Inspiration
We both play way too many incremental games. Balatro, cookie clicker variants, Clover Pit, yadayada, etc etc, anything that makes you feel good because of an absurdly large number. We wanted to build something in that space but tie it to something we like doing and something that fits this years theme rather than just gambling , so we landed on digital logic and the relationship between an engineer and automation, how although automating everything is helpful to an engineer its still fragile and can break down at any time, although getting the automation started in this game is easy its just there to give a lesson on how basic logic gates n such work since barely anybody who would play this would be advanced enough to do the puzzles.
how the code is structured (since we forgot to add that into the video)
so all the game state lives in one useState in App.jsx, credits, stamina, machines, tasks, all of it, and from there the code splits into three folders, game/ which is all the logic like ending a day, aging machines, checking quota, adding debt, generating tasks and shop offers, engine/ which is just two math files, one that checks if your circuit outputs the right thing and one that calculates chips times mult for your score, and data/ which is just flat config lists for machines, puzzles, synergies, none of it changes at runtime, then the components are mostly just display, the big one is the circuit editor which we built from scratch, its a grid where you place gates and draw wires, and PuzzleBoard.jsx wraps it so when you solve a puzzle it knows if you were installing a machine, repairing one, or connecting two for a synergy bonus, everything else is just HUD stuff, shop, shelf, modals, floating text.
What it does
Quota Machine is an incremental style game where you play as a systems level engineer trying to meet a daily quota that increases at every day and if you dont make the quota you go into debt and if you go too deep into debt you DIE, just like real life :)), you start by buying machines that will give you chips and/or mult (you can guess where we got that naming convention from), but everything ships to you offline so you have to solve a puzzle to get it online, the puzzle is just a simple problem with logic gates, you can also connect machines to one another for synergy to multiply the output, occasionally machines wil break down and you will have to do a puzzle to get it back online showing how fragile automation can be.
How we built it
We have no game engine and everything is made with just react and vanilla JS, we made a circuit elevator from scratch for the puzzles themselves, the puzzles are procedurally generated with random everything, and everything scales based off of how many days you have survived.
Challenges we ran into
Balancing the game was way harder than we expected (now i know what its like to be supercell) since everything interacts with each other in some way and every base stat that we made was just dead wrong and needed tweaking, the puzzle generation was also a challenge sometimes the randomly generated puzzled would already be solves or it would always output the same thing or it was just plain impossible to solve so we had to filter the puzzles so the player actually has puzzles to solve. also actually putting the circuits out on the page was extremely difficult, it still looks unrefined right now.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
it sort of plays like a real game, evaluating the circuits works and were honestly really really proud of that since it was definitely the hardest part to code.
What we learned
Predictable game play freaking stinks and is boring and just sucks, but if its too chaotic it also freaking sucks.
What's next for Quota Machine
just small tweaks here and there to get the game properly balanced and to the difficulty of Balatro and Clover Pit and some other small things to refine it a little bit
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