Image via Nintendo/YouTube Have you ever been monstering a race in Mario Kart and then, blam, the blue shell hits and you’ve got a few seconds of teeth-grinding frustration while you wallow about and the other players catch up with you? If you have, congratulations, you’ve been caught in a feedback loop. What are feedback loops? …

Recent gaming history has been littered with examples of triple-A games being released well before they are ready. Huge releases from major studios and developers such as Anthem, Cyberpunk 2077, and Fallout 76 have all been released to the public as buggy or highly unbalanced messes. These releases were followed by the predictable fallout as …

The idea of a game that essentially plays itself might not sound like the most entertaining thing, but since its inception in 2016, the idle game genre has grown hugely in popularity. In this article, we’ll be breaking down exactly what an idle game is and what constitutes the basic building blocks of its game …

I’ve always been a fan of finding the latest and best tools for supporting my game design workflow. While these tools only help me execute my designs, the right tech can support creativity and speed up my process, which ultimately impacts the quality of the outcome (the game). That’s actually how I came across the …

Update 8.7.0 represents a huge milestone in our mission to deliver a platform that truly improves your game design process. This update was designed to improve and facilitate game balancing. For the past several months our backend team has focused on delivering faster simulations. We won’t bore you with the under-the-hood details, but let’s see …

We’re looking at how Machinations can be used to test progression systems for different player profiles and play styles, ranging from casual players to your biggest whales. As well as how different players might approach your game and how this impacts their progression. We were joined by Jeffrey Feenstra, LiveOps specialist @ PopReach who went …

Battle Passes are looking like an established trend in free-to-play games, especially PVP, slowly substituting the older aspirations of subscription models that have only been successful for a handful of titles. What exactly is a battle pass, how can it influence your game’s economy, and how do you balance one? Battle pass mechanics As stated …

Virtual economies have become a feature of an increasingly large number of modern games and, like any other economy, the in-game ones need to deal with economic factors like inflation. Handled correctly, inflation can actually be beneficial to your game. Handled incorrectly, however, runaway inflation can turn your game into the virtual version of Hungary …

As part of the Academia Panel, I was kindly invited by the Machinations crew and got the chance to demonstrate our final project for our Innovative Game Mechanics course. As I was entering my 3rd year as a game design student at Bahçeşehir University Digital Game Design (BUG), my mentality was changing on how games’ …