Re: But WHY aren't you working on...
#11 by hanako - Jun 13 2017
I'm definitely not actually working on this idea, BUT...
... so you may have seen me mentioning on twitter that the world really needs more games using the office as a default setting instead of high school as a default setting because I'm sick of high school teenagers all the time.
Along these lines I've been trying to think about translating some classic VN plots set in school to set-in-office to see how they'd work.
One classic plot is the "investigate something sinister", where there's really something dreadful going on under the surface and everyone is acting just slightly weirdly, and you're going in undercover to try and find the truth behind the institution. Could just as easily be a fake office junior as a fake high school student, no?
But then, gameplay. The problem with stat-raising gameplay in an office is that office stats are kind of inherently boring, even more so than school stats. While you might be excited about getting your Filing skill to max when you're deep in the game and you know that maximum Filing will get you another clue about the eldritch conspiracy, it's not really very appealing to a new player looking over the game and what it entails. "I can learn to be good at FILING?? Why would I want to do that?"
So then I started thinking about gameplay elements for an undercover investigator pretending to be an innocent new hire at a giant potentially-evil corporation. With that motivation it seems like the gameplay should really revolve around both befriending people (to get info from them) and finding excuses to poke around all the hidden corners of the corporation without getting caught. How to do this? Considered a number of ideas having to do with picking particular tasks to work on which might then lead to having to go to a supply room or visit someone in accounts, all kinds of things to get you out of your actual office and be able to poke around... but again, gameplay about choosing tasks like 'Refill Coffee Machine' or 'Get Printer Paper' does not sound very exciting or aspirational.
And then it occurs to me: EVIL office tasks! I mean, not evil in the sense of the kind of horrible creeping eldritch evil you're there to investigate, but tasks about intentionally screwing things up, petty little things you might actually imagine doing in the workplace but never really do because in a normal job you don't want to be randomly mean and risk getting fired. CHUG ALL THE COFFEE so that someone has to refill it! PRINT A BUNCH OF BLACK PAGES to use up all the ink so you have to get more! Obviously you can't do ONLY negative tasks or you will get fired and lose the game, so there has to be some balance and some sucking-up-to-coworkers, but I think there would be more instinctive fun in scheming to do little bad things, while you're ramping up the game to find out about the big bad things.
Note: If I ever run a patreon this is probably the kind of rambling game design concept post you would get out of me.
