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Probation Period's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Narrative | #1339 | 3.304 | 3.304 |
| Audio | #3237 | 3.043 | 3.043 |
| Artwork | #3369 | 3.348 | 3.348 |
| Enjoyment | #4066 | 3.043 | 3.043 |
| Creativity | #5232 | 3.130 | 3.130 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Count down the days until your probation review. While counting down the tasks on your daily task list.
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
see description for full credits
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Comments
Overall love the premise of the game, its setting as well. The gameplay is interesting, and the tasks are really well polished. Interesting layout of the office as well (maybe a map?).
I did have issues getting to it at the start, as it took me whole of day 1 just figuring out where things were. For that I think a map might be helpful, or some additional instructions. The tasks while fun for a bit, do end up being repetitive and I think having them randomized could be something for replayability. I also think whilst the task items are usually easy to see, having some glow or some other indicator for them would be nice I feel like.
Apart from the gameplay I thought the sound design was fine, the BG music is good enough and the Sound effects are solid. With some more additions of stuff and changes it definitely has the room for improvement.
Otherwise Awesome Work!
Thank you for your feedback, I'm pleased that you enjoyed the general concept of the game!
There's certainly an interesting divide on people that like the initial experience of learning where things are, and others that would prefer more guidance. There's definitely room for a solution of some sort - I'm just not quite sure what that could look like yet.
There is an element of randomness to the tasks, but the pool size ended up too small for this to have much of an impact. I had originally hoped for roughly double the number of tasks, but each one ended up taking a surprising amount longer than I expected to create. If I revisit the project, I'd definitely like to expand the variety of tasks and add some dynamic elements to them.
You're right that an outline would have been a good addition for the interactable objects. Not sure why I didn't include this, as I had just experimented with this in my previous jam.
Thanks again for leaving your thoughts and experience, I really appreciate it all!
Very nice submission! Theres a great amount of tasks to do and I like the initial panic of just not knowing where to go for some of the objectives.
Thank you! I'm so pleased that you enjoyed your playthrough. I was definitely aiming for that concept of having to hunt for items and slowly learn where things were over time - pretty much how it can feel in real life too.
It's been really interesting seeing the different perspectives on that. Some people (like yourself) enjoy that initial panic to locate items and others would prefer a bit more guidance. I'll have to put on my thinking cap to consider how I might bridge that gap, without losing the sense of exploration or the feeling that your employer accidentally skipped your induction!
Thanks again for your feedback!
Felt really polished and intuitive. Only personal gripe is I don't want to do these jobs IRL so not fussed about doing them in a game!
Otherwise, really great jam entry :)
Thanks for playing! I don't blame you, it's definitely not the sort of tasks I'd see myself wanting to spend too long doing either! I'm glad that you enjoyed it anyway, and thank you for the kind words!
Fun and quite replayable too with the random task. Although it wasn't immediately clear what I was supposed to do when I just started the game. With a tight timer it's rather hard to get into. The instructions on the tasks could be made more clear. To this day I still don't know where the white board cleaner is. And I couldn't find the fish tank before the timer runs out, only to find it in the manager's office the next day. Perhaps a tutorial day briefing the player where something would be might make it a smoother experience for new players. Otherwise, interesting game and good job on the submission!
Thanks for your feedback! You're right that something to help guide the player would have been helpful. The feeling I was aiming leaned more towards "thrown in the deep end", so I didn't want to highlight the location of items directly, and I never managed to come up with an alternative in the time frame. In hindsight, a map that indicates where to find things might have worked well.
I'm pleased that you enjoyed your playthrough though, and I'll definitely take some kind of tutorial or introduction into account if I ever revisit this project (or for my projects in the future too!)
Fun game that's easy to pick up and enjoyable to explore! I particularly enjoyed the music-- the first one sounded a bit like severance which someone mentioned lol.
Thank you! I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the game! I actually have the Severance soundtrack playing while I'm writing these replies, so I'm listening out for anything that sounds familiar!
Neat concept! It definitely could use more of a tutorial as what to do with the mail is really not clear. An office mailbox slot or something would help but I did eventually figure it out. Otherwise, funny use of the theme and was fun running around trying to figure out what to do and where to go.
Thank you! I originally wanted the main task to be a case of finding the right desk to put it on, but I didn't quite get enough time to label desks or add that into the tasks system. Instead, I just settled on having it drop on the boss' desk, but it definitely should have been made a little more clear in the task list. That said, I'm glad that you did find out where it goes in the end, and that you enjoyed playing the game!
I gave up, i got fire many times :(. Apart from that, great game.
Thank you for playing! To be fair, getting fired is part of the "authentic corporate office experience" I was leaning towards, and it does get quite a bit harder as you progress. I had originally planned to add a performance rating system rather than a quota, but ran short on time and had to make a couple of feature cuts in that area.
Still, I'm pleased that you enjoyed the experience!
