Idle Mage Life
Forge Your Arcane Destiny in a World Where Magic is Currency and Power is Forged in Flames
Begin as a Soul Scavenger scraping for copper in alleyways where magic leaks like poison. But with each incantation muttered and relic forged, ascend through interwoven paths of power—where careers are rituals, skills bend reality, and death is merely the first step toward godhood.
△ PATHS OF ASCENSION: From Flesh to Legend
- Common Work
Start as a Soul Scavenger, then rise to Runeshaper or Auction house owner. Tend crops, mine ore, or barter—but know: gold is fleeting where magic reigns. - Gang Might
Start as a Alley Sprout, then rise to Phantom Enforcer or Ghost Sovereign. Pick pockets, run protection rackets, or smuggle contraband, but know: in the shadows, loyalty is bought with blood. - Magic Learning
Begin as a Student, evolve into a Supreme Sorcerer. Master Time Control to twist hours into seconds. - Magic Business
Harvest chaos as a Herb Finder or rule as Magic Council Archon. Let Mana Stability turn potions into empires.
✧ SKILLS: Sculpt Reality, Shatter Limits
- Fundamental:
- Discipline (All XP)
- Patience (Happiness)
- Combat:
- Battle Tactics (Military XP)
- Trading:
- Bargaining (Reduced Expenses)
- Magic:
- Holy body (Longevity)
- Laws Manipulation (Time Warping)
♻ THE GRAND TRANSMUTATION: Rebirth as Revolution
When age cracks your bones and magic devours your flesh:
- Reverse time and comeback stronger.
- Each return makes you stronger and speeds up the game.
Will you die a beggar—or live forever as magic incarnate?
discord: https://discord.gg/h92MEmsDNX
Game based on: Progress Knight
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Development log
- Alpha 0.117 days ago
Comments
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Is there any plans to add an Android ver
Hey, found this from the PK discord. Loving it so far! It's definitely similar to PK but it has it's own "feel". I'm still early game, but I'm eager to see how it goes moving forward.
Like the game. Love the feel. Innovative.
A couple of notes mostly QoL or cleanup.
You have 2 main sections labeled Skills (Skills and Skill Tree). Maybe rename one to something synonymous like Affinities.
The ability to wipe a save is useful. Might consider adding an option in Settings or at the initial Load screen.
Also, why does the load screen say “Join Discord” under Income?
Maybe change based on PK to inspired or influenced by PK. It just reads better in my mind.
On top of wiping saves, being able to export/load saves would also be great.
Alright, the 6/19 build feels like a separate game from progress knight. The prestige system seems to work well and the setting feels unified. It plays good. Needs a pause button though.
The naming sense and flavor descriptions are... very edgelord.
Ignoring that, I did find a bug in prestiging, for a brief moment you get a ton of exp gain on whatever you happened to have been skilling up (and the first job) based on your last prestige. This includes leveling up skills that you shouldn't even have unlocked yet through exploiting this bug.
Since it seems tied to the automation mechanics, a simple call to stop automation for a second or two while the xp gain gets cycled through post-prestige should fix it.
Wiped mine, not starting over
To be different from Progress Knight, I highly suggest doing what the title of the game is... and making it more about the magic. Completely remove the military stuff and combat skills and all the related items and just go heavier into the magic and mundane. Make the grind in common work longer, add in nobility ranks, and make it all feel pointless until you finally get magic through your first rebirth. Hell, instead of making it a rebirth, make it that you possess your own descendants. You've already done great in making houses one time buys per life, now make them hideously more expensive and make them permanent. There's so much you can do to still have the bones of Progress Knight/Groundhog Day, but make it entirely your own beast.
This is a from-scratch rebuild of Progress Knight, apparently. It needs to do more from the first click to NOT feel like the other Progress-style games. My suggestion would be to make the first loop a job WAY OUTSIDE of the city that the character leaves behind. (They go from their old life, with a level-capped job and no skills/shops/etc options, to the city and from there becoming a mage/soldier/whatever with the other options gradually opening up with further progress.) And maybe expand with some minigames?
Just a quick note, as I'm still playing through the game: apparently the game doesn't remember which house you selected, and defaults back to the basic one when you come back. It had me stumped for a bit as to why none of the progress bars were moving. I had progressed all the way to the pocket dimension, so you can imagine going from x500 to x1 is a huge drop. Which uh... I kinda already got that, plus max age of over 600 in just the second life, which might indicate a need to slow certain factors down?
And yeah, so far this game feels like someone played Progress Knight and said - "I like this game, but want to just make a few changes." I'll reserve judgement until I've finished, though.
There are actually a ton of modded versions of Progress Knight. If you join the progress knight discord, you can find them quite easily. The original creator either stopped working on it at some point, or was just too slow so people took it into their own hands. Progress Knight 2 is pretty good.
Try to be more iterative in your design instead of just lifting parts from other games whole.
Look at how Proto23 inspired multiple games, each with their own takes on the Cultivation Incremental. They are similar, but different from each other, and distinct enough that playing one doesn't feel like playing the others.
This? This is just Progress Knight with a different skin, and what changes are present aren't meaningful. This is derivative in the worst way; if you wanted to experience Progress Knight again, you could just replay Progress Knight.
Perhaps the dev, Szklanka Herbaty, can use this as a rough blueprint of what they want their game to eventually be, but it would require going back to the design phase, and remaking the game from scratch instead of piggybacking off of another game's code.
