Genre: Puzzle
Features: Online multiplayer, asynchronous multiplayer, different gameplay styles.
Project started on: January 31st 2020
Project completed on: February 2nd, 2020
Approximate time spent on project: 28 hours (multiplied by five people)
3011: An Office Space Odyssey is my sixth GameJam project where I programmed, did voice acting, level design and visual effects for a puzzle game about the Global Game Jam 2020’s theme: Repair.
I’m extremely happy about the work I did on this game. My level design served the purpose of the story and gameplay well enough, I discovered new tips and tricks with particle effects, 3D systems and more, and I did some voice acting as well. Some aspects of the project went sideways in my opinion and we had fierce competition, eluding us the victory this year, but I’m super proud of what I did!
In 3011, the sequel to our UQAT jam of four years ago (3010), you either play a Space Accountant or a Space Janitor on a ship with broken down equipment.
Screenshots
About the game
After a small cutscene where the Accountant divides a cell value by 0, the ship gets scrambled and split in half. You’ll first need to repair some memory modules on the wall to enable certain cells of the spreadsheet used to disable the ship’s self destruct system and open the first door. The second door has a hint on the nearby wall and leads to the reactor room where you’ll need to fill three energy tubes to the right level in order to power on the rest of the ship. The next door is blocked by some faulty breakers and you’ll know the right answer by looking into some spreadsheet data. Next up is the teleporter, where you’ll be able to edit your position in real time! Finally, grab the floating spaceship part with your space hands and undo everything you’ve just done to save the day!
Development Log
After the theme of ‘repair’ was revealed, we immediately went into brainstorming mode. We had a ton of ideas about ghosts tower defenses and elephant wizards, but then when we looked at the diversifiers, one about playing the game in spreadsheets caught our eye. Like our last two projects - hammed robbery and spiraling out - we decided to go with a story-based puzzle game where one player would be in front of a spreadsheet while the other would walk around, the two would communicate via the internet and solve puzzles. On day one I had character movement and a few rooms of the spaceship done.
On day two I finished the spaceship design, added doors, ways to open them, a dialog box system and more. My laptop decided to windows update by itself at some point, so I lost two hours there! But still, I pushed through, discovering a great way to use particles that look neat to make sparks. I started integrating all the amazing assets for the walls and floors and needed to redo some of my room design so everything snapped together. I had a few issues there; one-way walls needed to be duplicated when you could go to both sides, and we got hit with a massive performance issue that made me waste a bunch of time. Unity just didn’t want to do its occlusion culling properly, so our whole spaceship was being rendered at all times. Day two is also when I started connecting the bits and pieces of code required to communicate to the spreadsheet game part.
Day three started with a very succinct but efficient bit of voice recording. Then I had to redo many of the things I did because they didn’t work anymore when integrated in the project as a whole. I did the main cutscene which took me a while - this moment was the most stressful for me because while I was working on the main cutscene, I broke a few things and people were waiting after me to finish that - and then it was time to test and polish the game. We managed to get almost everything we wanted into it, working and looking fine.
I had a great time! Looking forward to our next jam. This time I’ll push for something fun to play instead ;D