Cult Inc.
Cult Inc.
Update: Save and load is in the place now!
Cult Inc. is a short incremental clicker game where you take charge of a growing cult, with one goal: bring the entire world under your influence and “purify” your followers along the way.
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Sacrifice
Greatness demands sacrifice and loyalty goes all the way. After all, what’s a cult without a little sacrifice?
Persuade
Turn visitors into devoted members, they’re only valuable once they’ve given themselves over to your cult.
Attract
Be an attractive cult that draws in curious outsiders and wandering skeptics.
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Download
Development log
- New demo with our Steam page10 days ago
Comments
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the upgrades that reduce soul costs and coin costs say "spend less coin/souls on everything" but it only applies to actions. doesnt apply to buying any of the upgrades.
Fun game. Mistake i noticed: The Meat Grinder upgrades say it sacrifices normies
Oh, thx for pointing that out, we didn't notice it lol.
(or should we add the possibility of sacrificing normies : D)
a few errors:
- the upgrade KEY_UPGRADE_SLAVE_LABOR _1 is missing its title
- the upgrade Hunger II is missing its description
yo thx for reporting that, we just fixed it and updated the builds!
Me: hey wanna join our not cult
Random guy: um...
Cult members: screams of pain
Me:
Guy:
Me:
Guy: sure
XD
great game! definitely will wishlist on steam!
thank you :)
hello,60 seconds take several minutes
do you mean the duration of some events take more than 60s to actually finish?
very fun I like it a lot!!!!
Thx : D
I've got hard locked with 1 coin, can't do anything...
A new day should bring your more normies to persuade but still we should figure out how to prevent that situation.
Thx for letting us know! you can also always reset by click the button at the top right corner
It definitely need perfomance optimization, it slows down to a crawl when there's so many mobs on the screen
Performance is definitely one of the biggest issues we’re working on right now. We’ve improved it a bit already, but we’ll probably need gameplay systems that limit how many characters appear on screen at once.
If someone was playing this game, kept it on their computer, and had to get called away for a couple of hours for dinner or some other event, they would come back to find it a completely slow mess as the influx of followers and members inevitably slowed your computer to a crawl.
I'd find some way of limiting or altering the amount of sprites on screen in case something like this happens.
Absolutely! We honestly didn’t think about that situation at all lol, but we’re currently working on new systems to better limit the amount of characters visible on screen. thank you for the feedback!
Please add the ability to scale the text and the hud I can barely see the text when sitting on my recliner with the computer streaming to the tv with my wireless keyboard and mouse and sometimes my cat Jared jumps up to the tv when something on it catches his attention so please patch that out as well thank you.
Thx for the feedback! We haven’t added proper scaling settings yet, but it’s definitely something we should support, especially for different screen setups like TVs. I’ll add this to the list
fun
Help. I wanted to scroll down, so inpressed [s] a few times spawned 100k ppl and broke the game
You’re actually the first person to discover the developer cheat key xd, we originally added it so people could preview the late game without having to grind through everything. You can hit the reset button in the top-right corner anytime to restart.
I really enjoyed this!
A few thoughts I had while playing
ty for the feedback! Did you get the thank you screen in the end? that might be a bug that the game just resets after you get all the upgrades.
We're indeed working on more visual feedback of player's input, do you have other ideas for the upgrades as well? like when sacrifice efficiency has increased, we're kinda struggling with what visual to add atm
I did not get the final thank you screen, just the sound you get from pressing the "reset" button followed by a full reset. It happened right as I clicked the very last upgrade left on my tree (I don't remember which one, sorry).
For sacrifice efficiency, maybe add some kind of torture devices popping up? Like a guillotine, iron maiden, stuff like that. I think old Catholic torture devices would fit the vibe well. You could also just upgrade the death animation to be explosions to keep it simple. Even just adding static images to the church screen would give the player a better sense of progression I think.
Thx again for the idea and the end screen was fixed right after your comment as well! Appreciate your input :)
I LOVE the art and the sound effects
thank you!!
Good concept. Needs a bit more refinement for goals, overall progression, and balance. Also would recommend limiting the maximum number of visible cult/normie entities to 1,000 or something to prevent lag. Nice work!
appreciate your feedback, we did tried limit it to 1000 but gameplay wise it doesn't always connect to your actions then, any ideas on that?
I've got an idea - maybe limit the max (wandering) Normies and Cultists to say, 20 or so. (Or maybe 100, whatever number you think is a good one)
Maybe have an extra building to increase your Normies cap - say, 2x as much as church capacities? And you build those in conjunction with churches. Can call those Houses or Shelters or something.
Show both buildings (Church / House or Shelter) on the map, with the windows slowly lighting up as they near capacity. So in canon, those extra Cultists / Normies you don't see are inside those buildings, and you greatly reduce lag.
