What it is
Robo Repair Rush is a 3D first-person timed puzzle game made in Unity for COMP3540 at ANU, built with three classmates over a semester.
You play as a robot whose job is to repair other broken robots scattered around a map. Each robot needs a specific set of randomly generated parts to fix. The required parts show up on a TV in the level. You run around collecting parts, bring them back, and either submit them by hand or throw them at the robot's hitbox. Yes, throwing counts. Yes, trickshots are viable.
The catch: submit the wrong part and the robot breaks, resetting the required parts entirely. The main pressure is a strict timer, though successfully fixing a robot rewards you with extra time. Fix all the robots in a level to clear it. A new robot rolls in on a conveyor belt each time you finish one.
It's a 3D FPS movement-based timed puzzle game. It is a lot of things at once, and that itself was a lesson.
Movement and upgrades
Movement is a bigger part of the game than the description makes it sound. Holding space lets you jump higher. Momentum carries through jumps. Parts can be thrown and still count as a valid submission if they hit the hitbox, so there is genuine skill ceiling for people who want to optimize.
Hidden around each map are vending machines offering two upgrades at the cost of time penalties: speed and strength. Speed is self-explanatory. Strength increases throw distance, which opens up a whole playstyle of just lobbing parts across the map instead of walking them over.
Designing maps 5 and 6
I designed the last two maps, which are also the hardest two.
Map 5: The Island. The setting is a flooded island with water physics. Parts and the robot to fix are floating in the water among debris: furniture, cars, trash. The path to everything is parkour across the floating junk. It works well with the strength upgrade because you can skip a lot of the parkour by throwing parts from a distance.
Map 6: The Factory. This one is my favourite. The concept: you are an escaped robot who gained sentience, returning to the factory that built you to free your friends stuck on a broken assembly line. For the first time in the game, the robots you need to fix are moving, riding conveyor belts that randomly change direction, speed, and route. I also added lasers that instantly kill you, sending you back to the start without whatever part you were holding. The conveyor belts can push you into those lasers if you are not paying attention. It is the most chaotic and most satisfying map in the game.
What this project actually taught me
The game design side was a genuine time sink. Going into a project this scope without a locked design document leads to exactly the kind of feature confusion we ran into. Not having a concrete design before touching Unity costs you more time than the design process would have.
More than that, this was the group project that actually needed to function as a team. Previous group work at ANU did not require the same level of communication, regular meetings, or genuine coordination. Working with strangers on a shared creative project where everyone has opinions is different from splitting up a software assignment. It required more patience, more compromise, and more trust.
I came out of it wanting to make more games. Game design is a hassle, genuinely difficult, and a real time sink. It is also one of the most satisfying things I have worked on. Looking forward to more of it.