Machinations: Progression Systems for Game Economy Designers

Welcome to the “Machinations: Progression Systems for Game Economy Designers” course!

You are going to learn how to use Machinations to model and simulate a level progression system to ensure that you can convey an engaging experience for your players. You will delve into concepts such as state connections, registers, gates and arrays to solve problems in the economy of progression systems, which have been widely used in game development.

In the first lesson you will build a simple core loop for a generic progression system, including earning XP and levelling up.

In the second and third lessons you will implement an attribute system, where players get skill points and assign them to specific attributes, which will have an effect on their character’s stats.

The fourth and fifth lessons will show you how to implement how players progress between different areas, and how that affects the stats of the enemies, specifically their damage and HP.

Finally, you will tackle more complex XP earning curves with arrays and implement a simple combat system to test the economy’s balance.

At the end of the course you can take a test to assess your knowledge about Progression Systems in Machinations.

Overall, in this course we will cover the following topics:

• State connections: formula modifiers, triggers, activators, getters from registers.

• Gates: deterministic and probabilistic gates, gates as triggers.

• Registers: basic formulas, randomness, boolean registers.

• MathJS functions.

• Drains.

• Custom variables: math expressions, randomness.

• Conditionals with ternary operators.

• Arrays