Plumber Simulator 2KInfinity (PS2K8)

Plumber Simulator is a game about a plumber's worst nightmare. You play as a plumber in a basement filled with a copious amount of pipes that are all about to burst. You don't have your tools with you so you have to fix the holes by plugging them with your fingers until the leak stops. The game creates an atmosphere that is funny, exciting and nerve-racking.
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Game Play Scripts

The gameplay is fairly simple. After a starting countdown, the holes will start popping up all over the screen, spewing water. There are UI elements on the leaks telling the player which key to press to fix the leak and a circular fill bar showing the amount of life remaining on the leak before it will be fixed. Once the bar is full, the leak is fixed and the player can use that finger to fix other holes.

The development was pretty simple with only 5 scripts needing to be added to the unity engine for the entire game including menu systems. We coded plumber simulator in C#. I acted as the lead programmer and made the majority of game play. The game was quite simple to set up. To better illustrate how the systems interact with one-another, I will go over the 3 scripts that create the core game experience, the cursor replacement, pipe burst script, and  game controller.

​To start, one of my favorite systems is also possibly the most simple. The script allows us to replace the cursor with a 3D crayon model and use it on the clipboard menus. The crayon tip is simply repeatedly moved to the location of the mouse while making the regular mouse hidden. It interacts with UI by making the UI world-space and attaching it to a model of a clip board that can move around the screen.

The game controller and burst scripts work hand in hand with each other. Burst scripts are attached to every leak prefab we want in the scene. These scripts have a burst function to start them activating particle systems and adding them to the game controller's list of active leaks. They run their own health bar and grab a unique random key that the player has to press to fix the leak. The particle systems on them also change depending on whether they are above or below the plane of water rising up from the ground. They also have follow different events from the game controller allowing the leaks to continue their visual effect after the game has ended but ending their intractability while maintaining the particle effects to make it look like they're still leaking. These make up the cornerstone of the game and combined with the controller, only the two scripts are really needed to run the whole game.

The main game loop runs in three stages: pregame, mid-game and post game. During the game the game controller loops indefinitely grabbing new random leaks and turns them on based off of a time buffer generated from a random number within a range. This keeps new leaks emerging but stops them when they reacha certain level. When the water gets above a set y position, the player dies and the end game screen appears. Honestly a fairly simple game loop

Since Development Ended

This game was actually finished in April of 2016 and laid dormant on my computer for a while. We only meant for it to be a small, month long game jam and leave it at that. In the fall, it had some minor upgrades and bug fixes for OUGDA to present it at the Game Developers Expo (GDEX) in Columbus, Ohio in late October. Since then it hasn't seen much else. I am posting it now and updating information because I finally know more about getting good quality capture of the game and how to make it available online. There probably won't be any more changes to Plumber Simulator, as I really like closing these small games I develop so I can learn and go make a bigger and more exciting project afterwards. You can however play/download this game now if you like!

This game is currently available on itch.io for free. You can play it in browser or download it if you like! If you just want to see the game player all the way through, see the Youtube video where I play through a round of the game. If you are more interested in the technical side of how this game was developed, all source code for the game is available on my github, linked below. Thanks for reading, this game was a really fun chapter in my development career and I hope you enjoy the game!

Itch.io:
https://andrewdecker.itch.io/ps2k8