Making of Work Life Balance

A week after working on this game for Ludum Dare 44 I thought it might be interesting to write about the development of this little game. I didn't keep a log last weekend and I'm too old to have been streaming my development live so ramblings in hindsight is the best we've got!

Anticipation

My first Ludum Dare was LD41 and it was a great experience. LD42 and LD43 seemed to fall on weekends that simply didn't work. I had been feeling like I was missing out. More importantly I have loads of game ideas, and a desire to get some games released and needed a kick up the bum to get back into development. I suggested some themes that didn't make the slaughter (hey, few do):

• Something Pun
• Inside out and upside down
• And something else that I've forgotten so it can't have been very good.

I didn't have any ideas that would actually match these themes so I wasn't really invested in them. 

By the time theme slaughter and some rounds of theme voting were completed there was no particular theme I was pinning my hopes on, but I was sure I could come up with something  for any theme.

I chose the Compo as I was working on my own anyway and only had 36 hours (it started at 1pm on Saturday and I still had to work on Monday). It added the challenge of having to create music, art and sound effects from scratch but that turned out to be a bit of a unexpected win and probably the best part of my game!

Theme reveal and brainstorming

Your life is currency.

Oh. 

...

While I guess there are subtleties in the theme (and lots of the games I've played this week were creative with this) it also leads itself to some fairly obvious mechanics. I started brainstorming in a notebook and here are some of the ideas and why they were rejected:

Fat Cat 

Thoughts: Cats have 9 lives. Fat cats have lots of money. Maybe trade some of your nine lives to pimp out your cat mansion. I was reminded of a game from the 80s called Alley Cat that we had on PC. Platform and mini games to earn the opportunity to trade a life for more loot.

Rejected: Due to needing to make a lot of assets mainly.

Ransom

Thoughts: You are a hostage (i.e., your life has a monetary value) and you need to escape or something.

Rejected: Either this game was going to be a simple platformer while you escape or it was going to end up in a very dark place as you make yourself worthless to the hostage takers by damaging or killing yourself. I didn't have the enthusiasm to follow this through.

Murder Mystery

Thoughts: You are a detective being taunted by a serial killer, you need to solve murders to get a bonus while trying to stay one step ahead in order to prevent him from taking your life.

Rejected: I started writing up ideas for a way to procedurally generate logic puzzles that could represent the murder cases and realised that if I was going to pursue this idea I would need a lot more time to make it work the way I'd like to.

And the rest

Some others barely made it past a few words:

• Vampires using and trading in blood
• Reincarnation
• Fade out Back to the Future style
• Robot battery power
• Trade life bar for upgrades

Finally a work simulator

Ironically because I was spending the weekend getting away from work I decided to work hard simulating work.

I decided that you would do menial tasks with specifically pointless mini-games that trade stamina for dollars. Death is inevitable and the game being the challenge of how long you can survive and how much money you can make for the 'corporation' while doing so.

Get on with it

I already had my heart set on using Godot for this game. I'd been dabbling Godot and following development closely but never really made a game with it. All my experiments had been in 2D, but I fired up Godot which defaults to the 3D view and thought "Why not?".

First step (as my 3D modelling skills are really really rusty) was to check if it was possible to import from MagicaVoxel directly into Godot. I made a quick placeholder box, imported it with the appropriate extension and it worked! Including the right material! Excellent, I'm locked in now.

For the rest of Saturday afternoon I worked on making trigger areas, learning how to map mouse clicks to world space, navigation and path finding and so on. By Saturday night I had a small boxy character and a plane with some walls that would walk where you clicked, and logging to the console the thing I wished would happen when you got to specific trigger areas. Life got in the way of the rest the available time and I eventually headed to bed dreaming about how to turn this silly little tech demo into a working game.

The next day

I got up in the morning having dreamed up the 4 nano games I wanted to represent working and the couple of activities that represent resting. Resting activities just involve going to the right place, either the kitchenette for coffee breaks or lunch, or heading to the door to represent going home.  The four work activities are photocopying, answering phone calls, attending meetings and working at your computer. Each one has a simple UI and buttons to press.

Time and clicks cost your stamina, coffee breaks, lunch and going home restore your stamina. Taking too long for a task sees your break or hometime cancelled ensuring that a game session is short and death is inevitable.

First thing, make each of these nano games and test them out in isolation. Click, click, yawn yawn. They are pretty dull but that it what I was trying to achieve anyway so I locked them in. Mild spoiler alert, I'm going to discuss more of the gameplay here. The game intentionally does not have help and tutorial - it just throws you right in to the action for reasons that will be explained further on.

If for some reason you want to discover this yourself go and play until you can live for more than a few  minutes and then come back, by then you will have learned all you need to know.

The nano games

Not even mini games these are pointless and mundane tasks to simulate work. Time and clicks are at stake though so there is some minor strategy here.

