Palmachine Crane-set

Palmachine is an incremental game based off of claw machines. Use your coins to play the machines, getting prizes that help you get even more coins!

Gamejam game for Monkeyjam2025 - third place award

Role: Game designer, game artist

Focus: system design, incremental design

Engine: Unity

Development time: 26th Sep. 2025 to 29th Sep. 2025

Link to itch page (playable on browser): https://isadado.itch.io/palmachine-craneset

The gamejam's theme was Pals, and by being hosted by a popular streamer/youtuber, we decided to theme the game around the person's pals as well as creatures we consider pals.

About the game

Palmachine Crane-set is an idle incremental game where you must win prizes at claw machines to earn money to spend on better machines to win better prizes. But some of those prizes are sentient, they are you long lost pals! You must help them get out and maybe they will help you on your quest to get the most money.

My contribution

Core idea and progression

This game was developed in 3 days by 2 people, so there was not much time to plan around. We had the general idea together and I worked on the systems, focusing on the currency progression and balancing. I also did all the art with vectors, making them scalable and giving them simple animations.

The idea of theming the game around a claw machine arcade came from the content of the youtuber hosting the game jam, CDawgVA, as he sometimes makes videos playing on real life arcades.

Designing the progression

Progression in Palmachine is done by getting enough money to get better prizes. Normal prizes can give a flat amount of currency, characters produce currency over time or upgrade the production of another character.

Being a short incremental game, it was important to make the progression steep, in a way that players would not immediately unlock the next upgrade, but it would not take too long to get the next one, so we implemented multiple currencies to have players always close to the next new prize.

Art - function and visuals

As a designer that can do art, I had to figure out a way to make quick assets that are easily reproduced and repurposed.

So I settled for a simple vector art style that allowed me to break down the characters and items into multiple shapes that I could then give them a simple wobble animation in engine.

Designing and drawing the items was the most fun part, as I had to consider how the claw would hook them. As the game progressed, I designed harder and harder items to hook

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