clicker flash game players just running across this thing and trying to play it that does me in. People get _so_ angry.

  • by throwaway47292 on 12/11/21, 2:35 PM

    This is the best game ever, I played it from 10pm to 6am.. non stop to reach the end.

    It should be studied in addiction classes.

    On every level there is some mystery and you have expectations, and somehow they are always blown away on the next level and the next..

  • by whiteboardr on 12/11/21, 7:32 PM

    For me (personally) this is one of the three all-time greats - it’s one of those rare occasions leaving you magically hooked and sucked in completely.

    Only experienced this with Half-Life (ok, HL2 aswell) and Playdead’s Inside.

  • by autarch on 12/11/21, 5:23 PM

    I love Universal Paperclips. I've played through it a few times over the years.

    In fact, I'm wearing a UP t-shirt right now. I won't say what the text is, since it's a spoiler for one of the best moments in the game.

  • by svenpeters on 12/11/21, 2:56 PM

    You are a kitten in a catnip forest.

    https://kittensgame.com/web/

    With great replayability ;)

  • by mikewarot on 12/11/21, 2:36 PM

    I played Universal Paperclips all the way through 100 times, and stopped. It was interesting seeing how I could optimize my way through it. It provided a good distraction from Long Covid last year.

  • by bo1024 on 12/11/21, 12:43 PM

    Loved the philosophy and storyline in this game, along with the addictive game itself.

  • by gurjeet on 12/13/21, 3:01 AM

    Took a few hours to play the game, spread over ~24 hours. Was able to reach the end, and score 30 Septendecillion [1]; I chose not to start over. At times it felt like there was no end to this game, and the only reason I kept playing was because of the level of engagement built into the game. The player has to figure out the game mechanics at each level, and every level introduces some novelty.

    This is the first game in many years, in over a decade perhaps, that I was glued to for hours, and kept coming back to play. This left 2048, my favorite pastime until now, far behind in terms of engagement.

    I did not read the blog post because it warned of spoilers, so at different stages it took me a while to optimize the numbers to make progress.

    Loved the game, and will play it again when I have a few hours to spare. Hopefully will be better at it the next time.

    [1]: Paperclips: 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

  • by pkdpic on 12/11/21, 3:46 PM

    > “You look at a painting,” Frank Lantz told the interviewer, “and you’re just absorbed.”

    > We’re always looking. All day long we’re looking around, looking here, looking there, doing stuff. But then you stop and you look at a painting, and for a minute looking takes over. You’re no longer looking along with other things, you’re just—a hundred percent, your brain is all of sudden just a vision machine. You’re just looking at this thing. ...You fall into it, but then you also are able to lean back and think, “oh, that’s what looking is: that’s color, and shape, and form, and this is how my vision is structured... this is how looking works.”

    Great lead in, unclear if the first breakout text block is a direct quote from Lantz but I love it.

  • by jcun4128 on 12/11/21, 11:42 PM

    One of those games you get sucked into the clicking. I don't know what it is, I have this desire/fetish to see things moving/tabulate things. Paperclips is like that seeing the numbers increment.

    I was bad at this game though (not even close to that "beat paperclips in an hour" or whatever).

  • by debacle on 12/11/21, 5:48 PM

    For anyone who really loves these types of games, "Leaf Blower Revolution" on steam is truly enjoyable. It is free to play (though I did buy the $5 supporter pack myself because the dev made such an enjoyable game), and is probably 30-50 hours of various levels of memes, relaxing, and math.

  • by ctdonath on 12/11/21, 3:17 PM

    My currently addictive “parody clicker” is Egg Inc., going on for months with pathetically minimal graphics and numbers on orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.

  • by brazzy on 12/11/21, 4:57 PM

    A shame the article doesn't mention how truly poetic and philosophical the game becomes in the end.

  • by simonebrunozzi on 12/12/21, 3:49 PM

    Obligatory mention: A Dark Room [0]

    [0]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

  • by tommek4077 on 12/11/21, 2:55 PM

    Why put a all red banner with this warning on the display, you don't even need JS to read the TEXT in a blog. "This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts" Make it scroll out at least.