I've been experimenting with idle game mechanics in a browser and it was surprisingly easy to set up.
Originally I was just curious about how an idle game could work if the game state is saved on the server. I assumed that idle games didn't literally hold a session open with a server or run a process to count seconds for each user because that would be ridiculous. But it turns out that an idle game can be run entirely just by tracking the start/end session times of idling events, which is nuts! So a multiplayer idle game could be as simple as having an interface make API calls to register action start times like logging a clock in time on a register, with the server validating things. And all the idle progress bars and stuff are literally just UI calculating off the start time.
I ended up setting up a prototype to run locally, with some basic stuff like mining copper, smelting copper into bars, mining iron, smelting iron into bars. I liked how it went. I abstracted some of the events so that the reward event can give probabilistic outcomes, like how gems drop in OSRS. And I also had to spend time making sure the structure was data-driven and that it was structured to be easy to plop in particular idling events at particular locations, which I realized is super important for iteration after trying to put stuff on this website.
Right now it's still kind of a sandbox for me, and it's mostly me messing with design choices that I didn't like from when I tried Melvor Idle or Idle Iktah. I liked both of those, but I really...struggle to connect emotionally with purely menu-based idling. Idk if it's just me but the abstractness sucks a lot of the charm out of the grind. I feel like so much of the experience I liked from OSRS (admittedly as a non-member and I never got very far) is walking around, exploring things, and going through the grind in different places. That's one of the inspirations for my website, is that I was always charmed and intrigued by the exploration map in Gaiaonline or the world map in Neopets, yet for some reason they never went very detailed or deep.
I also just don't like that some of the design choise they made feel like they were for player ease (or following other modern mobile game trends) when it just serves to ruin the satisfaction of farming. Like, I don't like how the inventory has slots but each slot can hold an infinitley large stack of that same kind of item. I know it's more friction to have finite stacks, but it also forces players to interact with other systems in the game. On the first day of Melvor I set myself to fish then came back like two days later and I had gained 64 fishing levels and had 20k fish in my inventory. I get that's a big payout but that sucks! There's no way for me to emotionally metabolize what that means! It's not like in OSRS when I walk back and forth smelting steel and I finally clear like 10 stacks in my inventory, THAT feels satisfying. I just want the idle version of that.
This is all just a separate prototype for now, but I feel like it would be really cool to incorporate the idle farming into my website. I'm prototyping right now expecting user save data, cuz I really appreciate a long grind. I would honestly play OSRS and pay for membership if the game was more idle friendly because I don't want to spend my life manually farming MMOs anymore. I'm imagining going to different locations around Rove City to gather stuff, craft things. I was thinking, to make the idle game unique compared to other idle games, I could put a heavy emphasis on house decoration, with a much more fleshed out skill tree for artisan stuff. Like, low level woodcutting and carpentry lets you make basic wood desks, but high level skills lets you make magical lacquered yew wood pedestal desks. I was also thinking of doing things like inviting NPCs to your house and giving them gifts you made.
Anyway it's a lot of imagination and those things are far away right now. If I wanted to have that I would probably need to move my site off neocities since I'd need a server.