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title: Gacha machines

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# Gacha machines

LET'S GO GAMBLING

This is a general design doc/guidance for the new gacha mechanics I'm adding in an upcoming PR. For those unfamiliar, gachapon vending machines (or "gacha machines") are small coin-operated machines ubiquitous in Japan that dispense little capsules with collectable prizes inside.

![PG-2](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HkXskJYz1x.jpg)

## Goals
1. Provide an additional outlet for small, fun items that are often unseen by players or are difficult to place in other areas in the game without being too out-of-the-way or obscure.
2. Provide an extra, small time-waster mechanic for players who may be bored and feel like spending extra credits to find something fun to mess around with.
3. Diversify station vending/arcade areas with more things to interact with.

## Non-Goals
1. Function as a "loot dispenser".
2. Provide an alternative source to obtain all arcade rewards.

## Guidance on adding items
* Items should not have any significant gameplay advantage or use outside of just being a fun time-waster. Things like the current toys and plushes are a good example. I don't intend on adding every toy and plush to the table (as I don't want to completely outmode arcades; they should generally have better stuff than gacha machines) but most of them are a good fit here.
* Items can be added at different rarities who's odds roll once the capsule is opened. Since we can adjust those rarities, items that are harder to find normally can be added to capsules without fear of them being too common.
* Items that do nothing on their own but are generally just kind of cool should be relatively common. Action figures are the best example of this, and all future figures that aren't intended to be extremely obscure should be added. There *will* be a function to add rarity to action figures as part of this, so they can be added as a higher rarity if you're concerned about them being too common.
* Item size shouldn't be a concern here. The lore flavor on the capsules will be that they use bluespace technology to hold items of any size, so don't worry about what can logically fit in a little sphere. I would encourage adding large, strange items to them from time to time, as the idea of someone opening a little handheld capsule and getting a large oxygen tank sounds very funny.
* We will need items for the contraband version, as these will basically just be vending machines with 1-4 available items. Focus these on potentially dangerous things that aren't too disruptive to have.

## Potential ideas
* Someone mentioned making emagging the vending machine cause it to dispense capsules that have a ~10% chance of spitting out a live grenade. This sounds hilarious but I'm not sure live grenades exist as an item, nor do I know if vending machines have an EmagAct.
* The PR will come with a rework on action figures, adding different rarities to them and making the crew job ones common with the other ones more rare. I intend on adding a 1-in-10,000 six star rarity John Syndicate one that will trigger an achievement, similar to the arcade machine achievement for getting the pulse carbine. Otherwise, action figures will continue to do absolutely nothing but look cool.
* The overarching joke here is obviously towards gacha mobile games, so a few items that make fun of that wouldn't be a bad idea here. I want to add at least one waifu figure that's a pastiche of characters that do nothing but are really hot to get you to buy pulls to get them.

## Sprite work needed!
I will need assistance with the following sprites:
* The vending machine itself (I'm thinking something similar to the above picture, like 4-6 of them stacked together. If not, then just a single one that's a little smaller than the other vending machines.)
* Capsules (I might be able to coder sprite these; they're not too complicated. I also kind of want to GAGS these so they come in a bunch of different colors.)
* New action figures (We could use more for the higher rarities, also need to figure out how to apply a silver, gold, or platinum overlay to existing sprites.)