Eldritch Bakery
An idle clicker where you bake cursed pastries until reality falls apart - Unlock eldritch recipes, perform void rituals, hire otherworldly staff, and ascend through cycles of cosmic rebirth. Each cycle you grow stronger. Each cycle the void grows closer. The oven was always warm.
Early Development - This game is in its earliest stages with placeholder art (fonts and emojis standing in for the future pixel art) and rough edges. However, if you enjoy it, have ideas, or spot something weird (weirder than intended), your feedback will directly shape where it goes next. Leave a comment - the oven is listening.
Future Plans - My goal is to nail the game "feel" of a satisfying clicker game with some interesting (hopefully) flavor text first, and then to create lots of handcrafted pixel art to replace every current placeholder and add art for characters, events, game stages, as well as animations for the oven. The oven is patient.
Development log
- Fix 0.12 days ago
Comments
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I think the theming of this game is a lot of fun, but I have some problems. The scaling of this game was way too fast, the endgame challenges were trivial, the only hard ones were clicking a certain number or waiting for the corruption to fill. Speaking of corruption, I literally never had the bar fill up until I was required to do so. Clicking is almost always trivial, to the point that spending pastries on multipliers for it was a waste. The staff powers could be navigated better, I didn't figure out I even had them until a while later. I ascended far too quickly, often having a production rate that made each goal trivial, which meant all the lore sort of flashed by at once. I beat the game without ever seeing the merchant or void events, and only one echo ever showing up, so this must be adjusted. This seems like harsh criticism, but I'd rather be honest about my experience. Beyond the theming, I don't know what this game is doing to be unique with all the other idle games on here, the gameplay is vastly similar to Cookie Clicker. Give me a reason to play this game over that one.
The game is really good, but i noticed in the shortcuts it says "Space=click" so I tried pressing space, and it didn't click the cupcake. Is this a bug, or is it not finished yet? All the rest of the hotkeys work though. ( except for save, since I don't know where it would say if i saved it) Other than that it is a really good game, and i would love to see it when it is fully developed
Love the game, though I spent the last of it just waiting on the echoes to spawn.
BUG: I want to continue beyond so I can re-read the lore, but when I click it, it auto-reopens the continue beyond/restart the cycle screen within a few frames. Clicking restart the cycle brings me to the confirmation screen, but I don't want to click on confirm because I don't actually want to restart yet.
Edit: I restarted the cycle to confirm that the restart the cycle option functions properly. It does. It's only the continue beyond option that doesn't work.
A "buy all" button for upgrades would be useful in the endgame. Maybe unlocked after the 8th or so reset. It's a lot of clicking
At first I didn't once allow the corruption reach 100% until a quest required me to do so. The description of the bakery being consumed sounded like an endgame event, so I thought of it more as a timer for how long you could do each run before being required to ascend.
Also, random events happened very rarely, like, I only encountered golden cupcakes like 2 times, riddles 4 times, merchant 3, and I'm still looking for the other 12 void echoes.
Could really use a "next" button for upgrades. Getting to 25 is awkward with only a x10 and x1 button and going down the line to do that is kinda tedious.
Edit: aslo sometimes I ascend with trillions and sometimes it only gives me the 500k i upgraded for lol
Fun game, but I would like if you could disable corruption slowdown so that for The Record quest you don't have to wait forever for the corruption bar to fill.
Also after you get through a good portion of the game it becomes too easy to ascend, mostly after you gain the ability to keep a portion of your recipes on restart it becomes just ascending. I would make it harder to progress or remove the upgrade entirely because at this point the game basically ends after you get the upgrade. Also I don't know how to get void echoes unless it is from the merchant which I never saw.
Thank you so much and absolutely great points!
I am trying to come up with a more “elegant” way to make that quest less tedious, and instead of just disabling certain bonuses, which to me seems like a cheap solution, maybe I’ll just have to change the quest’s structure entirely or add something interesting to the corruption’s behavior for that specific quest.
Balancing progression is absolutely a work in progress! It’s surprisingly a complex system to nail (for me), because it can’t be linear, or the game becomes boring and predictable, can’t be purely logarithmic, because then it becomes too grindy at a certain stage, and then too boring if you try to just balance it with more bonuses, so what I’m doing is a mix of linear, logarithmic and manual settings at different stages of the game.
As far as void echoes go, are you not getting them at all? Or have you stopped getting them at a certain point?
Currently the game is set to be “completed” after achieving ascension 20
I've got everything done but not a single void echo
Thank you guys, I've found the issue and had it fixed! Some changes to the game's balance have been made as well. The new version should be compatible with your previous saves but I would recommend to save wipe through the "tools" section.
Forgot to mention but i completed Ix'thalan, the Silent Baker's trials and at the end didn't receive any pop-up or anything, not sure if that's intended.
So i ascended a few times but still nothing of "void echos", and since I'm not sure what I'm looking for, I don't know whether I'm doing something wrong. On the left side of the cupcake there is 2 symbols, an eyeball eclair and tentacle tart. Are those the void echos? Tried clicking them but nothing.
In terms of progression balancing i think the early game is decent, but all of a sudden everything starts going really fast. For me personally corruption was genuinely not a part of the game that mattered AT ALL. some of the trials i was completing immediately. I really like all the cosmic horror themed stuff plus the story, i think they're the strongest part of the game, since i was speeding through everything it game me more of a chance to read everything, which to be honest i usually skip to focus on the game.
You probably haven't gotten to them yet as void echoes are what I intended to be the "actual" little story for the game, so it's supposed to be more of a late game achievement.
Basically, once you reach Ascension 12, a small glowing "✦" symbol will start appearing somewhere on the screen, and during the latest fix I have also added a "void echo drifts..." writing under the symbol to make sure that the player understands what it is. If after achieving Ascension 12 and playing for about 5 minutes you don't see anything like that pop up, please feel free to let me know!
As far as corruption goes, surely that'll be improved as well. I wanted a somewhat active but not "too urgent" of a system (since it's an idler game after all) that would play into the idea of sacrificing small amounts of current pastry for a long-term future benefit, or rather absence of an incoming malus. But in true Lovecraftian manner, I wanted there to be a twist where sometimes corruption would actually give you bonuses, and later on in the game you would get an upgrade that makes corruption purely beneficial so it kind of enhances in my mind the feel of "giving in" to the whole dark Ascension theme. Sounds good on paper, but in practice I do understand the system is still pretty flawed!
I have left the early game almost completely unchanged with my last update, but I did tweak the later ascensions a bit (more detailed breakdown in the devlog).
Same here with the void echoes, never got a single one and the merchant never spawned...
But I had a lot of fun with this one, looks promising!
Hmm, I thought I definitely got it fixed in this version.
Will absolutely be looking more into this and thank you so much for your feedback, super happy you enjoyed it regardless!