A.R.C. Awesome Repair Team (CREATE Submission)

[Tobiah Marks]

The official thread is here.

Hi everybody.

My name is Tobiah. I've been a independent game developer since graduating college 4 years ago, and I made a puzzle game for the OUYA Create game jam.

It's codenamed "A.R.C." or Awesome Repair Crew. I'll probably end up changing the name to something better later on.
In the game you play a team of space station repairmen who have to fix a broken down station. The trick is, the gravity is out, so they're all in 0g. You'll have to float around a gird trying to get all the characters to their respective goal locations.

Gameplay video+explanation

(The video was also created in the last 30 minutes, so it's a bit thrown together as well. I'm sorry I ran out of time for a higher quality presentation)

I am just a one man team. As of right now, besides a character concept piece, all I have is programmer art. So the game doesn't look all that pretty yet. But I am happy with where I am at so far gameplay wise. I've prototyped out 100+ levels, and starting to get a good feel for the puzzles. I will be working on adding even more levels to the game, with more variety of theme and mechanics before release.

This is the first project of my brand new solo company, PlayPerro. Since it's brand new, I am just starting to work on the marketing thing.

If I am lucky enough to win anything from the competition, I will be able to use all that money to hire artist(s) to help make the game look as great as it can.

If you are interested in the game, please take the time to go to the Kill Screen page and hit those Tweet/Like buttons. I hear that those matter a lot to the judges.

You can also follow my company PlayPerro on Twitter, and if you'd like you can follow me personally as well. I also just created a Facebook page, if you want to be one of the first to like me there.

If you have any feedback/questions/comments about the game/my company/anything else please feel free to ask here or email me directly.

Thank you!
-Tobiah

[Tobiah Marks]

What happens when you write a post at 4:30am, you mess up your own name in the subject line. Awesome Repair CREW not team heh. Well as I said the name is temporary until I can think of a better one.

[wizzdingo]

This game caught my attention because it feels a lot like one of my favorite board games, Ricochet Robots.

Looking forward to seeing it on the Ouya.

[Tobiah Marks]

This game caught my attention because it feels a lot like one of my favorite board games, Ricochet Robots.

Looking forward to seeing it on the Ouya.

Exactly my primary inspiration! I love that board game so much.

The problem I find is some of my friends just don't want to play it, because once moves start getting complicated it gets hard to remember everything in your head. I wanted this game to have that similar puzzle, but in a much more accessible way.

I reduced the size of the grid by a lot, to make it easier to understand. Players can visual the puzzles by sliding around on the screen, and undoing and redoing moves without time limit. Yet at the end of the level, they will be scored based on number of moves and time. So some players will attempt to find the minimal move solution, where as others will just bounce around until they hit it.

Then I increased the complexity a bit and made it so you have to get multiple characters to multiple goals, which leads to some interesting puzzles. You might get blue and red to a goal, but then you realize you need to use another character in order to get green to its goal. The order of which you solve them ends up mattering a lot, very much if trying to do things in the least amount of moves.