
The Root Cause
Submission for Cozy Fall Jam 2026
The root of all evil is messing with all things good and nice!
Feel free to try another game from the gamejam while this one runs in the background. Though you can see all this game has to offer in like 5 minutes
The game runs on mobile, but you can't see tooltips and can't use bulk-purchase
Pre-deadline updates
- Added tooltips & the pixel art in the game screen
- Reduced karma prices cause the karma scaling is worse than i thought
Used assets:
- BG music: Aviators - Infinity Awaits Us - A Royalty Free OST - 07 Flora
Disclaimer: Most of the main menu was created in preparation for the jam (the day before), everything past the "start"-button was created during the jam.
Post-submission commentary:
I wanted to have a third prestige layer "destroying capitalism" but i didn't get to it :/ Turns out a lot of coding and math is involved with this genre. Took a lot longer than expected to set everything up.
There is no endstate, i'm like 90% sure the game will crash if you somehow actually destroy all 1.79e308 root lol
| Published | 1 day ago |
| Status | Released |
| Platforms | HTML5 |
| Rating | Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars (1 total ratings) |
| Author | Someitoj |
| Made with | Aseprite, Godot |
| Tags | Idle, Incremental, No AI |
| Content | No generative AI was used |



Comments
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The first level of Reflect gives no bonus.
Oh, that probably means i multiplied by level instead of 1 + level
My bad
I finished the game(?)
It didn't crash since I could still click and buy the basic upgrades but it's stuck here. clicking prestige at this stage result in this:
Well anyway, this is a fun, albeit very short and basic game. it does start off really boring as you don't really know what exactly each upgrade does and the prestige is a bit unbalance since it tapers out far too quickly, meaning the best strategy is to prestige as soon as you can instead of saving it up for later.
If anyone else wants to complete the game as well (though not worth the time in my opinion), here's my strategy that I figured out. 1 Focus completely on gathering prestige first. buy a few positive outlook (I got 10) and start saving up karma. once you got a decent supply, buy a few purify water. it's a strange but despite having 0 water the root upgrade, purify water still help boost the root destruction rate. then start batch buying the basic upgrades using shift-click (This mechanic is mentioned in the top right as well, though it's not obvious at a first glace) and focus on grinding karma. your primary goal should be to reduce the time needed to prestige so that you could spam click prestige (or alternatively, click prestige one then spam spacebar & enter key). once you reach this point just start farming karma, upgrade the karma focused upgrades, then once you get roughly the karma upgrade level that I got, start buying the basic upgrades again in batches.
oh lol, i see why purify water helps on it’s own.
Intend was
[base ^ (1 + (water_lvl/1000 * purify_water))]But code is
[base ^ ((1 + water_lvl/1000) * purify_water)]ah, no wonder it's very powerful when I start buying a bunch of them and why 1 upgrade seem to do nothing at all. honestly, I'm glad I beat it before that mistake was found, not sure if I would've been able to finish the game if it hadn't have that error XD