Machinations.io

The idea behind this product was originally conceptualised by Joris Dormans, with some help of Ernest Adams. It was available as a free Flash plugin accompanied by a very insightful book which and was incredibly powerful for prototyping as such. Unfortunately it suffered from bugs and was very limited in its usability. This new cloud based version tries to address the shortcomings, but has constant problems with timings which never existed in the original version. Many crucial features like modificators for multipliers are missing and on top of that the whole product is buggy, as can be seen in some of the state connections which calculate wrong values. This makes this product pretty much unusable for any professional, I wasted hours wondering why my diagrams behave unexpectedly, just to realise that the values went completely off chart. This is completely unacceptable, especially considering that the original tool had only bugs when it came to editing, but performed consistently and reliably once you were able to achieve a desired diagram. The new cloud based tool brings increased convenience due to stand of art graph connection tools and the addition of layers. It comes at the price of reliability and iteration speed however, while costing you quite a considerable amount of money. Especially for small studios that's a lot to ask for, considering you can get a Adobe subscription for that money. For anything beyond the complexity of the most basic core loop you're currently faster off just prototyping the damn thing in the programming language of your choice, unfortunately. I hope this tool once lives up to its original form, but today is not the day. I recommend buying the book Game Mechanics by Dormans and Adams, download the tool that comes with it and install a standalone Flash player to avoid security issues. That kind of setup is for free and will serve you reliably for small scoped diagrams. At least you're going to be able to rely on your work, just try to avoid the undo/redo operations while editing...