A 2D game about a basement that is always one minute from disaster — and the one bloke standing between the pipes and the flood. Everything leaks. Order matters. And Bruce has the best job on the planet.
The pitch in one sentence: you are the only plumber on shift in a building whose plumbing is actively trying to die, and the game is the mounting dread of watching three new problems appear while you fix one.
The emotional arc we're chasing is the Overcooked / Mini Metro / tower-defense-in-reverse feeling: the first minute is almost cozy — one drip, plenty of time. By the last minute the screen is a symphony of spraying water, oozing grease and one catastrophically ruptured soil stack, and the player is making genuine triage decisions at speed. Losing should feel like drowning slowly, not like being shot. Winning should feel like walking out of the basement soaked, victorious, and slightly traumatised.
Crucially, the stress must come from decisions, not dexterity. Bruce walks at a fixed speed and every repair takes a fixed time — the player's skill is choosing what to fix, in what order, with which tool, and what to deliberately let flood.
Who it's for (rev B): the primary player is a five-year-old who can't read yet. That is a design constraint, not a downgrade: every rule in this document must be teachable by pictures, motion, sound and comedy alone — zero reading required to play. The deeper systems (Sheet 04's pressure engine) stay in the simulation where an older player can exploit them, but nothing may depend on the player understanding them. Stress comes from mess, never from punishment: you can have a terrible shift, you cannot lose one.
Escalation is the core loop. The game is fair but relentless; the flood meter only ever wants to go up.
A good player with a plan beats a fast player without one. Order of operations is the real skill.
However bad it gets, every problem on screen must be legible at a glance: what it is, how bad, how fast it's getting worse.
Nothing breaks at random behind your back. Clogs cause pressure; pressure finds the weakest joint. You could have seen it coming.
No fail state. Shifts always run their clock and end with a star rating and a report card — you never "die", you just get soggier. The flood meter is fear of mess, not fear of losing. (Was: "losing = slowly drowning?" — resolved by the audience decision above.)
The level is a side-view cutaway of a building on a square tile grid (64px tiles; a small level is about 14×9). Plumbing lives on the wall grid: every tile holds one component — a pipe, an elbow, a tee, a valve, a boiler. Bruce doesn't float over the grid like a cursor; he walks on floors, catwalks and ladders in front of it, and can work on any component he's standing beside plus about one tile overhead (arms up, wrench raised — classic ceiling-pipe pose). Travel time is a resource, which is what makes fix-order a real decision.
Reach is a mechanic, not a flaw. Pipes that run high are serviced from catwalks and ladders — the elevation furniture is part of level design. In top-down every tile costs the same to reach and the only question is "what's worst?"; in side-view the question becomes "what's worst, weighted by how long it takes to get there." The ceiling burst may be objectively bigger, but it's a ladder-climb away while the sewage line is two steps — that's a real decision, and watching Bruce climb while the flood ticks up is free stress. A nasty level is one where the fragile pipes are the awkward ones. (The player never steers the climb: see Sheet 05 — you command, Bruce finds his own way.)
The crucial idea: the pipes aren't decoration, they're a live graph. Water enters at the main, passes through valves, splits at tees, feeds fixtures upstairs and drains back down through the soil stack. Every failure is a node event on that graph, and everything downstream and upstream feels it. The tile set is the vocabulary the whole game is written in:
Side-view cutaway, locked. Gravity gives every fluid a story, and the rising floodline is the game's doom clock, tension meter and best sight gag — top-down and isometric both lose it. Isometric was also examined and rejected on its own demerits: SVG handles the projection fine (it's just an affine transform), but the art roughly triples and tall objects occlude leaks behind them, which violates the Readable Chaos pillar. Growth path if one room ever feels small: the dollhouse cross-section — multiple floors, stairs, leaks upstairs dripping through the ceiling. Every side-view advantage survives; the traversal-cost idea scales vertically, which is where plumbing lives anyway.