To the dev, Szklanka Herbaty:
This game would be much better received if you presented it as a mod of Progress Knight, not a new game inspired by it.
That framing is specifically where your major hurdle with this project is, since the biggest change is the skill trees you've tacked onto the base game, and modifications of idle games for QoL or new features aren't unheard of.
Just something to bear in mind next time you tackle a project of this nature.
Hey, it came out a bit strange, I started to do this game with the thought that it would be a "mod" but I did not use any line of code from the original game, I uploaded the game on itch.io for convenience, I published the whole development of the game on the main PK server on the channel dedicated to mods, after some time I just did a separate server for convenience, the game is not finished, and this is the first test, (alpha/beta), thanks to which players found a lot of bugs for me.
Similarities to the original PK have already ended with the jobs and magic skills, 2nd rebirth is a tree, 3rd will be a territory, and the next jobs that will appear also have nothing to do with other mods or the original version. I didn't hide at all about taking "inspiration" from PK, that's why I don't understand why people have such a reaction
I would also like to mention that the creator of PK has stopped being interested in this game, he is not active on the official discord or does no updates and in addition the game is open-source, without a license, i.e. everyone can do what they want with it
I didn't realize you rewrote the game from scratch, obviously, and that was a pretty rude assumption on my part; sorry about that. I can definitely understand the chain of events, and I'm not trying to throw shade at picking up someone else's game concept, it's just... well, no matter how much you add, the beginning is too similar to PK to divorce it from the original. Perhaps calling it a "branch off/continuation" or something would be more apt? Less accurate, but it would solve the framing issue.
Knowing that this is effectively an alpha work-in-progress, it should be low-priority to remake the things that already work, but varying up the beginning, even if just in superficial ways, would probably help to shake the comparisons. The problem people seem to have at first blush is that it seems like it's not just a copy, but a knock-off; having a stronger unique "identity" (for lack of a better word) for your game would give it stronger legs to stand on.
Thanks for your comment and advice
Many issues with the game even aside from the ripping off. One of the biggest would be rounding internal numbers rather than being exact- such as 'reduce expenses' skill.
Nobody cares if the display number is rounded, but every level should have an effect, especially if that effect is more than 1 copper, but probably always even if it's less. - this applies to all skills, especially also the magic ones, but expenses most of all
*Oh, and selected property doesn't save when reloading the game. Even though properties don't have an active cost.
Only real change I would want to see (other than more content) is a way to make the first SP reset less annoying. Like many Incrementals, the first SP reset is a MAJOR annoyance since it darn near makes you replay the game from scratch. I am not saying to make it trivial, but it is still aggravating.
Also, in case anyone else has trouble making it to lifespan increases after the last Time upgrade: Turning on autobuy is darn near mandatory at that point.
I'd say opposite. I'm not newbie to this type of games, so right before first reset I boosted all professions and skills to reasonable amount and on second run I've got Merchant Guild Owner at age of 19. NBD.
First skill point reset, not the first amulet reset
Skill points become amusingly worthless once you get the fourth upgrade in the SP+ line.
Also, I've noticed that Muscle Memory has a typo in it's description, and does not actually do anything.
Muscle Memory boosts Strength exp by 1% each level. Actually works.
It may be a rip off of Progress Knight, but It isn't a copy. The addition of the skill tree is nice, the game progresses faster, but goes farther. Over all its simply a better version of progress knight, even though it does have bug issues. Progress Knight is a free game, and This is a free game so since no one is making or losing money, its fine. Ignore the haters, you got a good game here.
Even if he was making money, it would be fine. The author of Progress Knight intentionally licensed his code for use, even in commercial, closed source software without attribution.
Meditation does nothing
Did you even try to reach out to the original creator?
This isn't inspired by, it's 95% a rip of it
Some games have various different versions being worked on with the blessing of the original creator, but as far as i'm aware progress knight is not one of those
Rip off of a rip off of groundhog life - This game's author already does much better by mentioning his inspiration.
Lets be honest - human creativity is taking from something existing and adding or removing something(or mixing 2 thingies)
Groundhog day is not a game. It is not every name and system and progression word for word, it is not every hint of plot or setting or even popularity. It's not even the same form of media for crying out loud
And if you're going to whinge about it like that, Groundhog day was *not* the original 'time loop', not even close.
Don't defend this title.
Idle Mage Life was inspired by Progress Knight which was inspired by Groundhog Life which was inspired by Progress Quest. Life sim is not a new genre...
Great game, dev!
Groundhog Life is very much a game. It was named after the movie, but is not really a reference to it beyond the looping mechanic itself.
seems to be a bug were sometimes when one resets for max levels the game will keep at least part of an upgrades levels. for example i just did my first skill tree reset but already have 186 max life and i went into gamespeed
everything that buffs specifically strength xp seems to be broken. trying to toggle dumbbells on and off for half a level and each takes the exact same amount of time.
muscle memory also does nothing for strength xp (i think, the number is just the same for that)
this is so peak
This game is almost entirely stolen from another incremental project.
if u mean progress knight, its heavily inspired by it!
it credits the inspiration and there is no profit so i would say its prob fine. there are also already so many PK mods s oi think the dev is fine with it/doesnt care.
I'm not sure how the dev feels about it now. However, I'd posit that the reason there are a bunch of PK mods is because the dev gave blanket permission (via the unlicense) for people to mod his game, even in closed source commercial games and even if they didn't provide him with attribution.