Arcade Worker

You are a service worker at an Arcade. Throughout the day, different machines will break, and you will have to fix them. If too many machines are broken, then the store gets shut down.

Gameplay Pillars

Time crunch: The player should be working against time, there should be pressure to continue fixing machines quickly.
Puzzle Solving: The method of fixing machines should take enough time to be a challenge, but not take so much time to distract from the rest of the game.
Managing Environment: It should be clear which machines are broken, and the player should easily figure out how to go about fixing them.

Machines Breaking

Machines will break at certain intervals for the player to fix. If they aren’t attended and fixed after a certain point, then they will become destroyed and can no longer be fixed through minigames.

When machines break, they will turn from purple to red with a red light to be able to see them better.
Machines breaking make a sound so that the player can hear that they have broken even if they aren’t able to see it at that time.
When machines are broken, they will display an icon that can be seen at any position in the arcade. This icon will have the shape correlating to the minigame needed to fix it, numbers counting down how much time is left until it’s destroyed, and the color will change from yellow to orange to red as there is less time to fix that machine.
When machines are destroyed, they make a sound indicating destruction. They also turn into a dark yellow color so that it is clear that they are destroyed, since it is discernible between the other machines, but also doesn’t draw too much attention.

Game Balancing in Machines Breaking

As the game progresses, machines will break at faster rates from each other. They start off by breaking slowly so that the player can get a sense of the game, and then they start to break more rapidly so that the player can experience the full flow of the game.

As the game progresses, there is less time between when machines break and get destroyed. This allows the player to become familiar with minigames, and then have to think on their toes as the game progresses.

Fixing Machines

In order to fix broken machines, the player needs to solve puzzles/minigames. When a player wins a minigame, the machine is fixed and the player can then move onto the next machine. While a player is fixing a machine, they will see a countdown on that machine indicating how much time is left to solve the puzzle or else the machine will be destroyed. This adds a time pressure onto this portion of the game. There are 3 types of minigames: Screws, Circuit, and Wires.

Screws Minigame

In the screw minigame, the player is tasked with making sure that all the loose screws are screwed in and rusted screws are replaced. The minigame is won when the player has tightened all the screws in the minigame.

They have 4 “tools” to use: Phillips and Flathead screwdrivers, and Philips and Flathead spare screws.
Rusted screws need to be replaced by clicking on the spare screw corresponding to the screw type and then clicking on the rusted screw.
Any non-rusted screws can be tightened by using the corresponding screwdriver.

Circuit minigame

In the circuit minigame, the player needs to turn circuits in order to deliver power from the power source to the light switch.

The board is made up of a grid with a bunch of individual circuits. Each of these circuits can be turned in order to divert power.

There are 4 different types of circuits: One that has connections on 2 opposing sides, one that has connections on 2 sides next to each other, one that has connections on 3 sides, and one that has connections on all sides.
The power source comes from the top left corner. The circuit next to it needs to have one side facing it in order to divert power. The energy then gets transferred to every circuit that is connected to that system.
In order to win the game, the power needs to be transferred to the light. In order to do this, the circuit in the bottom right corner needs to be receiving power and have a side facing the light.

Wires minigame

In this minigame, there are 4 sets of wires with 2 connection points each. In order to win this minigame, all 4 sets need to be connected.

There are 4 colors of plugs that are used: Red, yellow, green, and blue.
Each set has 2 plugs, one with and one without prongs. The plug with the prongs needs to be plugged into the plug of the same color without prongs.
If the player tries to move a plug to the wrong space or color then the plug snaps back to its original location.

System Implementation

The game ends when over half the machines are either broken or destroyed.

The player can see how close this is by the bar in the upper left corner, which goes down as the player reaches that 50% mark.
As the bar goes down, the color changes in relation how far it goes down. Its color goes from green to yellow-green to yellow to orange to red.
As the player moves further along into the game, they will feel a higher amount of pressure to complete minigames quickly and efficiently in order to keep the store from shutting down. This feeling is achieved by having machines break and destroy at faster rates.
As the player moves later into the game, they need to strategize which machines they will fix based on the machine type and how much time it has.

Wrench Power Up

When playtesting the game, towards the end of the game it got to the point where machines kept on breaking and destroying with no way to fix the destroyed machines. This made the last 1-2 minutes of the game feel hopeless, since the player couldn’t repair broken machines at a fast enough rate, and destroyed machines stayed at that state which ate up a good amount of the inoperable machines. Because of this I implemented the Wrench Power Up.

Wrenches allow the player to fix any machine that is broken or destroyed.

Wrenches will have a random chance of spawning every time a machine is broken.
- The chance of spawning is 20% which goes up 2% every time a wrench doesn’t spawn. When a wrench spawns the chance goes back down to 20%.
When a wrench spawns, it will be available for the player to grab for only a short amount of time
A player can hold multiple wrenches at a time, which will be numbered in the bottom left corner.
The player can press R in order to go in and out of wrench mode. When the wrench mode is activated, the player can fix broken and destroyed machines using a wrench each. If the player isn’t in Wrench mode, they can fix machines using the normal minigame method.