Knob

Reward escalation

You might say: more payoff for more success

The reward for a successful action increases the resources or options available for the next action.

What it does
Sets how strongly success compounds.
Ask
Does this reward create useful momentum or remove future choices?
Typical
reward size and delay

Sources

  1. Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 237Acting within the game typically brings its own short-term rewards, at the cost of spent resources, but building the engine invests for the future (and completes the reinforcing loop).
  2. Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 6, pp. 113–117: profit feedback and positive feedback basketballthe score of the better team quickly spirals upward as the difference increases, allowing them to field more and more players.
  3. Raph Koster, Game design is simple, actually, sections “Feedback” and “Variation and escalation”Almost no games are made of only one loop. Instead, we chain loops together – complete loop A, and it probably outputs something that may serve as a tool or constraint on a different loop.
  4. Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 5: Mechanics and Dynamics, Feedback Loops: score-to-power-up positive feedbackthe higher your score, the more power-ups you got for the next level.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Reward escalation" (reward-escalation) 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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