Knob
Investment and capacity
You might say: pay now for a bigger engine
A player chooses how much current resource to invest and how much future capacity that purchase creates.
- What it does
- Sets the strength and delay of the boosting engine.
- Ask
- What is the payback time, and what immediate option is given up?
- Typical
- current resource spent; future flow gained
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: resources, outputs and positive feedback
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. 68–69
If StarCraft players set aside a certain portion of their mineral income to build new SCVs, they get the same curve as money in a savings account.
- Daniel Cook, Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies, “Source Type: Investment (Exponential)”; “Match power of sources and sinks”
Player earns a little resource early on. Which they invest to produce more of that resource.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Investment and capacity" (investment-capacity) 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