Part
Braking engine
You might say: a loop that slows or stops growth
This game's braking engine drains a resource or reduces its future rate so another loop does not run away.
- What it does
- Regulates growth and can bring activity to a halt if its drain is too strong.
- Ask
- What pressure consumes the resource, and when does it become too strong?
What to look for
- Resource draining from a loop
- Growth slowing or stopping
Parts
- Drain and stop threshold: A drain removes resource, and a stop threshold decides when the loop can no longer continue.
Pattern
Sources
- Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 239
In contrast to boosting engines, braking engines have a predominant balancing loop. A braking engine is therefore in many ways the inverse of a boosting engine.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 6, pp. 113–116: drains and balancing feedback
The higher the temperature, the faster the temperature is drained.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4, pp. 66–70
Drains are the opposite of sources: They take resources out of the game
- Ian Schreiber, Level 10: Final Boss, “Economic Systems”; “Inflation”; “Trading”
In games, I’ll use the word “economy” to describe any in-game resource.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Braking engine" (braking-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