Introduction to Leap
What Leap is, the building blocks of a design, and how a design goes from Leap Studio to your game.
Introduction to Leap
Leap is an all-in-one meta and economy engine for game studios. This documentation covers the alpha version of Leap: it describes what you can use today, and features and screens may still change before release.
What is Leap?
In Leap Studio, Leap's editor, you design the rules of your game's meta — its resources, unlocks, progression and the actions players can take — as elements. When you merge your work, Leap checks that the whole design fits together and turns it into a model your game plays against. The design you build is the design your game runs.
With Leap you can:
- Design your meta and economy — resources, flags, achievements, entitlements, and the systems that tie them together
- Playtest the result as a brand-new player, one action at a time
- Ship it — tag a version of your design and deploy it to the environment your game connects to
Key Concepts
Projects
A project holds one game's design: its elements, groups, systems, workspaces, versions and environments. See Creating a Project.
Main and Workspaces
Main is the merged, shared state of your project, and it is read-only. You make changes in a workspace — an isolated copy, like a branch in version control — and merge it back into Main when you're done. See Working with Workspaces.
Elements
Elements are the building blocks of a design:
- Resources — what a player earns, spends and accumulates: gold, gems, energy, XP, wins
- Constants — fixed tuning values your design reads, such as a base damage value
- Flags — yes/no facts about a player, such as whether they finished the tutorial
- Achievements — goals that unlock automatically when a condition becomes true
- Entitlements — what a player receives from a store purchase
- Custom Operations — actions that check their conditions and then change other elements
- Events — named signals that move systems from one state to the next
- Formulas — named calculations you can reuse anywhere a value is expected
Groups
Groups organise elements into namespaces. Your game addresses an element inside a group as group.element. See Creating Groups.
Systems
A system is a state machine. A player is always in exactly one of its states, and moves to the next one when an exit's conditions pass or when an event it waits for is fired. Use systems for quest lines, tutorials, onboarding and any other flow. See Creating Systems.
Playtest
Playtest plays your merged design as a new player, so you can check it behaves the way you intended. See Playtesting Your Design.
Versions and Deployments
A version tags your merged design at a moment in time, and deploying it to an environment is how it reaches your game. See Versions and Deployments.
From Leap Studio to Your Game
A design goes from Leap Studio to your game in a few steps. Click a step to read more about it:
How Your Game Refers to Elements
Every element has a slug — a stable identifier made of lowercase letters, numbers and underscores, such as gold or claim_daily_bonus. Your game addresses an element by its slug, prefixed with its group's slug when it belongs to one: gold at the top level, daily_rewards.gold inside a group called Daily Rewards.
Leap Studio's Tabs
Once a project is open in Leap Studio, five tabs run along the top of the screen:
- Design — build your elements, groups and systems
- Simulate — shows a Soon badge
- Playtest — play your merged design one action at a time
- Operate — shows a Soon badge
- Analyse — shows a Soon badge
Next Steps
Ready to get started? Continue to Creating a Project to set up your first project.