Process

Resource generation and conversion

You might say: make, spend or swap

The economy specifies how resources enter play, leave play and change into other resources or capabilities.

What it does
Defines scarcity, opportunity cost and the timing of investment.
Ask
What are the source, drain, converter and trader, and what rates or delays connect them?

What to look for

  1. Resource entering play
  2. Resource leaving play
  3. A resource changing into another or a capability

Sources

  1. Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 240In an economy, the player can use a resource to perform a needed action in the game—for example, using wood as a resource to construct a building. Or the player can trade the wood for bread to feed their workers—who can then go chop down more wood.
  2. Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 5, p. 93including special nodes for the four economic functions (sources, drains, converters, and traders) discussed in the previous chapter.
  3. Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4, pp. 61–62Converters turn resources of one kind into another.
  4. Daniel Cook, Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies, “Inputs and outputs”; “Sources”; “Transforms”; “Drains”The resources flow mostly one way into a series of transforms to produce various other elements players desire.
  5. Ian Schreiber, Level 10: Final Boss, “What is an economic system?”Resource destruction, where players either burn resources for some use in the game, or convert one type of resource to another.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Resource generation and conversion" (generation-conversion) 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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