Skip to main content

Browse GamesGame JamsUpload GameDeveloper LogsCommunity
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
adamdaniels10 days ago

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!

Reply
CodeyDud10 days ago

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.

Reply
adamdaniels10 days ago

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!

Reply
CodeyDud9 days ago

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.

Reply
adamdaniels9 days ago

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!

Reply
AboutFAQBlogContact us
Copyright © 2026 itch corp · Directory · Terms · Privacy · Cookies