Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → The Life of a Corporate Drone
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 330 | 3.19 | 48 | |
| Fun | 329 | 3.05 | 48 | |
| Innovation | 277 | 3.12 | 48 | |
| Theme | 270 | 3.42 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 303 | 3.14 | 49 | |
| Humor | 162 | 3.06 | 46 | |
| Mood | 285 | 3.06 | 47 |
Haha I love the concept. If we weren't constrained by the 48 hours the compo allows us, I could see some sort of currency and upgrade system really making this an awesome game.
One question I had though - once a bar becomes fully red, is there any way to fill it back up? I was kind of confused by this and after a while I was down to only 4 bars that weren't red and I was able to just kind of keep those full indefinitely.
Anyways, great job! Cheers
@matthew-roelle Thanks! Instructions were one of the things I didn't really have time for, so I can understand the confusion (but these things just seem **so** obvious to you... when you've been working on it for two days straight).
To answer your question, no you can't restore them - letting some things go so you can keep the rest going is a sacrifice you have to make. I should probably have made them affect your mood a bit more because if you let the real time consumers (sleep and work) die, it's probably a lot easier to maintain the rest.
It's a frantic race to make sure everything gets taken care of! I was stressed in the first 10 seconds because of all the stuff that was going on! I love it! I'm determined to do better on this. xD
i cant stop laughing idk why but it makes me laugh badly
@slashee-the-cow haha that's so true! It's always interesting getting feedback on things like that after you submit - I force myself to make a tutorial screen with every jam I do to try and deal with that.
Nice Game. The only thing missing would be sound but i know, there was not enough time. Solid Submission Well done :D
Forget about the work, Arcade 100%!
I find going through the highway part really satisfying. In the end all I had was chores, so I imagined my character was obsessed with having clean clothes. Its a nice entry!
I have lost the ability to sleep. My family left me. I lost my job.
No worries, I'm caught up on my shopping and chores, and I'm still 5% happy.
@anfaas1618 Well I try to make people laugh whenever I can but I'm not sure it's quite what I was trying here, always happy to have given people a laugh though.
@loligxp Thanks!
@BloodyOrchidDC I agree! It's so much easier to spend all your time there once you're a superhuman who doesn't need to sleep or eat, too.
@khaotom There's just that **_one spot_** you can't get out, isn't there?
12 days, 14 hours, 16 minutes. Most things went down the drain quickly, but spent the last 4-5 days just staying at the bar! Hilarious game.
Disturbing, but so fun to play.
Day 17: While typing this comment, the bar closed down. Still shopping and playing at the arcade. Lost my family on the first day, cant sleep since the second day, no food and no job. But also no chores, yeah! Just shop and play all day :-) Great concept, nice graphics, even with a day night cycle! The first days feel a bit rushed due to all the bars going down. But once you settled for some of the rooms, it becomes very easy. Nice game! And with completing this review, I didnt went to the shops anymore and now I'm dead in the arcade after 30 days and 8 hours :-)
@jeremy-ryan That's what more people need. A positive atitude!
@Pukami I'm surprised they didn't kick you out! Don't blame me though, I just created the bar, I don't run it.
@vilix64 Is it maybe disturbing because of the uncanny valley? You know it isn't real, but it's just *so close* to real life.
@tomdeal Good thing you kept a diary, I'm sure someone from your old family might want to know what happened. But as a gamer, I can't really think of a better way to go.
Good Idea. fun to play
Pretty nice little sim-balance game! I tried to juggle-everything and first I dropped shopping then suddenly it was family & work. I thought I could manage that but I left with just Chores & Food - would that make me a vampire??
chores.png
Good concept and big bonus for character selection :thumbsup:
@chinmay-yagnik Thanks!
@blodyavenger Would that make you a vampire? I think it depends on whether your chores involve working at a blood bank. Although if you've lost your ability to work, I guess you don't, but... I suppose you could just vampire for the fun of it. (Is vampire a verb?)
In the beginning, I will give up the SLEEP&FOOD&WORK
very well done, props
Nice concept, too bad you couldn't push it further! I'd have liked if the different bars actually interacted between each other. It's also a shame that we're so focused on the little bars emptying when you made really cool art on the bottom, but my eyes couldn't leave the bars!!
Lost sleep, food and family... but at least I'm at work makin money!
so good for a python game !!! so innovative Loved it
I ended up with 2 tasks (Shopping and Chores). It appears that it goes indefinitely.
Maybe have it end when you have 3 tasks remaining?
Good entry. ;)
@morriss As a glutton I can't really condone that approach, but if those are what you feel you can give up...
