[Game development] Can you Survive Corporate Life?

I’ve been thinking a lot about video game development recently. I’ve always loved the idea of making a game but I’ve always had trouble with follow-through, especially when game programming involved a lot of coding or creating my own art assets. It just felt like too big of a project for me to tackle, especially when I haven’t had many really concrete ideas about what I wanted to create.

That being said, I’ve been feeling especially inspired after watching LixianTV work with Unreal Engine to create a horror game. Watching him use assets from the asset shop and code game mechanics using Unreal Engine’s visual interface, it occurred to me that I could probably create something of my own – at least something simple.

I’ve been tossing around a few ideas in my head about the different themes that I would be interested in tackling, like hidden horror and the existential dread of working in a typical corporate environment, and different game mechanics that I’d like to play with. Finally, I think I’ve figured out where I want to start.

I think I want to create a deck-building game around the theme of trying to get things done in a corporate environment. As I loosely imagine it, I see the basic mechanism being that you as the employee will try to achieve “productivity points” to reach a goal against a task that throws things at you like shifting deadlines, team reorganizations, and other perils that one might find during office work. Things could then get more complex as you have to deal with executives with their own agendas or work on group projects with other people where you’re technically collaborating but might also compete with one another for recognition.

I see this more as a mini-game that might fit within a bigger game frame in a similar way that the dance battles are only part of the farming sim which is Ooblets. However, I think focusing on this small section of the game will allow me to ticker around with game development tools and see if this is something I want to really pursue before I get too deep into everything.