Behind the scenes: how a new Arcade Mania cabinet gets designed (and why most ideas don't make it)

A few people in the "what should we polish next" thread brought up wanting new machines, so wanted to pull back the curtain on how that actually happens.

Every cabinet starts as one of roughly 10-15 rough concepts, and most don't survive the first review usually because the core hook doesn't land within a few seconds of standing in front of it, which is the bar we hold ourselves to in VR specifically. The ideas that do survive get built as an unstyled, playable mockup first. No art, no polish just the mechanic, to make sure it's actually fun before we spend time making it look good.

This doesn't answer whether we're adding new cabinets vs. going deeper on existing ones that's still genuinely open, see the polish thread but hopefully it's useful context either way.