@isaque-picao-sanches Thanks!
@jhell Yeah there was a lot more I could have done but it nearly killed me doing what I did... my RL bars were pretty much empty, other than work and sleep maybe had a little bit left. I considered putting the bars next to the room they apply to but I was worried they'd get a bit lost visually with all the pretty colourful things around them and I wanted to make sure they were easy to stay on top of.
@mruniverse Good to hear you're in a groove that works for you. One of the things I've thought of since I finished is keeping track of money, after all how could you shop if you don't have a job any more?
@s4m4di Thanks for that! My ego (is that a bar I have to add in the post-compo version?) gets a nice boost from people who like my work.
@bingdom I didn't have time to run through (or even think of) all the different options for what you could have left. If you only have one left it forces it to go down faster than you can bring it back up, and with a low mood if you have either of the big tasks (sleep, work) left you shouldn't be able to manage those with how low your mood will be, but you can handle a couple of the little ones. With what I've seen people have left though if I were to update it I'd probably make it automatically adjust how much you need of each task depending on how many you have left (I mean if all you have left is shopping and chores, they must be _pretty_ important to you, right?).
Love the concept, possibly the bars went down a bit aggressively but I really like that keeping your mood up gives you the motivation to manage more stuff
this was funny! xD :D Great job!
Hey guys, hope you had a nice time during the jam! Next time think of us (mac users) to play your game too! A web build works for all sides! :up:
@jamesdude At first I programmed it so that the bars would go down 24 hours worth every day, but then I found that was a little easy to maintain if you kept your mood up, so then I made them go down a bit faster, I wanted to tune them more but I ran out of time.
@itsjustjord Thank for that!
@danilo-freire I didn't want to leave out Mac users, it's just that I don't own a Mac and AFAIK there's no tool I can use to compile Python code into a Mac program from a Windows computer, likewise I don't know of anything that will convert it into HTML5 (especially with the libraries like pygame). If you download [a version of Python 3](https://www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx/) then install pygame by opening up a terminal and running `pip install pygame`, you can run the game by downloading the source code, extracting it into a folder and running **CorporateDrone.py**. If anyone knows a way I can create a native Mac or web version from a Windows computer, let me know and I'll be happy to do it.
Fun little game. Seems like a better version of my LD40 entry, as some others have pointed out I think the bars drop a tad bit too quickly and it wasn't initially obvious to me that when the bars are fully red they can't be refilled. I really liked the pixel art, for a Compo it's really nicely done. I think sound and some extra balancing is all this game needed. Thanks for making! :D
@call-me-nutty Thanks for the feedback. TBH the bars dropping a bit quick... well I was testing it just before time was up and I was thinking "okay, this seems a bit easy" so I went back and increased the numbers but wasn't really able to test it.
I also didn't have time for a tutorial. I was hoping the bars going completely red was going to be obvious (since it covers up the meter at the bottom that shows you what zone it's in was supposed to indicate something different was happening) but *everything* is obvious to you when you've been working on something for two days straight and are sleep deprived because of it.
Cute! Nice graphics, I like the simple game style.
@slashee-the-cow Nice game! You can try packaging with pipenv (or venv) too.
tbh I had quite a hard time understanding how it worked for the red bars. As soon as I started playing I had four of them red and by then I kept all the others up. After a while it becomes a bit boring though. Anyway good job!
I like this, but I was really easily to juggle everything except work. Others have said about the confusing nature of the red bars, which I agree with.
I really like how this is real-time, and how you take advantage of that with the time commuting. I think you could go further pushing other aspects. It'd be really cool if the bars affected each other, like you need to shop to eat, or if you don't sleep your other bars increase slower. And then you need a way to explain the connections.
Great job!
@fishbrain Thanks!
@stepan-shabalin Thanks for the suggestion - I looked at pipenv but unless I'm missing something it doesn't seem to be quite what I'm looking for (I'm looking for a tool that can create standalone executables for various platforms - preferably ones I'm not running myself, cause I don't have a Mac, and as far as I can tell that just packages up the Python packages you use to make it easy to run on another machine with Python already installed) - although if I'm wrong about that feel free to correct me.
@tanis Remind me next time to include instructions, even if it's just a screen you have to read before you start playing (obviously an interactive tutorial is better, but that takes longer). If you lose the really time consuming bars (work and sleep) it's really easy to juggle the rest so if I make an updated version I'd want to make it automatically rebalance what you have left so that it does fill up your time.
