Antimatter Dimensions is an idle/incremental game made for web browsers by a Finnish developer, Hevipelle. The game revolves around the user's moment-by-moment actions that are often extremely simple - but these actions are distinct from what the player does on a larger timescale. AD uses a structure like this & takes a (fairly) simple idea (one thing generates another) and expands heavily on it with several variations that are supplemented by paradigm shifts resulting from large prestige resets. The game emphasises automation throughout; most things end up completely automated at the end of the game. The idea behind this is so that the actual content is emphasised, and the old content can be built upon through that new content.


In Antimatter Dimensions, the goal of the player is to generate large amounts of antimatter. To generate antimatter, the player purchases the namesake dimensions. Thanks the the polynomial growth perpetuated because of this (the 8th dimension produces the 7th and so on until the 1st dimension which produces antimatter), the player able to reach extremely large values of antimatter, reaching values into 10 to the power of trillions or quadrillions.

The big idea behind AD is that it's continually unfolding. Content leads into other content, raising the complexity of the game and changing how the game itself is played. Upgrades are unlocked, automation is unlocked, and these work together to create a pretty satisfying experience. Old features are often revisited or changed in some way in an effort to keep old content still relevant, even as the newer features take hold. As prestige layers are a pretty big part of how AD works, the player may find themselves back at old content; though it is buffed or otherwise changed by some feature of the new content unlocked via the prestige.


I discovered AD on Kongregate (remember that?) in September 2017 and quickly joined the community thereafter. The AD I played back then is vastly different than what it is now, and by my estimate, it included around 10% of the current content. But I was hooked: the idea in the game was nothing I had ever seen before, and the novelty of it all really is what enticed me to keep playing. At this point, I had hardly had any experience with development, let alone web development, and it wasn't until right before the Eternity Challenges update around January 2018 that I joined the testing team.



From the release of the Dilation update in June 2018 to around August of the same year, details of the next update were pretty much completely hidden from the testers, but behind the scenes, Hevipelle, Omsi, and Razenpok were hard at work developing some of the basics of what would become the Reality Update. The update was massive in scope: nearly doubling the content of the current state of the game and introducing fairly novel mechanic ideas that kept the game fresh, and by extension, the genre fresh. Of course, with this massive scope came massive amounts of work, and Razenpok was responsible for streamlining our development process, and it was he who was responsible for the change to the Vue.js framework. He also improved our code style and etiquette dramatically, which was amazing for code readability. Once Hevipelle and Omsi found it to be semi-ready, they got the testers back together to begin a monumental task: testing the Reality Update.



I am eternally grateful for the opportunities that I gained from AD and the people I have met while working on it. The community opened up so much for me and even helped inspire me to create the Discord server companion bot, ADAnswersBot. These projects have further inspired my love for development and collaboration with like-minded folks.