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The New Arcade course at NYU ITP sets a simple, terrifying premise: design and build a fully playable arcade cabinet experience from scratch. Game logic, narrative, physical interface, cabinet design — all of it, in one semester. The goal was to push past what a game on a screen can do and make something that lives in a room, demands your body, and rewards playing with someone else.
It's Raining Vegetables! is a fast-paced, two-player co-op game set in a surreal food universe where rival cities are made entirely of edible matter. Players work together to catch nutritious falling ingredients and keep Jello — their gelatinous, glucose-sensitive companion — alive, while dodging the junk food raining down from above.
The lore isn't decorative. What happens when Jello consumes too much sugar? Why do certain ingredients carry more gameplay weight than others? These questions shaped the game's mechanics directly, so that the world and the rules felt like they came from the same place. Coherent absurdity is harder to pull off than it sounds.
The result is a playable, physical arcade cabinet that people actually want to play — loud, chaotic, and built around the kind of shared laughter that only happens when you're both losing together. The project tested the full range of what design across mediums means in practice: narrative, interaction, physical form, and visual identity all had to pull in the same direction simultaneously.
Good design can be weird, loud, and full of vegetables. This project proved it.
