Knob
Drain and stop threshold
You might say: the brake setting
A drain removes resource, and a stop threshold decides when the loop can no longer continue.
- What it does
- Sets the regulating force and the point at which activity stalls.
- Ask
- How much drain preserves choice without making the loop inert?
- Typical
- drain per cycle; minimum viable resource
What to look for
- Resource falling each cycle
- Activity stopping when resource is too low
Sources
- Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 240
Like a car with dragging brakes providing too much friction, this has the overall result of removing too much energy from the game’s systems, and the game will slow to a stop.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 6, pp. 113–116: drains and feedback effects
Any changes that affect the output of a node can also close a feedback loop.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4, pp. 61–62, 66–70
Drains are the opposite of sources: They take resources out of the game
- Daniel Cook, Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies, “Faucet-and-Drain” economy; “Sink Type”
These extract resources from the game and thus limit accumulation and pooling.
- Ian Schreiber, Level 10: Final Boss, “Inflation”; “money sinks”
Negative-sum elements are sometimes called “money sinks,” that is, some kind of mechanism that permanently removes money from the player economy.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Drain and stop threshold" (drain-stop) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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