About the Game

Yesteryears Arcade is a short experimental game - or virtual toy - created by Hexenwerk (solo dev). You interact with an arcade machine to travel through time and unveil historical events that hopefully make you smile.  

The Idea

My original idea was to create some kind of game with a skeuomorphic / haptic 3D retro interface built in Blender. When the Jam started, I decided to use my idea for this. Another inspiration was a funny animated gif I found a few years ago - a happy sun and earth carousel. So I combined both these themes.

The Jam Theme

Yesteryears Arcade has been developed from August to October 2025 for the YAZJam 6. The game follows the theme of this Jam in the following aspects:

- The game is located in "space"

- it features cute elements (kawaii)

- optional diversifier: The rotating sphere (sun)

Controls

- Start Game: Drag the joystick at the bottom right to the right

- Turn the carousel: Drag the joystick to the right or to the left

- Change speed: Click one of the three speed buttons at the bottom

- Restart the game: Pull the lever on the left

- Change Volume: Move the slider on the right

- Quit game: Press ESC

- Switch between Windowed/Fullscreen: Alt + Enter (Browser: F11)

- Reset overall progress: Press Backspace

Languages

The game can be played in English

Known Issues

Something that might happen during the initial game round: A black display with strange symbols on the speed buttons. If you encounter that, and see no alien who wants to talk to you, a game reset with the reset lever may help. I tried fixing it but I am not sure if it helped.

Credits

This game has been developed by Hexenwerk based on a simple stupid idea. 

The Game Art  and UI was created without the help of AI, but I made massive use of Gemini for the game code (C# Scripts for Unity). This was part of my experiment how far I can get with this, and for me it worked.

Audio

Music and Sound Effects are from freesound.org. Many thanks to: 

- slimclic

- rap2h

- noisecollector

- herbertboland

- fmaudio

- qubodup

- soapboxrocket 

Video

The cute cat is a free asset from pixabay: https://pixabay.com/videos/cat-sleep-animal-sleeping-pet-35693/