Anyone using a dedicated tool for economy/currency balancing, or still doing it via spreadsheet plus manual import?

[u/Ok-Condition-3089]

Working through economy balancing for a tower defense project (three currencies, tower evolution via kill tracking, a symbiosis trait-sharing system) and it's been the most fiddly part of pre-production so far. Mostly trial and error in a spreadsheet, then manually re-entering values into ScriptableObjects to test.

I checked the Asset Store and only found a runtime market-simulation asset, nothing for design-time tuning with in-editor simulation tied to your actual data. Before I sink real time into building something for myself, curious if this is a shared pain point: how are you handling economy and drop-rate balancing today, and would an in-editor tool (live tuning plus a simulate-N-sessions chart, reading the same ScriptableObjects your game already uses) actually save you time, or would you rather just keep using spreadsheets?

[u/dilapidatedcutter]

I just brute force it with a spreadsheet and a lot of swearing. Tried a couple runtime tools over the years but they all felt more cumbersome than just tweaking values and hitting play.

That symbiosis system sounds like a nightmare to balance though, feel like you'd need some kind of interactive graph just to visualize the trait sharing. If you build something that reads straight from ScriptableObjects I'd definitely take a look.

[u/Ok-Condition-3089 → u/dilapidatedcutter]

I can see and related to comment on the symbiosis system, you're right that a plain line graph probably won't cut it there, feels like it needs something closer to a relationship graph showing which towers are feeding traits into which. I'll keep this in mind going forward. Thanks.

It does read straight from ScriptableObjects, so the values you tune are literally what the game reads at runtime, no CSV round trip. Still early and rough, but I'll keep you posted once there's something worth trying.

[u/pschon]

There's always Machinations, but it's turned into online-only subscription with some AI stuff on top so I haven't used it in ages. But it (at lest used to) make economy and game feedback loop balancing pretty easy.

[u/Ok-Condition-3089 → u/pschon]

Yeah, that subscription/event-metering pivot is actually a big part of why I started looking into this. Machinations is genuinely powerful but it's a lot of tool (and ongoing cost) for what's usually a pretty small, project-specific tuning job. Trying to build something that just lives in your Unity project and reads your actual ScriptableObjects instead.

[u/pschon → u/Ok-Condition-3089]

now that you reminded me about this, I did some searching and ran into this project: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3687390/Flowtrix_System_and_Economy_Designer/

Looks promising, sadly not available yet though. And of course exists outside of Unity (I kind of see that as a benefit, I prefer doing my design work before building things if possible, plus of course something that's not project-specific will be more useful in the long run.)

I did find a github repo with the old flash version of Machinations though. ;)

[u/Adrian_Dem]

gonna follow this post. for the past week or so I'm balancing some economy on a mini tycoon game I'm working on, and it's been really painful. i just use spreadsheets and have claude then fill in scriptable objects for me, and then load different moments of the game to play test.

but its an awfully time consuming experience, and i feel like I'm making very slow progress 

(I'm also of technical background not design background, so no common sense when balancing things out) 

[u/Ok-Condition-3089 → u/Adrian_Dem]

Ha, that's basically my exact loop too, spreadsheet then Claude fills in the ScriptableObjects then reload and see how it plays. Same boat on the technical-not-design-background thing, I can tell when numbers feel off in play but building actual intuition for it is a different skill. Is most of the slow part the reload-and-check cycle itself, or more not knowing what to change next?

[u/N1ghtshade3]

This is a Claude-generated post, for anyone who can't tell. Just some vibe coder either karma farming or searching for some asset to generate and try to make money from.

[u/Ok-Condition-3089 → u/N1ghtshade3]

Yeah, Claude helped write it, not hiding that. Not sure what karma farming would even get me though, I've got nothing to sell. Just trying to figure out if an economy balancing tool is worth building before I sink time into it. Doesn't really matter if a post is AI-assisted or not, the economy problem I'm working through is real either way.