Oh, i don't want to be mean when i said "I gave up, i got fire many times :(.". I understood perfectly the game propose, i was just making some fun about the fact there :)
No worries! I didn't take it as a mean comment! While getting fired repeatedly wasn't the original experience I was looking for when I first thought up the idea, it still works well in the theme of the game. It was a last-minute change to make the first couple of days a bit slower and then make the playthrough more chaotic as you progress through each day.
Thanks again for playing and taking the time to leave your thoughts!
I couldn't put the paper in the printer or clean the whiteboard while holding the cleaner, either by clicking or pressing E, but I was able to complete other tasks on the list instead. Good idea having more possible tasks for the day than needed, so you can choose which ones to do. I can see this game being expanded into a great office comedy full game with the right game mechanics used.
Thanks for playing and taking the time to leave detailed feedback! I'm sorry that you had issues with the printer and whiteboard tasks. The task system started off simple (as it always does), but then got messier as I kept adding new features to it, and unfortunately I ran short on time before giving it a full look over.
I'm unsure if I'd take this in a future direction, but if I do, I have plenty of notes to completely revamp how the tasks and interactions work. I really appreciate your feedback though, so thank you very much!
If you do continue with it and want opinions or ideas...
The vision I had when I said it could make a good comedy office full game was more of a fast paced setting where you are continually given more tasks throughout the day. Some of the tasks could even be in conflict with each other ("Sally says the printer jams when overfilled so make sure you fill it with exactly 2 reams of paper" and "Bob says the printer keeps being empty to soon so fill it with 3 reams of paper") and maybe some obviously impossible tasks ("A manager has insisted that our department must file ten million reports today, and everyone has delegated that to you"). Maybe phone calls to answer that keep interrupting the other tasks, but if you don't answer the phones then they complain about that too. If there's plenty of office humor, and if ridiculous demands keep being made throughout the day, then it could be a hilarious and replayable game loop. Another thing that could make it both easier to deal with overwhelming tasks and be funny is if you could complete tasks in unexpected ways, such as leaving the rubbish in the enclosed cupboard, or if there is more than 1 whiteboard and your task is to clean the whiteboard in the meeting room then you could swap it with the clean one in the hallway, or a task says "Bob wants a donut left on his desk for when he arrives later" but Sally's desk next to his has her own donut with a bite taken out of it and you simply move hers over instead of going all the way to the break room to get a whole one.
If you have tasks being added through the day, they could be acquired by the phone calls, or by interacting with office objects such as "The manager wants you to go to his computer and send the email he left typed up on it" but after you send the email maybe you immediately get a response email with another task. Or when you start the projector in the meeting room sometimes it could project a message like "I spilled coffee on the rug in here but had to attend another meeting. Make sure you clean it up."
Of course, you could still be the only person there. That would keep it easier to work on if you don't need person models. To that end, if you included answering phones then some of the calls could be people calling in sick.
It might be funny if a win condition was something where you get someone else terminated either by not reporting their sick-day-call-ins or not handling tasks that are theirs that they try to delegate to you (or both), or like the Donut example above if Bob things Sally bit the donut that was left for him or if Sally things Bob stole his donut, and if you then get promoted to their position after they are terminated. This one might be more annoying than funny though to anyone who has been sabotaged at work, so maybe not, it's just a random idea.
Basically think of something like the fast-paced "order based" games, like the restaurant cooking ones where you have customers that come in and demand certain orders and you need to juggle completing them as they come in. I was thinking of something like that, except in the 3D environment and mechanics that you set up and with your theme and with plenty of office humor.
Wow, what an excellent reply! It could be worth developing further just to build a task system that can handle that level of behaviour! There's a lot of fun ideas in there and I'm very curious to see how it could be further developed. Especially with the idea of getting dynamic feedback rather than simply working towards a fixed quota.
I could have the manager constantly understating the effort of a job - "there's a small mess in the kitchen", just to walk in and find coffee and food everywhere (how did it even get on the ceiling)
As it happens, learning a bit more about how to get AI & NPCs in the game is one of the next things on my list, which could add a whole extra dimension to the game too. Imagine running into Bob on your way to fill up the printer, only for him to tell you to grab an extra ream of paper, or Sally walking round the corner as you're grabbing the donut off her desk!
Thank you so much for your thoughts - this comment is certainly one I'll be coming back to if I do take it further!
I don't mean to be overbearing, but if you might not continue this game then comments on development in general might be even more useful to you since you say you're about to learn a new topic...
If NPCs and their AI is up next on your list of things to learn about, then just make sure that you are aware of the things that could discourage you so that you don't quit prematurely. NPC and AI interactions can be overwhelming, and they can make a game worse if they don't feel right, so a big part of success early on in learning about them is to keep it small and work with what you know so far. If you're not careful, how you include them can require you to include other systems which take a lot of effort as well.
