Schrödinger's Abacus

Download it here:
https://arkahedron.itch.io/schrodingers-abacus

Conceptually inspired by real physical puzzle and fidget toys like the Rubik's Cube, Bop-It, Perplexus, and other gizmos or gadgets with lots of satisfying buttons to push.

The core mechanics and gameplay loop are designed around a singular central object that reacts and changes over time based on the player's engagement with it.

- There are multiple state-oriented interactions with a learning curve for understanding their interplay.
- Simple user input format, using just cursor movement and clicking to engage the mechanics.
- The core gameplay entails pressing physical controls on a strange cubic mechanical device.
- The purpose of buttons and switches and meanings of readouts take experimentation to learn.

- The outer shell panels of the device shift in and out, revealing and concealing different inputs.
- The main objective is to increase the device's core stage number from zero to ten using it's controls.
- Attempting to increase the core stage value is a game of chance, potentially risking losing progress.
- As the stage value rises, the maintenance required to resist automatically falling back stages increases.
- Optimizing the device's systems using the varyingly available resources is the core skill challenge.

The assets I made for this project and overall aesthetics were chosen for a mixture of necessity and personal taste. That being a graphical style I'd best describe as "Low-Poly Retro", something I've seen used a lot recently in PSX-Style (early Playstation 1 & 2 aesthetic) indie-horror games to great effect.

The typical aesthetics of games using these low-fidelity themes is really appealing to me, I'd say it was for nostalgic reasons but I didn't actually play especially old-school games growing up, aside from Minecraft's blocky graphics, for what that's worth.

However, the more practical reasoning I've been adopting this style in my work is the fundamental simplicity of it. Making models where 90% of the geometry is flat planes that roughly estimate the object is MUCH faster, and more realistic for me to accomplish with my fairly limited modelling and texturing skills.

After combining the mutually simplified meshes, textures, and materials, I try adding visual consistency and additional depth by putting a basic pixel-compression and color-limitation post-process shader effect over the scene, again, harkening back to retro games graphics.

Another core aspect of the visual and mechanical feel I wanted to achieve in the project was strong a diegetic experience, where most if not all of the player's interactions were handled through an object actually present in the game world, rather than a representative UI element on the screen.

This entailed making a menu that still provided some essential settings, but with the options being physically written on paper in the environment with corresponding checkboxes, or for adjusting the game audio, a small radio with volume buttons.

Given the fact that most of the assets and gameplay scripting was made in the one week prior to this submission, most of the development time went towards rapid prototyping of mechanics and building of systems with less of a cohesive design document and more of various handwritten notes and central concepts in mind, aside from the central mechanic on the front panel of a chance-based incremental number climber, which I'd implemented in a super simple c++ text program.

Here are some of said sketches which encompass the majority of this project's preliminary design.

As this project was very rushed in the time up to this submission, there's many mechanics I've had to hold off on implementing till after I felt I'd polished the core game loop enough, even just for an initial prototype release.

Safe to say, I plan to continue working on the Abacus after this submission, and especially adding a lot more variety in the gameplay with the several new module features I have in mind.

Deciding to throw myself and a project I'd worked on for a couple weeks into a prototype for the Rookies one week before the deadline has taught me a lot about my capabilities as a developer (and limits as a human), I'll be happy to get some sleep after this is said and done, at least until the next crunch time I find myself in, for as a budding developer I'm sure this is just the first of many to come!