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Friday, November 20, 2015

Bored to DEATH ( @PCTGameJam Fall 2015 )

The theme was "Uninteresting Jobs"
So I made a game about watching paint dry.
Play It Here!
     Bored to DEATH is a two-button game about goofing off while your boss isn't looking. It was made in Unity for my school's 12 Hour Game Jam where the theme was "Uninteresting Jobs". The iconic boring office job came to mind. I even replaced the computer with a wet painting you have to watch dry out just to drive the point home.

     You can use Left and Right mouse clicks to alternate between goofing off and working. If you work too much you will literally die of boredom and if your boss catches you dancing around, you'll be fired and die on the spot. A happiness meter displays how close you are to dying and you can see when your boss is approaching your cubicle. This is all done using crude animations and random art assets from across Google Images.


     I came up with this idea halfway through the competition when I realized a sorting factory game, a FNAF Clone with burglars, and a side-scrolling action game about climbing a corporate building to kill your robot boss were all either too boring or too complex for a 12 hour crunch. I spent way too much time deciding between those ideas and prototyping basic gameplay for them. I settled on something with simple input that didn't have any physics errors for me to clean up.

     A one-screen, two button game. Something tiny that gives me enough time to polish. I was so close to finishing and with just 10 minutes left on the clock, the goof-off detection stopped working. Like a mysterious Unity curse, my game broke for reasons I still don't understand.


     After submitting a broken game and feeling sorry for myself I started looking towards the bright side. I learned that I could've made it in less than 12 hours if I had the idea ready to go at the start. I also got the experience of doing a game jam with prior expectations for the first time. I felt bad about having nothing to show for the time spent though, so I decided to fix the big bug and make the game playable here on my website.

You can download it on the games tab or play using the link above.

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