Part
Boosting engine
You might say: invest now to grow later
This game's boosting engine turns some resource now into greater future capacity or flow.
- What it does
- Creates reinforcing growth while asking the player to delay an immediate benefit.
- Ask
- What can be invested now, and when does its larger flow arrive?
What to look for
- Resource spent now
- Greater future capacity or flow
Parts
- Investment and capacity: A player chooses how much current resource to invest and how much future capacity that purchase creates.
Pattern
Sources
- Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 236
A boosting engine is a system that adds resources to the game in a way that enables the player to choose between using them to act within the game in the moment or to invest them to gain a greater flow of resources in the future.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 6, pp. 113–117: property/income feedback and positive feedback basketball
the money spent to buy property is returned with a profit because more property will generate more income.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4, pp. 66–69
minerals to build a mining unit (called an SCV, for Space Construction Vehicle) that can be used to collect new minerals.
- Daniel Cook, Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies, “Source Type: Investment (Exponential)”
The powerful sinks at the end of each value chain acts to maximize flow of resources through the chain.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Boosting engine" (boosting-engine-instance) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal