Community Spotlight – Optimizing Players Progression with Machinations
Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background
I’m Guido Parlatore, a technical game designer currently in the final year of the Game Design course at AIV – Accademia Italiana Videogiochi. The diagram I created is for Project Anchor, an isometric metroidvania game immersing players in an underwater adventure in search of the lost city of Atlantis. My team and I have been developing the game for the past two years and our goal is to publish it on Steam later this year.
Related to your featured diagram, can you briefly describe it? What was the goal behind it?
In Project Anchor, players unlock various abilities throughout the game, which can be powered up using experience points within a branching tree structure. Each power-up can also be leveled up twice.
What specific features of Machinations did you find most useful during the design process?
Machinations has played a crucial role to iterate fastly, allowing us to quickly test different formulas to determine the optimal pricing for the power-ups.
Using the predictions feature helped me to understand the possible progression gap between the best and worst case scenarios and the amount of powerups the player can unlock at each point into the game.
Also, having a way to test the diagram manually with interactive buttons helped me to personally simulate multiple player experiences before implementing the progression system and the UI into Unreal Engine.
Lastly, the libraries feature made building the diagram much quicker and easier.
What advice would you give to someone who is new to using Machinations?
My advice for someone starting now with Machinations is to go check Machination’s Youtube channel: opening a blank diagram can be pretty daunting at first but both the Machinations Academy playlist showing the basics and the livestreams about more complex systems have been very useful to start using this tool on the right foot.
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