Introduction to Simulations
What simulations are and when to use them
Introduction to Simulations
Simulations let you play-test your game economy, progressions, and behaviors without touching a game client. You build a graph of actions, press Run, and The Leap walks through every step, records every currency change, and hands you a timeline you can scrub through, compare, and chart.
Use simulations to:
- Balance an economy — make sure currencies flow at the pace you want
- Validate progressions — confirm steps unlock, rewards drop, and branching behaves
- Compare player archetypes — see what a "spender" vs. a "free-to-play" player experiences
- Stress-test randomness — run thousands of iterations and analyze the distribution
Two modes at a glance
- Evaluation — a single run with detailed per-step logging. You can step through every decision, inspect datapoint changes, and debug behavior. See Evaluation Simulations.
- Statistical — many runs aggregated into distributions (mean, median, stddev, …). Use this once the graph is stable and you want to understand variance. See Statistical Simulations.
What's in this guide
- Creating a Simulation — start from scratch or auto-generate from your progressions
- Simulation Nodes — the five node types and how they chain together
- Variables — inputs you can slider and plug into behavior nodes
- Profiles — save named sets of variable values
- Evaluation Simulations — running a single deterministic run
- Step Insights — the step-by-step debugger
- Statistical Simulations — many runs, aggregated
- Graph Analysis & Views — reading the charts, saving chart layouts
- Comparing Profiles — running two or three profiles side-by-side
Next
Head to Creating a Simulation to build your first one.