I've been working on my game Factory Works Idle and just finished implementing two new playable dimensions, each with its own hostile mechanic.
Standard industrial idle. Gather, build, automate, prestige. Once you're deep enough, you unlock a mega-project called the Reality Forge that rips open rifts to two new dimensions.
Organic dimension. Buildings grow from seeds on timers instead of instant construction. Some resources decay, so hoarding doesn't work. The threat is The Reclaim: hostile flora that erodes your buildings over time. You build defenses and watch a Purity meter to keep things alive.
Pure computation dimension. Buildings are "programmed" and each has a complexity rating that eats your processing power budget. The threat is The Cascade: entropy builds up from overloaded processors, and if it hits 100% you get a Temporal Glitch that wipes ~25% of your resources and knocks building levels down.
The three dimensions feed into each other:
- Each rift produces an exotic resource needed to advance the Reality Forge
- Cross-dimensional upgrades let you spend resources from one dimension to buff buildings in another
The idea is that each dimension should have different challenges, not just a reskin of the same game. Main is classic idle, Bio-Lattice is survival/defense, Abstract Core is budget management.
I'd love to hear thoughts on this.