Photocopying

Photocopying involves putting the original in, pressing copy the number of times required, taking the original out. Repeat for each page and load paper when needed. Each time you are sent back to the photocopier both the number of pages and the number of copies increase. Due to the number of clicks in this game its most likely that you will die at the photocopier fairly frequently. Any strategy is just around keeping an eye on the progress bars as clicks on inactive buttons also drain your stamina.

Meetings

Meetings just involve listening to nonsense and then choosing an option that has no bearing on the outcome of the game. Meetings get longer and more choices are required the more meetings you attend. As they don't involve a lot of clicks they mostly just burn time, with the risk of the task timing out and taking a break with it.

Reception

I was going to make more commentary on the nature of customers here, but with only one nano game per location and time running out it was reduced to transferring calls to ever increasing numbers. Clicks burn stamina and one wrong click requires starting the number all over again.

Desk

Pretending to look busy is an important skill for any worker. This game just involves clicking the 'Look Busy' button fast enough to fill the progress bar. Additional clicks waste stamina and clicking too slowly will see the progress drain away. 

Break

Got this far, I had four separate nano games that had been tested individually. I also had a little 3d room with a box walking around it. Time to head out for lunch, which stretched a couple of hours longer than I expected...

Sunday Afternoon

Finally got back to the desk and on child minding duties. 

Sound effects Take 1

Making use of the small voices, I asked the boys to pretend to be in a meeting so I could have multiple voices in the meeting room. Several takes later (to remove them calling each other stupid poo poo bum bums) I got them to stick with 'Blah' and added a couple of different versions into the game. While they were at it I got them to do slurping coffee and munching lunch noises. I also wanted a gameover noise from them too but the over acting and improvised dialogue got well out of control ("Noooooo!, Why am I dying!" Cough Cough, collapse on the floor). I guess I'll have to do the rest myself.

Fired up sfxr and started generating sounds. The boys loved them but I was having analysis paralysis and couldn't choose which ones to use. hundreds of little bloopy blippy noises later I still couldn't really match them to the game so I gave up.

Making it a game

I went back to the code and wired up the nano games to the main 3D level. I played through it a lot and tweaked things a little. I wanted a few minutes to be a sensible length of time and enough variety in the tasks (not the same task twice in a row, breaks spaced out evenly and in a order that makes sense etc.,)

I was happy with where it was at but still a long way to go, barely any sound effects, no graphics to speak of, still console output instead of UI for a number of elements and no music at all.

Another break

I should've pressed on but instead took another break, out to watch my partner play football and give the boys a run around.  Home to cook tea and back to it. 

Sound Effects Part II

I'll just record the other things that the boys couldn't be relied on for. I started with all the responses to the meeting actions as they needed to be voiced. After that a more subtle death noise, relief at going home. 

With no other options than record something or go back to sfxr I decided I may as well record all the clicks, beeps, and other UI sound effects as well. I edited them all up in Audacity and put them in the game.

Graphics

With MagicaVoxel I can make passable assets in front of TV so I did that. Making the meeting room table first it turned out to be the wrong scale entirely. I resized it and pressed on with the other assets.

Looking back later I saw that the meeting room table looked different to everything else due to being scaled and chunky. I make some rough edits and put it all together.

Letting someone else play

Oh dear. I finally let my partner play and she was really confused. I found I was having to explain everything and help her out with moving, understanding what you can and can't click, what the nano games involve. She was so confused she didn't even notice or comment on the sound effects and assets I'd worked so hard on!

She headed to bed.

I didn't have much time to make changes and still wanted to write some music for the game as well as title and ending screens. I added lights that will highlight the place you need to go to next and hoped that would be enough for fellow LD Jammers to know what was going on.

End screen

I had wanted to make it clear that this is your whole life. Without a lot else going on in the way of narrative in this game I decided to summarise it as your entire life in minutes and seconds on the final screen (the code supports hours if anyone can survive that long, but I don't think its possible). In hindsight I think it makes my already menial little game a bit depressing but also tied it up with a story and theme that might otherwise be missing. I quite like it.

Music

Midnight has been and gone and I have work in the morning. Its tempting to park it and finish things off after a sleep but I know that it will just distract me from work if its not delivered tonight. I make a start on the music. I have written music before and have a particular style I keep falling into, sleep deprived and rush there was nothing else I was going to do but repetitive rhythms and basic tunes. It works on one level but more time would have seen a lot more improvement here.

Done

I put the page together for itch.io and uploaded the Windows build. I tested it and realised I had names and icons wrong. Rebuild, upload again and check out the itch.io page. Needs themeing (does it need themeing at 1:30am?) quick tweak of some colours and fonts, add a few screenshots and call it a night. I uploaded the Linux and Mac builds in the morning from work (despite trying not to be distracted at work). I also tried a HTML5 version but couldn't get it running well on anything, a problem for another time.

I really enjoyed taking part this year. I learnt a lot about Godot and working in 3D and had a load of fun with the sound effects and voxel graphics. I don't think this is a game I'll develop further but I have been inspired to pursue the ideas I do have and start getting more things released.

I hope you enjoy my work simulator.