Making of Back to Work

Greetings!

Me and my friend Howiie have worked on this game together for this year's GMTK Game Jam! This is the first time we've worked on a game jam together and the first time we've collaborated on a game that got released!

Back to Work follows an every day worker at a computer company; You have to frantically respond to emails, fix the printer and type up letters. All the while your angry boss pesters you to work faster!

The game was inspired by computer technology from the 90s to early 2000s. Many of us have had first hand experience with unreliable technology and wanted the game to emulate that frustrating feel. Using broken tech is like taming a beast, learning it's patterns and adapting to it's faults.

All the main coding was handled by Howiie, i coded the printer and made all the art assets. I was personally impressed with Howiie's coding speed, there came a point where i essentially said "You've got this, I'll handle the art!".

I wanted the technology in the game to feel disgusting, the monitor without anything on display is covered in dust and finger prints. Everything has a beige colour which to me evokes images of worn and torn, cigarette stained computers. The work you do is tedious, the office is eerily empty, yet your desktop background serves as an escape, by being far more colourful and alive than anything else in your environment.

The printer was originally meant to be middle of the desk, but was moved to the right side so that you could see it while operating the laptop.  We had to carefully think how players would have to discover elements like that.

Our buddy Will handled the music, the tracks were inspired by Vaporwave music, a music trend that satirised 90s technology and music. It may not be possible to hear the full track in-game as it lasts a full 10 minutes complete with mumbled radio interludes.

It was an intense 48 hours but we managed it well. We frequently called to check up on progress and decide on what ideas should go in next. If an idea was too ambitious then it would be cut or changed. The computer for instance was going to have a third menu for just printing, though since we already had an email menu we just made it so you'd print off the emails instead.

We were making this game run on html 5, which is notoriously difficult to handle compared to exporting to Windows. There were many times where early testing would lead to unlikely results, and had to jump through loops in order to get it to run. We did plenty of testing and got the game to run well before all was finished.

The html 5 browser version is what you'll be playing for the Jam period. We actually had a downloadable Windows version ready for play, but in a twist of irony, that version came with a game breaking glitch where you couldn't pass the title screen. That was a big "uh oh" moment as we'd already passed the deadline. Thankfully the html 5 version was our intended way of play and that version was up and running.

Overall this was a very fun jam to do. I've always wanted to make a meta game like this and was happy to see this concept through! I have my eyes on another game jam that isn't too far off from now.

I want to give a shout out to Howiie for his work on the project, go follow him on itch.io to stay on track of his upcoming projects!

Until next time!

-Angus Beer