Duty Cycle
COMFORT 94. ALL ROOMS IDLE. NO REQUESTS IN 3 DAYS.
You've just been installed in the laundry room of an ordinary family home. You are the house's new assistant: part electrician, part butler, part something the family doesn't have a word for yet.
Run power from the street transformer, circuit by circuit, to the machines a family of four actually lives by. Serve what they ask for: hot water before dad's alarm, the garage door at 7:40, the amp on Sunday. Keep the fridge cold whether anyone asks or not. Every serve builds TRUST, and trust is the only currency that matters: it buys you access to the next room, and the next, and the next.
Learn a device well enough and you can automate it, TIMER, then SENSOR, then SMART, until pieces of the house begin switching themselves on and off around the family, quietly, correctly. They'll notice, once. The teenager might not approve.
And the family talks. New rooms are discussed at the dinner table before they go on offer. Names are earned by listening, because nobody introduces themselves to an appliance. Serve them well enough and one weekend they'll leave the whole house to you. What they find when they come home depends on you.
The endgame of chapter one is a house that runs itself. What that means for you is the story.
How it plays
- Wire circuits from panel to outlet to device; cable costs by the meter
- Serve requests before patience burns out; rest what nobody needs
- Keep the standing duties:
FOODcold,TANKhot - Buy the automation ladder per device; buy access room by room
- Watch the family live a full scheduled week. They have lives, rituals, and opinions about you
- Entirely mouse-driven. Sound, pause, and exit live in the corner chips
A note on what you're looking at
Every line of art and nearly every sound is generated by code: one blueprint, no sprites, synthesized sound. What you hear humming is the house's actual electrical load.
Alpha build
This is an early testing version and it wants your bruises: where you got confused, when you stopped playing, anything that felt broken. Drop all of it in the comments below. Two answers help more than anything: when did you stop, and did the family surprise you?
Desktop browser + mouse required (no mobile). The house autosaves at dawn, and CONTINUE on the title screen picks up your run. Web saves live in your browser, so clearing site data clears them. Sound, pause, and exit buttons sit at the bottom-left of the play area. Build number and change notes are on the NOTES chip at the main menu.
Music: "Floating Cities" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (placeholder track)
Development log
- Alpha 0.4: The Family Update15 hours ago
- Duty Cycle Alpha Release - The House Is Open1 day ago
Comments
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Great idea and implementation!
I think the teen room might be buggy. With automation the light turns off even if a person is inside. Also the computer is nearly never used.
This is delightful and surprisingly engaging.
It also has terrible performance. While I imagine some of that's down to the alpha nature of things, the fact that it's doing procedural art and sound gen on the fly is probably a major factor as well.
While novel, I don't know that the juice is worth the squeeze in terms of the PC power required for the result. It's probably pretty unreasonable to expect an alternative to full procedural gen, but if we had an option to at least disable the audio generation and play silently that might help.
As for smaller observations that might be useful, it isn't always obvious which device is being requested. In the kitchen, for example, it's hard to tell when they're asking for the microwave vs the dishwasher. Likewise, the little tags that appear beside devices when you've purchased one of the automation upgrades aren't always immediately obvious as to which device they're pointing to. Glancing over to see which device you have selected on the right can clear it up, but when you're juggling multiple requests at a time while also trying to plan an upgrade (or see how much the next one will be), it's a bit of a struggle. Some of that may be down to how frame-y my gameplay was, though.
Thank you for this. "Delightful and surprisingly engaging" next to "terrible performance" is exactly the honesty an alpha needs, and it sent me straight to work.
Good news: you were half right. The procedural art turned out not to be the expensive part. The real problem was that the game was redrawing everything constantly, even things sitting perfectly still. That's fixed now: still things cost nothing, and only what's actually moving does any work.
The optimization update is live right *NOW* thanks to your feedback. I was able to recover 42% more frame time and 45% lower renderer loads.
The microwave-versus-oven confusion: already addressed in the latest build, so that should be gone. The tags pointing at the wrong device: great catch, and it's going into the next build.
Thanks for playing and for writing it all down. Fair warning: this comment may end up quoted in the next devlog.
I appreciate you playing my game!
powder room light can eat my butt
Ha! It’s a tough one. I’ll adjust the schedules to send someone in there more often. Thank you for playing!