@benburgh Thanks for the suggestion. I'd already thought of having money (gotta work for money, gotta have money to shop, go to the arcade, etc., although to make it not impossible if you lost your job I'd have to make it so you could get poor quality food which doesn't fill you up as much for free). As for the not sleeping, that already sort of exists, if any of the bars are still active but in their lowest zone that makes your mood lower, which makes bars go up slower, but I understand how having a bit more of an effect for things like sleeping would make sense.
Good job!
A python game, I like that innovation π. The concept was nice but it looks like once you lose some places you are never going to lose and I don't understand the -2 days, etc. In the results. Maybe you could add negative humor or specific points for everything that will be removing when you run to 0. That way at least, there will be a real ending.
I hope my irrelevant thoughts helped you π
I really like this idea! I found it interesting/funny how it seems that it's possible to keep everything up without sacrificing anything at the beginning, but then you see that it's just not possible, like in real life :) There is a lot of room to extend things further, such as having the "corporate drone" take time walking from one place to another, and having sleep affect the walking speed. Was fun nonetheless, well done!
This is a cool little concept game, I found it really difficult to balance everything, and then the sacrifices piled up on top of each other. I really loved your art style for this, I think that it worked really well. As you said, it could have benefited from audio, but I donβt think that the lack of audio took that much away from the gameplay, it was still a frantic scramble to futilely attempt to keep the bars up. I thought that it was an interesting mechanic to have the bars fall and refill at different rates, it made it hard to balance because I was constantly thinking that I could put it off a bit more because It would come back quickly. Well done, this was a fun entry!
Nice idea! It took me a first try to fully understand how it all works but it's nice. Pretty simple but effective!
I think I had a glitch on my first game though: I had a couple of bars already set to 0 when I started? Left me a bit puzzled but it didn't happen on my 2nd and 3rd tries...
Like others said, I believe it's a bit too easy to live indefinitively with only 2 bars to take care of. But I think your game is rather nice, congrats! :)
I'm a sucker for games like this. Having character selection was a nice touch.
Was a little tricky to see how everything fit together. On my first playthrough I ended up had chores left, but it ran down faster than I could fill it up, taking my out on day 13. On my second, I ended up with "food", "chores", "play" and "shopping" left, and was able to keep all four in the green indefinitely. Ah well, taking time to get everything balanced during the compo is basically impossible, eh?
All in all I really liked this one!
I loved it! I found it funny that you could not sleep, eat or do chores for a while, and then after, never have to do those things again! SCORE! :thumbsup:
@shiqichuan Thanks!
@nekonyo The -2 days in the results is a bug from how the in game time is handled, it starts at day 1, hour 9 but that's when no time has passed in game so I had to subtract 1 day, 9 hours from all the times at the results screen, but sometimes it bugs out and says -2 days (in my case it was usually -2 days, 15 hours) - I noticed it but didn't have time to fix it, the problem is probably that I made my own class and functions to handle that time (always a good idea, just search [The Daily WTF](https://thedailywtf.com/) for date functions). I did hope to add an "in memoriam" screen at the end that went through things one by one saying when you lost them but I just ran out of time.
@vasco-freitas Yeah, those are great ideas, and I probably would have thought of them if I hadn't been too busy thinking of all the other ideas I didn't have time to do :smile:
@smilewood Thanks! The bars rising and falling at different rates was one of the things I made sure I implemented first - we might like to have to game as much as we have to work and sleep but I don't think that would be making much of a sacrifice :wink:
@linky439 Thanks! A few other people have reported that bug, I don't think I ever experienced it myself but testing time was sort of limited due to having too much "brute force coding till it works" time. I did get around to forcing it so that if you have one bar left it'll always go down faster than it goes up but I didn't have time for extending that to two or more (which is a little more complicated than just setting the bar increasing rate to like 90 percent of the bar decreasing rate for one bar).
@rjhelms Thanks! Yep, as I've said in most of my comment replies here, balance was something I didn't have time for... plus when you're that sleep deprived and hungry (look after yourself folks, I didn't, as much as I should anyway) your silly brain keeps telling you "I came up with these numbers, *how could they be wrong?*"
@justcamh The problem with giving up sleeping, eating and doing chores is that playing games is a lot less fun when you're tired, hungry, and... nope, can't think of a downside for that third one.
I actually chuckled a little bit at this game haha, who would choose work over arcade??
Who needs sleep, work, chores when you can play games all day. :laughing: It appears the timers are running while you select characters, cause i started with couple meters already red and failed. Also it seemed that sleep at some point got unquenchable, even when i was doing it, it would go down faster than i gained it. Overall pretty nice little game.