B.O.C.K. Part 1: Introduction

Egg, Inc.

Egg, Inc.¹ is an idle game by the lovely people at Auxbrain.

The conceit of this game is that you have hatcheries that spawn chickens who lay increasingly more and valuable eggs that sell for increasingly high prices. The result is a game where numbers are almost always displayed in orders of magnitude². To offer some perspective, my lifetime earnings in-game sit at a respectable 194.529 quattuorvigintillion³ bocks.

Idle games

The gameplay loop is simple: you buy upgrade your habitats, hatcheries and transportation vehicles, and buy ‘research’ that further increase your growth and earnings. You then close the game. All the counters keep running, so when you come back after a while you will have accumulated a lot of income, which you can then spend on more growth.

The game is free to play, but offers in-app purchases. I’ve spent some money on it, but nowhere near the amount I’ve spent on other games. Especially considering the amount of time I’ve spent playing it.

Contracts and communities

The game offers weekly time-limited contracts that can be completed by joining a co-op with other players. There are several communities that group people of similar ranking together. I performed well on a number of those, and this lead to me being invited to a private, invite-only Discord community in October 2015.

This community would organize co-op centrally using spreadsheets, detailing team captains, multiple scenarios for different max co-op sizes, Discord channels that would have to be co-ordinated, the works.

I asked them to please tell me this wasn’t all manual labour. It was.

I offered to automate the process. This blog series is about how I created a Discord bot to help.