A design tool for simulating and exploring game progression and choices.

It's an interactive hybrid of a State Machine and a Markov Chain.

Example usecases of this tool could be:

• Finding soft locks in your progression systems.
• Getting a vibe of your game's systems before they are all fully implemented.
• Mocking up narrative and dialogue trees.
• Predicting how many hours of gameplay a non-linear game takes to complete.
• Getting a bigger holistic picture of how all your "locks and gates" fit together.

Strange Loops is made with very few dependencies, just Cytoscape.js and a couple Cytoscape extensions for the core graph logic and rendering the graph, and lodash as a sub-dependency for one of those extensions (I don't use lodash in my own code). Everything else fits in js/main.js and should be somewhat simple to follow along and modify. There's no React, Vue, JSQuery, or whatnot.

I encourage designers familiar with JavaScript to take Strange Loops and modify it to fit their own workflows. There's no server/cloud component either, which makes this suitable for use in more secure/secrecy-sensitive environments.