Energy Value of Virtual Commodities
With special guest game, Love and Pies!
Systems Designers are always trying to balance in-game economies, particularly the value of in-game commodities and loot.
If your game has an energy system though, you have at least one useful valuation tool to measure the economic value of in-game commodities.
Enter merge and romance ‘em up, Love and Pies.
Each in-game commodity is either spawned onto the board from a spawner item, which costs energy, or it is merged from exactly two identical items that are exactly one level lower.
We can value each commodity by its total energy cost and leverage the math fact that a level N commodity consists of 2^(n - 1) level 1 commodities merged together. So if a level 1 commodity costs 1 energy to produce, then a level 6 commodity has an implied total energy cost of 32!
If we know the relative value of in-game commodities by their total energy cost, we can get closer to determining their relative real-world money value!
Love and Pies’ economy has other wrinkles which make the valuation problem more interesting, such as:
Some spawners randomly drop secondary rare items, making those items more scarce.
Spawners have cooldowns that trigger after a certain number of spawns, which make their items more or less scarce.
Grid Space also comes at a premium, as players of any 2048 or Threes clone will attest!
Spawners can be merged!
But no truly entertaining in-game economy is so simply reverse engineered in one step, but a good place to start is to look at the energy cost!