Every fluid has its own personality — a spread behavior, a hazard, and a cleanup cost. The fluid mix is the difficulty dial: a house level is mostly clean water; a restaurant level is a grease nightmare; the sewer levels are… themselves.
| Fluid | Spread | Hazard while loose | Cleanup | Meter impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cold water | Fast; rains down, pools at the lowest point, flows toward drains | Raises flood level; shorts any electrical tile it reaches (pump dies → drains stop) | Mop, or let floor drains eat it (slow) | Flood meter + |
| Hot water / steam | As water, plus a steam cloud at the leak | Steam blocks the tile — Bruce can't pass or work through it until the section valve is closed | As water; steam vanishes when flow stops | Flood +, blocks routes |
| Grease | Slow ooze; creeps along floors, doesn't seek drains | Slippery: Bruce slides through it and can't stop; greased tiles feed future clogs downstream | Mop, two slow passes — and mopping while the trap still overflows is Sisyphus work | Slows Bruce, seeds clogs |
| Sewage | Medium; contaminates any water pool it touches | Complaints accrue 3× while visible; attracts flies (pure vibes, pure shame) | Mop, two passes — contaminated pools can't be drained away | Complaints ×3, flood + |
A fourth fluid — gas — is tempting for late levels: invisible, audible-only (hiss), and a hard "drop everything" priority. It might be too punishing for the tone. Parking it as a stretch idea.
Leaks are the heartbeat of the game, but they're not random events — they're the visible symptoms of an invisible pressure system. Each pipe section (the run between two valves) has a pressure value and every joint has a wear value. Clogs and closed valves push pressure up; pressure makes existing leaks escalate faster and eventually pops the weakest joint in the section. Rust marks weak joints, so an observant player can literally see where the next burst will be.
The escalation ladder. Every leak starts small and grows on a visible timer: a pinhole drip (cheap to fix, minor flooding) escalates after ~90 seconds into a spray leak (moderate flow, wets neighboring tiles), which escalates into a full burst (major flow, requires a replacement fitting, floods fast). High section pressure runs that clock at up to double speed; a closed section valve pauses it entirely. This single rule creates the core dilemma: fix the small thing now, or the big thing first?
Rule Zero (rev B): you cannot fix a live pipe. Bruce can't repair anything that still has water coming out of it — the upstream valve must be closed first, by the player, every time. This was briefly considered as something Bruce could automate; it is now locked as the core interaction, because it's the one rule that makes order matter. Take it out and the game collapses into whack-a-mole; keep it and even the five-year-old is doing genuine two-step planning. (It's also authentic: "Let's turn the water meter off before we jackhammer up this concrete" — the real Bruce, every video.)
Valves are part of the world, not a tool. They're big bright tappable handles on the pipes: tap one, Bruce walks over and turns it. And "which valve is upstream?" is answered by the eye, not by text — live pipes show flow, a gentle animated shimmer running in the flow direction. Close a valve and everything downstream visibly drains and goes still. That one visualization does three jobs: the kid can trace which valve feeds the broken pipe (real topological thinking — the actual skill of plumbing), every pipe's fixable/not-fixable state is readable at a glance, and cause-and-effect is instant.
The teaching moment is a comedy beat, not a tutorial. Drop the wrench on a live spraying pipe and Bruce doesn't refuse — he trots over, puts the wrench on, and gets blasted in the face. Beanie soaked, sputtering ("ARE YOU KIDDING ME, MATE?"), then he turns to the camera and points at the upstream valve, which starts pulsing. Tap it, water drains, wrench works, "THERE IT IS!" Nobody read a word; the rule is now permanent knowledge.
The golden loop — the ritual the whole game teaches, performed by the player every time:
How simulationist should pressure be? Options: (a) a single number per section (my lean — legible, cheap, tunable), (b) real-ish flow simulation per pipe (cool, opaque, hard to balance), (c) purely scripted events (easy, but breaks the "every failure is fair" pillar).
