Simulation of the Waxel World Economy

The economy of a game is super important (especially in the beginning).
Before we even started with the development of the Waxel World, we made a big Google sheet with all the important information and formulas regarding the balancing for it.
For example the sheet includes the times and success rates of the Waxel Ninjas regarding how many citizens they can find based on the race, times and amount of the professions of how many materials they can find per day and what influence equipping the different items would have on that etc.

We then used the results of the formulas to see how many citizens / professions / materials / items a player would create based on holding a certain amount of Waxel Ninjas and how it would be influenced by changing certain values to find a good balance.

This already helped us a lot in hopefully building a good economy model for the Waxel World and how it would look in theory, when the game is launched.

Simulation

While I (Ryu) have been browsing through Twitter I found a very interesting application called Machinations.
The application allows you to build your game mechanics and also economies to run a simulation of them in real time.
The past week I was heavily focused on building our theoretical economy model of the Waxel World inside Machinations and this is the result:

*Please keep in mind that the values you see in this video are not final as we are still in the alpha testing phase.

Let me try to explain what you can see here:

  • The flow chart runs for a total of 100 steps (1 step = 1 day)
  • The starting point is the triangle on the left and ends with the crafting of an item on the right
  • We use x amount of Waxel Ninjas with the “human” race attribute to see how many citizens get found each day
  • After a total of 5 citizens gets found, one of the gatherer profession gets minted
  • Each profession lives for 20 days and finds 3 raw materials (common, uncommon or rare) each day
  • If enough raw materials are found, they get refined into refined materials
  • If enough refined materials are created, items are crafted randomly

The model is a bit simplified. Adding every single game mechanic to work dynamically for each game asset would make it way too complicated, but it is sufficient too simulate the most important things.

Result

Being able to simulate the economy of the Waxel World this way helped us a lot! We already identified some parts where we will adjust things before we go live.

It will also help us in introducing new game features / mechanics and see what influence they will have on the economy to make better decisions before we deploy them in the game.


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