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A Christmas Inevitable
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About the game
It is December 20th, 2012, and you wake up outside your house with an idea: the Mayan calendar says the world ends in five hours, and the only way out is to go back in time and stop it. The game gives you five real minutes for it, shown as a countdown in the left panel, and the story is told a line at a time in a box at the bottom of the screen.
You begin with a single button: do science "magic" tricks on the street, for a little joy each time. Joy buys cookies from the people you impressed, cookies pay for research, research opens upgrades, and each step unlocks the next resource. Soon you can hire elves to do the clicking for you, with the price of each elf going up as you hire more, and later the elves help you make presents and teach reindeer relativity and faster-than-light travel. The goal is to have 100 reindeer and 10,000 presents when the time runs out, so that you can climb into the sleigh and fly into the past.
It is a small incremental game, a genre in which numbers go up and you spend them to make them go up faster, with a sense of humour and a hard clock. If you do not finish in time, the world is doomed and the game restarts; if you do, the story gets its ending, and then the page restarts as well.
Zephi Sero made it for the 48-hour Ludum Dare 50 contest, whose theme was "Delay the inevitable". The whole game is a single web page, with no images or sounds.
Playing it here
Click Play, then press the "Begin!" button in the game. Everything is done with clicks, and the page is built for a wide window. The game does not save your progress: if you reload, you start from the beginning. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click "Do science tricks!" | earn joy |
| Click the other buttons | ask for cookies, do research, make presents and train reindeer |
| "Hire elf" buttons | automate that task; each new elf costs more |
| Tabs at the top (Home, Research) | change between the main page and the upgrades |
A few things worth knowing
Automate early. Elves work all the time, and every second you spend clicking by hand is a second they could have been saving.
Watch the per-second numbers. The counters on the left show how fast each resource is growing, and they turn green, yellow or red depending on whether the pace is enough.
Research pays off. The upgrades make each click and each elf worth more, so they are worth their cost in cookies.
Credits and licence
A Christmas Inevitable was made by Zephi Sero (Zephia-Sero) for Ludum Dare 50 and released into the public domain under the Unlicense, whose text is linked from this page. The game is served exactly as published.