I'm building an arcade from scratch. And I mean actually from scratch — there is no building yet. An empty lot in a small town in New England, town approvals, foundation, framing, the whole thing — about fourteen months before the doors open.
This devlog is about what I'm doing while I wait.
The arcade will be called The Quarter. A real retro arcade — cabinets, pinball, a floor full of machines. And alongside the classics, something of our own: a custom multiplayer game, built for this specific room, where every player in the building plays in the same persistent world.
One world. One run a day. Nothing resets.
Every machine in every arcade forgets you the moment you walk away. This one never forgets anything. There's one shared world, and the whole community plays through its story together — twenty-five chapters in a season. Each player gets one free run a day. Every run moves a shared progress meter — on a big wall in the arcade, and online. When a chapter finally closes, everyone who chipped at it owns a piece of that story, by name, in a permanent public ledger.
The world is built from the real folklore of the towns around the arcade. I'm keeping the location vague until the paperwork is done — but if you're from around here, you'll recognize things. That's a promise.
There's an old rule in game development: nothing matters if fifteen minutes of play isn't fun. So before the persistent world, before the wall, before any of it, I built the dumbest possible version of the combat. It's a one-person project, so the whole approach is to keep things simple, lean on good tools, and test constantly — the first playable version came together fast.
It's all circles and rectangles on purpose (feel first, art later), but by the end of the week the greybox had:
And then the part that makes it an arcade attraction instead of just a game: the run reports itself to a server, the server writes it into a permanent ledger, and a webpage updates in seconds — chapter one, meter climbing, the run recorded under the player's name. Forever. That pipeline is the spine of everything this project will become.
The first line ever written into the world's history:
Season 1 begins. Twenty-five chapters lie unwritten. The Chronicler sharpens his pen.
Four controllers are in the mail. Next episode, real humans play it for the first time — a test with a name (the Fun Gate) and a real chance of failing. That's what makes it worth writing down.
Follow along. It's going to take a while. That's the good part.