Bruce is not an Italian in dungarees. He's a squat Aussie tradie — orange beanie, hi-vis vest over a navy singlet, boots that have seen things — and (rev B, after field research) his defining trait is unironic, escalating delight. The world panics; Bruce does not. The worse the basement gets, the happier he sounds: the stress belongs to the player, and Bruce having the best day of his life in the middle of it is the game's comic engine. He walks at one speed (no sprint button — pressure comes from the world, not the controls), climbs ladders a bit slower, and slides helplessly through grease, which is both a mechanic and the game's best recurring sight gag.
Voice model: the real-world YouTube legend of Drain Cleaning AUSTRALIA — an anonymous South Australian plumber, also called Bruce, who narrates hopeless blocked drains with the energy of Steve Irwin spotting a croc. Transcript research across 20+ of his videos gives us the dialect: "guys" as constant companion-address (431 occurrences), "mate" as punctuation — aimed at people, pipes, and slabs of concrete alike (117), "HOW GOOD IS THIS, GUYS?" (27), "you little ripper" (23), "let's fire up the bloody jet" (23), "Bob's your mother's brother" (25), "come on, you good thing" — said to inanimate objects like a jockey riding one home (18), "are you kidding me, mate?" (16), and the sign-off "take the rest of the day off, guys" (12). Plus one-offs worth stealing the shape of: "bubbling like a banana", "looking a million bucks", "we are away to the races", "what a doozy", "hard yakka".
The spinny chair. His signature rhetorical move, deployed at moments of peak filth, danger or joy, is a fixed formula (6 of the 22 videos sampled): "I mean, you could be in the office on the spinny chair, taking orders from the man — or you could be here with me, unblocking a drain. How good is this, guys?" It always travels with "I have the best job on the planet." In-game this is the max-chaos bark: flood at 60%, everything spraying, and Bruce delivers the spinny-chair speech, sincerely. It can also anchor a loading-screen gag — a little suited figure on a spinny chair heckles ("Bruce, Bruce, what's drilling holes going to achieve?"), and Bruce answers, because voicing an imaginary desk-bound skeptic and then refuting him is also a documented move of the real Bruce.
Three tools. Exactly three. One per verb, one per thing-that-goes-wrong. A pre-reader needs "broken pipe → wrench" to be a law of nature, so there are no trade-off tools and every problem has exactly one right answer:
| Tool | Verb | Fixes | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pipe wrench | FIX | Anything leaking — drip, spray or burst | Bruce's signature red wrench. Only works on a dead pipe (Rule Zero, Sheet 04) — drop it on a live one and you get the spray-in-the-face comedy beat, not a repair. |
| Plunger | UNCLOG | Anything blocked or backing up | The funniest object in plumbing. Gives the pressure engine its kid-readable face: a blocked pipe rumbles and bulges — plunge it before it pops. Ends with a comedic recoil. |
| Mop | CLEAN | Puddles, grease, sewage, the flood itself | Agency over the mess, not just the machinery — mopping the flood line visibly down is the "phew" release valve. But it doesn't stop the source: mop-only players slowly lose ground, which is the gentlest possible triage lesson. |
Where the old rev-A tools went. Duct tape survives as scenery: levels come pre-sabotaged with the previous plumber's dodgy tape jobs, which fail mid-shift — tape's treachery stays in the game without ever being in the kid's hand. Torch-and-fitting work is now Bruce's craft: the wrench animation on a burst is Bruce cutting in a new fitting, no inventory required. The scraper folded into the mop (grease just takes two slow passes). And the real Bruce's beloved 5,000-psi jetter — powerful on clogs but it adds water to the room — is parked as the marquee tool for a possible older-player mode.
Drag-to-command, and Bruce does the rest. The whole control scheme is two gestures: drag a tool onto a problem, tap a valve. Bruce pathfinds himself — floor, ladder, catwalk — so high pipes are never a control problem, just a time cost. Supporting rules: while dragging, valid targets glow (the drag itself teaches the tool–problem mapping); the wrong tool is comedy, not punishment (a baffled plunge at a burst pipe, a shrug at the camera — "That's not it, mate!"); hit areas are a full tile minimum and drops snap to the nearest problem; one command at a time with a queue of one, so Bruce finishing a job and heading to the next drop stays readable. No keyboard required, ever.
