Machinations is a design tool to simulate complex systems. Back in August 2012 it was already a very well made flash free software made by Joris Dormans as part of his Ph. D. Later it became Machinations.io : The Game Balancing Platform, a commercial product for game studios.
This is a quick test that I made with the old Machinations (the flash one) from 2012. It’s worth noting that it was a 87 Ko software, I love great & simple programs like this.
Note: it might be difficult to see many small things on the graph, don’t hesitate to zoom-in to appreciate the beauty of the beast.
This was the interface, with a few Graph nodes and links on the right, the ability to copy & paste things, save & load in xml, and overall very easy to use visual programming.
The .xml format is also super easy to read to potentially use them in your game or toolset.
Zooming-in a little, let’s see what I was trying to do.
It all starts on the top part, with the Kill Monster action that generates Gold and Experience. The amount of Gold and Experience acquired depends on the Level of the player, set with some formula Gold Per Kill and Exp Per Kill.
After each Kill Monster there is chance you get injured and receive Damage. In this example I set the Damage chance to 5%, so after fighting 17 monsters I received 1 damage, and I now have 2 Health.
I fought many monsters and I’m now injured but I can Buy Health (bottom left) for a Gold price of Level * 5. I did it, and you can see that I’m back to 3 Health (and 0 Damage), but I only have 12 Gold left, from the 17 Previously. I spent 5 Gold because I’m still level 1.
Something else I can do is Upgrade Stuff to become stronger. Each time I do it I Reduces the Danger by -1% (chance for me to get injured and lose 1 Health).
This is balanced by the fact that when I Level Up my character (see the blue Level Up button) it will increase the danger by 1.3%. Everything related to danger is in black, just below the Kill Monster button.
I had 17 points of Experience that I didn’t use, so I Level Up to Level 3. This increased the danger back to 6%. It also raised the Exp Per Kill.
The Stuff Level is on the left, the character Level is on the right.
After playing a bit more and killing a lot more monsters I’m now level 8. I didn’t improve my stuff so I have 205 Gold, and my danger is at 12%. I Already suffered 1 Damage and I have 2 Health left.
You might have noticed at this point, but the amazing tool of Machinations are accumulators and incremental testing. Accumulators (or tokens) are visible on the graph in the circles: Health Bought, Reduce Danger, Increase Danger. Some other accumulators like Gold, Experience, Stuff Level or Level look different, but they are essentially the same.
It is exactly like this that we would implement this mechanics, in programming we would use an integer it’s another term but it’s really the same thing. That’s why machinations is so good at representing complex system, because it’s just some visual programming that can be executed step by step.
Continuing with the example, I kept fighting more monsters and I leveled Up to Level 10, but I received too much Damage and I’m now dead. Temporarily Damage & Health are showing wrong values because I deactivated part of the graph to prevent any action during Death. I have 1 accumulator in the Death state, but I can Revive!
I used the Revive button, it removed the Death token but added one Death Penalty. You can see that there is an experience penalty called Exp Penalty If Die costing r * 0.2 where r is the Exp Required Level Up. So basically Reviving cost me 20% of the cost to level-up. Costly! But I’m back alive.
We can keep playing forever at this point, now my character is level 15 with my Stuff at level 15 too and I’ve Revived one more time. My Danger is up to 9% now because the danger created by leveling up is a little bit higher (+1.3%) than the danger lowered by acquiring stuff (-1.0%), so the game gets slowly harder.
And that’s how you can simulate a game progression & balance with Machinations!