A text-based incremental game

As of Oct 2025, the game is still in early development, although an alpha version is available.

Small Gods is a browser-based, text-driven, incremental game inspired by Terry Pratchett’s book of the same name, as well as other browser games like Kitten’s Game and Fallen London. Designed and developed as a personal project, it combines interactive storytelling with incremental game mechanics to create a unique gameplay experience.

I have been talking about making an incremental game with one of my friends for a few years now, and if I’m being honest, this is probably my fourth or fifth attempt. The both of us have started and abandoned multiple projects, for various reasons. I’ve tried various tech stacks and game designs, but eventually settled on using React to create a browser game instead of a game engine like Godot because I don’t want to suffer too much scope creep, which I believe contributed to burnout in some of my earlier projects. This time, I aim to see it through to the end, or at least to a playable state.

The project is written primarily in Typescript and uses the Next.js framework for React. Given that it is a browser based game, it could have been sufficient to use vanilla React and a compiler like Vite, but I chose to use Next.js in case I wanted to have some API routes. Additionally, I might build a landing page or a wiki in the future, and Next.js would make that easier. In the end, I think Next.js was a fine choice. It’s certainly much easier and simpler than configuring Webpack, the de-facto standard compiler back in React’s early days.