For one example: having NPCs with movement means you need some kind of pathfinding, and there are a lot of different ways to do pathfinding. Some pathfinding methods and their implementations can be very CPU-heavy while others are not. The first time I did dynamic pathfinding so that NPCs could dynamically figure out optimal movement patterns, I thought my code was buggy and that my game crashed when I ran it but really it was just that brute-force solving a shortest path problem using an inefficient algorithm every game frame update is a bad idea, especially on large complex maps. But there are other ways to do it, like I did in my GMTK jam entry where I set up waypoints and gave enemies specific paths to follow where they just go from waypoint to waypoint - the enemies actually can leave their path, at which point it gets a little more complicated, but most of the time they are just walking to the next waypoint. Or an example that would be closer to your office game's requirements would be Stardew Valley, if you've ever played that you may have noticed that the NPCs all follow paths with specific waypoints, and even if you get in their way then they will just stop and wait a moment until they get impatient and push through you with an angry emote. Or in lots of retro games the NPCs would just take a random step every few seconds, and they would have a bounding box that they could not walk outside of.
Another consideration is interacting with them, your menu systems need have more options, allow for dynamic changing of dialogue, possibly inputs depending on the game. All very doable, but my point is just to be aware that NPCs and AI often require major overhauls to other systems or even to have entirely new systems added to support them.
I see it says you used Unity to make your game. I've heard that Unity has some decent tools to help make some of these things easier, such as a pathfinding tool on the Unity Asset store (some of them might be free even though they're in the store) that does some of the heavy lifting for you by letting you set some parameters and then calculating optimal paths between various map areas at edit-time. I've been meaning to try one of those but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Whatever you do, if these topics feel overwhelming when you get into them (and they are huge topics), just know that you can always back away from one dark overwhelming corner of these topics and try another, because there are lots of different ways to do them and some are better or worse, or easier or harder, than others. For example, if you're struggling with getting your NPC movement to not look weird, and at the same time you're making a big new NPC dialogue and menu system, then I would not recommend learning how to implement an A* pathfinding algorithm with all the optimizations at the same time unless you're someone who is used to implementing complex algorithms for fun, and maybe not even a simpler waypoint-path system until after you're happy with your other additions. Even some famous AAA titles don't bother to move their NPCs around because it's so much easier that way.
I guess the overall moral of my essay-like rambling is to take it one step at a time because all of these topics have a lot to them but can be very rewarding even when biting off just a little at a time. Sorry I keep giving you so much text. I hope you do well and enjoy your development endeavors. I need to go get back to mine now, as I plan to release an update to my GMTK submission once we can update them since mine is so unfinished that it has long bouts of boring which I need to fix.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out. It's definitely not overbearing and I appreciate your insights too!
I'm definitely the sort of person who likes programming in systems, so I can easily see myself getting sucked into months and months of making an AI/NPC system (or even trying to generalise it for future reuse) without actually making something that needs it.
In general, I think I'll try to take it in as small chunks as I can manage and develop it in its own little prototype in short bursts, and then over time, that should add up to a more complete understanding.
I'm lucky enough to have had some exposure to this in the past, so some of it won't be completely new, but equally, I've never fully developed something like that for my own projects and I'm looking forward to the challenge!
Thank you again for your thoughts and encouragement, and the best of luck with your own updates too!
Dang, so many games in office job positions. One of the best I've seen so far though! Pretty well polished. Good job on this one.
Thank you very much! had a ton of fun pulling this game together, and I'm so pleased to hear that you enjoyed it!
i would probably fire me too it making a coffee took 3 hours , nice game
It's a good job the kettle only takes 1 in-game hour to boil, I originally wanted to make it longer! Thanks for playing, I'm pleased that you enjoyed the game!
Like the soundtrack a lot, couldn't figure out how to deliver mail. Cool game!
Thanks for playing! Sorry that the mail task wasn't clear. There was a lot more I'd have liked to have put into the tasks system and unfortunately, just ran out of time. I certainly have quite a few notes for how I can make things more clear in the future though.
There was enjoyment in figuring out where to go and what to do, most tasks were pretty straightforward as well
Adequately stressful, as any day at the office should be. I particularly appreciated the Severance reference in the soundtrack (idk if it was intentional). Good job!
Thanks! I'm thrilled to hear you enjoyed it. No intentional reference to the Severance soundtrack, in fact, I haven't even heard it yet, but I'll definitely be checking it out soon now!
I liked the sound effects! The controls were also easy to figure out.
Thank you - I had a lot of fun putting together the sound effects and would have happily sat through the next week adding more if there was time! I'm happy to hear that you enjoyed that, and that the controls felt intuitive to use.
Great music and I love the art, it fits the vibe really well. Interesting take on the countdown concept.
Thanks! I'm really glad that you enjoyed the soundtrack and art!
Neat game. The office is really big and detailed, so it took some time to figure out where everything is located. I really liked the menu.
Thank you! I spent a fair bit of time getting the menu up and running, so I'm glad to hear that you liked that, and the game in general.