(Alternatively, the option isn't to "build" but upgrade your Church / Shelter so it's the same building we see at the start, and it makes sense there's only one of those)
And with the lag reduced there's also the possibility of adding anything extra (demons or magic or what have you) without also killing your screen rate, if you have any such ideas for those in future.
Edit: if there's excess beyond the capacity it just doesn't show up, but yeah the gist is you cap the number of wandering units in the map by shoving the rest into those buildings.
Also, wanted to say I really appreciate the change so far to clicking on the buttons instead of the drag. The drag is fun initially but gets tiring fast with volume.
Also, while I'm at it, some suggestions for the ending!
I do like the idea of summoning a big monster at the end - maybe after reaching a certain number of cultists.
Or - and this is if you make a save function for the game - how about multiple monsters? Like, Cthulhu or something, a horned demon, an eyeball, maybe a frog for fun. Each monster summon destroys your whole church and resets everything but gives you a bonus - like maybe one monster doubles your coin income, another doubles your soul income, another doubles your church / shelter capacity, etc. Each new monster needs more cultists to summon based on how many you've already summoned (like a Prestige mechanic). Maybe there's a final boss, or your goal is just to summon all of them through several runs?
Collecting demons sounds cool damn, now it actually gives me more motivation lol.
Thank you for all the feedback btw, this is the main reason why we post our game here, to come back to your previous replies:
We actually had other protypes where the main focus is on the buildings but from our test we found out that took the pivot away from the cult a lot, therefore we're very careful with 'buildings' in general.
But getting characters inside the building sounds doable, but the problem I'm seeing right now is that when the task's target is inside the church, how do we show the visual feedback then, just light up the house? (actually that could work as well).
And yes, appreciate your appreciation on our updates! It was almost a painful process for us as dev team to make those big pivot decisions, ty again for playing and for your awesome feedback!
No problem! Thank you for your awesome work on the game!
As for visual feedback, hm. Could show the actual feedback effect from the church / house, OR yeah, light up one of the windows (it could be a single blank window that lights up with a different colour). It depends on which one looks cooler, though with multi-sacrifices / persuasions the window lighting might be more efficient for screen lag?
Also regarding it taking away from the cult: Fair enough! I mean it does look neat that there's a lot of them but it kills framerates in the later game.
From my own experience (made a game in the same genre), players cared a lot more about a smooth/lag-free gameplay experience than about visual effects or tactile-feedback, especially if they're in the end-game where numbers get huge. There are some things you can do to optimize without a hard-cap; sprite-batching is a big one.
In the end though, a cap is the most practical. One simple technique you could try is to pool the 1,000 visible-entities separately, so your actions can bind to one of them randomly and always produce a visual effect. A subtle tradeoff that still provides that visual juice! :)
You're absolutely right, I have checked our draw calls, it stays around 300 when there are thousands of characters so I think sprite batching is working correctly with Godot's internal design (and I double checked we don't have anything break the batching https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.5/tutorials/performance/batching.html).
However I do notice fps drops a lot when I instantiate new characters or destroy them, I tried object pooling already but didn't seem to improve that a lot, idk if I'm doing it correctly though.
As you might noticed I'm pretty new to some of these optimization stuff, though thx for your ideas and feedback!
help there is +6k normies AND cult members in my screen
lmao, was it lagging for you?
it was but i guess the fault is on my laptop, it is not a good one lmao
Man, I spent a lot of time in this demo here hahah super fun <3
thx for playing, any feedback that you wanna give us?
Cool game. Is it supposed to save on exit? I lost my progress on the web version.
no, I should be working on that ASAP, didn't implement the feature since the whole game takes no more than 20min, ty for playing!
Wish there was some big ritual at the end where you sacrifice everything to summon some giant monster
neat game!
that's actually a nice idea, we got a lot of complains about the ending (we don't have one lol), ty for playing it!
This is interesting, I dunno if people will be okay with the drag mechanics rather than the just clicking (or auto clicking) games to this kind.. nice to try something different though.
Hey thx for playing! Indeed we faced that problem as it gets annoying and now we're working on more automation stuff, let us know if you have any cool ideas!
Game interested me, because I like (oc)cult themes (well, in fiction). I played it and it is pretty good!
(browser) broken build. click upgrade tree icon doesn't buy upgrade. click "outsider i" for a while, and displayed cost from "FREE" => <a huge number>.
Hi! thx for the feedback, can you provide the browser you're playing on? Do you remember which upgrade was it or just for all the upgrades?
Not sure if intended but when clicking too many times on "Outsider I" price goes from free to really high, probably some sort of overflow?
yea that's a bug, however we want to remove the side bar purchase and just spawn outsiders in the map since some players complained about 'why do I have to click on it to make it my cult member after buying it'
how do i build a 2nd church
that's the feature in the first version lol, you can check it out in our dashboard page.
hope more update!