RightSizing
Made in 4 days for the GMTK game jam 2024, this cartoonishly oppressive business manager has the player hire, acquire, and literally fire their employees out of a cannon to keep the giant robot of capitalism afloat. I handled the set design and dressing, 2D art, particle effects, and shaders.
Overview
Players are tasked with running a giant robot corporation. This means sorting through resumes, to hire employees, to work on projects that earn profits for the company. Employees have their own stats that effect their productivity and moral, and must be paid on a set pay cycle, tracked by the clock on the wall. The player can summon employees to their office to either promote a hard worker that needs a moral boost or fire an employee that “isn’t supporting the company culture”. The player earns profits to add departments to their company so they can hire more employees, and if the player reaches the end of a pay cycle and can’t pay their employees, or the company moral bar bottoms or tops out, the company fails (and catastrophically explodes).
Promotion! Prepare to receive your mandated celebration
The company is going in a different direction..
the business world isn't for everyone
The world outside
With only 3 days to create the set, I had the idea that implying a larger world would be more effective than trying to show one. So I built a dark office, where the player would be staring at a cutesy management program. The only clues the player would receive about the actual outside world would be the boom of the canon, the rumble of a company getting “acquired”, or the occasional cheer from employees. These sounds were all very distant, and I hoped that this would make the player ask themselves - what’s actually out there?
The computer
I was intrigued by the idea of having an interactive computer screen inside the game. So a render texture was setup to an off screen orthographic camera, to which I modified and appended a full screen render CRT filter. The intractability was achieved (by our programmer) by teleporting a raycast to line up with our distant camera.
Post Mortem
When the jam was over, our two biggest complained about topics was onboarding and signposting. Players would often miss the fact that you could click on employees on the in game computer screen, and they would also just click on the lit buttons repeatedly, even when they weren’t doing anything.
Had we had the foresight and time to address the clickability problem: I would have liked to morph the players “real” computer cursor to an “in computer” styled one when they moused over the screen. I think this, plus some additional highlighting on clickable objects, would have suggested a level of intractability that we currently aren’t communicating to the player.
To address the button issue, ALL buttons should only be lit when they are relevant. This would have meant that the thumbs up/down buttons wouldn’t be clickable until the employee arrives in the elevator. Removing nonreactive buttons would have done a lot to lead the player towards a full understanding of this information heavy game.