It should work now…
***Some parts of the game don’t require clicking
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I have my game, Ren’Py effed it up when I was building it, and it won’t even open the game file anymore. Trying to fix it. I don’t know if this works.
OK I builded it? Somehow? I still don’t know if it works:
Probably still doesn’t work because Ren’Py hates me.
A few technical issues: the intro is text super fast, the language has some tense/plurality discrepancies, I was told to raise my confidence and that I was set to go after one choice, and the game crashed while I was in Vegas (which was hilarious.) The menu text is also hard to read. The yellow text is a good psychological choice. It contrasts so harshly with the stark background images that it makes my eyes hurt, a good simulation of doing heinous office work for weeks and weeks on end. The way that the text is revealed, like a typewriter, adds to an atmosphere of fakeness, as if the people talking to me are robots, and I have to figure that out. Some sections are long winded, which added to that office work atmosphere, but could also be handled with more narrative design should you wish to shorten them.
Text scrolls a bit slowly for me, not sure if that’s an aesthetic choice on your part (definitely makes sense during the paperwork part).
Can’t access the second link for mac. It doesn’t seem to be shared completely publicly. You may need to share from a non-CMU google account.
Anyways, as far as the game goes: really neat aesthetic, has a very corporatey conformity/1984-ish feel. The long paperwork part does a great job of simulating the unpleasantness of such a job, and how easy it is to get fired shows how intense such situations can be. It does seem like a lot of the “choose your own adventure storytelling though”, with one main branch, and short side branches that quickly die off. One way to extend it might be to not be fired, but to get an even more boring job. I wasn’t too sure what the ethics meant as the game crashed due to an error (although I had the first build so that might’ve been why). Overall, neat idea!
I played through and went to vegas. I’m not sure how many endings there are. I was very interested in what was going to happen the whole time. I thought there might be some shady secret spy organization stuff going on. I thought originally that the first package might be a bomb. I really probably just mislead myself, but the mystery was interesting even if it was a tad more mundane/realistic/common than I had imagined.
Aesthetically, I enjoyed the pictures and felt the flow of the text was well done and very representative of office work. The text outlines were a bit large and resulted in the menus being nearly unreadable. It might just be some weird difference in text rendering settings though.
I’m not a fan of the yellow text on the background – it is very hard to read at times. This is probably a situation where gameplay and narrative conflict, but I can’t advocate sacrificing readability here.
I was frustrated by the Copy. Copy. Copy. section, but that’s definitely the point, so great job with that. The game definitely has a strong narrative tie, which is what makes the yellow text critique harder to give. I also like the fact that so quickly after you are promoted the company collapses (in my first playthrough, anyway). Overall, I like the nature of your story, and even the frustrating bits serve the overall structure.
EDIT: Oh no! Second playthrough I elected not to bribe the guard and was fired for failing to complete the assignment, but then I still got the same ending of how I was a tool of a corrupt company despite not doing anything for them. Ending after floating and looking for a job seems to be the proper way to go there rather than jumping to the ending. There’s a few mislinked passages – you can explain your situation to the guard, and it says he understands better, but then it jumps to him putting you in a hold again. Definitely need to verify that the passages are linked correctly.
The aesthetics do wonders for this story. The yellow text on black and white reminds me in turn of a Paul Austin graphic novel and of obnoxious corporate advertising, which makes use of senseless, tasteless bright colors to steal your focus. I also spent a small forever trying to find all the endings to this. The paperwork scene was effective, in the worst possible way. Ultimately, this does a great job at teaching you about “business ethics.”
Good job with the visuals. You are immediately establishing the company as questionable so the ending didn’t come as a surprise. I personally went first for full obedience because it just seemed obvious that I would get fired otherwise and the story seemed more intriguing.
I reached an inconsistent ending in which I’m fired for insubordination, then I read the news, it tells me I was shredding documents and I lose my job again.
🙂
I really liked your art style in this work. It was minimalist but conveyed the black and white of the business world, something devoid of creativity. Yet your approach to this was in fact very creative.
It was an interesting choice to leave the company and rep name out of the piece, and made this seem like more of a repeat issue in large sketchy companies. I wish that the vegas part had backgrounds for each of the things you did; the show, gambling, hotel etc. Because I want to see more of your black and white backgrounds. The length of the shredding/filing/copying scene was PAINFUL but that is reminiscent of your feelings towards the industry you set your game in