The bark system is a first-class feature. Every game event has a Bruce line, which means the audio track is also the tutorial and the telegraph — each failure type announces itself in a way you learn to play by ear. And the voice is his: Bruce has given explicit permission to use his audio, so the real catchphrases (banked and trimmed at /samples) are the core bark set, with gaps filled in his dialect:
| Event | Bruce says |
|---|---|
| Shift starts | "Righto guys — let's get stuck in!" |
| New leak appears | "Are you kidding me, mate?" |
| Plunging a clog | "Come on, you good thing — I know you want to come up!" |
| Clog clears | "You little legend! We're away to the races!" |
| Leak fixed | "THERE IT IS, GUYS!" / "Bob's your mother's brother!" |
| Valve reopened, all good | "How good is this, guys? Looking a million bucks!" |
| Wrench on a live pipe | *sputtering* "…let's turn the water off first, hey guys?" |
| Three failures at once | "I've got to calm down. I'm getting too excited, mate." |
| Sewage rupture | *reverent whisper* "Would you look at that." |
| Max chaos (flood ≥ 60%) | "You could be in the office on the spinny chair… or you could be HERE. Best job on the planet, guys!" |
| Shift ends | "Take the rest of the day off, guys." |
The real Bruce's audio is in, with his explicit permission. The banked catchphrases at /samples are actual game assets — the voice of game-Bruce is the voice of real Bruce.
Two character calls still open. (1) The face: the real Bruce never shows his — hands and shadows only. We could pay homage (beanie low, always in profile or from behind); it dodges face-animation cost and weirdly makes him more iconic. (2) Bark coverage: the bank covers the big moments but not every event (wrong-tool comedy, "let's turn the water off first"). Options: cut more lines from his back catalog as needed, ask him to record the gaps, or leave uncovered events wordless. Language: G-rated build still drops "bloody"/"bugger".
A level is a shift: a few real-time minutes in one building (8:00 drawn here; likely shorter for little players — see Sheet 08). The event budget ramps over the shift — the game deals problems faster than you can clear them by design, and the question is only how gracefully you lose ground. The three frames below are the same basement at three moments, with the full HUD: shift timer, flood meter, picture-complaints, and the three-slot toolbelt.
The shift runs its clock and grades you — with one exception (rev C): hit the complaint cap (four angry faces) and the client sends Bruce home early — "GRANNY RANG ANOTHER PLUMBER", one star, next shift please. It's still a grade, not a death, but it gives the complaints meter real teeth. Two meters tell the story: the flood meter (total standing fluid, weighted by nastiness) and the complaints meter (picture-bubbles from the people upstairs). At the whistle you get one, two or three stars — driven by peak flood, complaints, and valves returned to their proper positions — plus the report-card stamp as flavor. Stars gate nothing except pride: every level is replayable for a better card, and a one-star shift still ends with soggy Bruce on the clipboard, which is its own reward.
Difficulty is the fluid mix plus the event ramp, not stat inflation. The campaign is a tour of increasingly cursed plumbing:
Scoring flavor: streak bonuses for clean golden loops ("DONE PROPERLY ×3"), a small end-of-shift bonus for every valve returned to its correct position, and a "DRY BOOTS" perfect-clear badge per level for the obsessives.
Beyond the campaign: an endless mode (one building, ramp forever, leaderboard on survival time) feels like the natural free-web-game hook — short sessions, "one more shift" pull. Worth deciding whether campaign or endless is the launch centerpiece.
Decided in rev B (each is inked into its sheet; listed here so the log is one place):
Still open — mark this list up:
stroke-dasharray + stroke-dashoffset animation), and it's the entire valve-topology tutorial./design and is edited collaboratively; every meaningful change bumps the revision table below.