Hey, what’s up?
The past month or so has been a very exciting for me and a lot of things related to Office Management 101 have changed with startling speed. One of the integral parts of those changes has been the addition of a new teammate in the role of a co-producer. As many of you may have noted, up until now I worked on the game alone most of the time and when I had problems or questions, I didn’t really have anyone to turn to with them. After one and a half year of working on on a project, while not having someone to discuss things over, can easily lead to a sort of tunnel vision. I had definitely become blind to several problems with the game and no doubt a new pair of eyes were needed to move forward.
So that’s where Edvin comes in. His previous works include the indie hit game Teleglitch and he’s now working as a game designer on a space rougelite Rogue Ambassador in an indie company called Interactive Fate. On Office Management 101 he’s helping me out in both the business and game design part and his input has already been highly valuable for the game.
Edvin has helped me identify some of the biggest problems in core gameplay and I’m in the process of redoing a lot of it. Our goal is to polish it up as much as we can by the end of the month, while also finishing the teaser trailer and redoing the website, and then start approaching investors and/or publishers. Up until now I’ve been funding the game development out of my own pocket by doing freelance work on the side. Proper outside funding would finally enable me to concentrate on the full time, while also hiring the much needed help.
As long as we haven’t actually started the negotiation process, the exact timeline of everything is still up in the air, but I hope that my initial estimate of releasing the open alpha by the end of the Summer still stands, even if we don’t manage to get any outside funding by then. Also I can now finally say with high certainty that Office Management 101 will be a commercial game on full release (I’ve also discussed it with the management of GameJolt and apparently it’s allowed as long as the game goes through at least some stage free on the site, so in our case the alpha). As for the date of the full release, Spring 2016 is our current goal, though that may still change.
Now understandably many of you would much rather hear about the game itself, not the business side of it. Unfortunately I don’t have much to share in the form of visuals, as I’ve mostly just been programming lately, but to list some of the key changes I’m doing now:
Simplifying the employee parameters. There were too many of them and it’s probably not good game design-wise if you need a calculator and a lookup table next to you at all times to make the best decisions.
Replacing some jobs with others - used to have Researcher, Engineer, Designer, Tester and Marketer. The new system removes Researcher and Marketer, while adding a Project Manager position. I will add back the removed positions in a bit of a different form at some point, but that’s probably beyond alpha.
Making the project management more easily understandable. It was way too complicated until now and hard to understand even with a tutorial. In previous versions it was possible to start a custom product development project in invented categories. The new iteration concentrates on the player’s company being the subcontractor for parts of a project (ie. doing design or testing for another company). There’s less things the player can tweak this way, but the added depth in other parts of the game should make up for it and I plan to add custom projects back in a later version of the game in a different form.
Less interaction in the popup windows (ie. the employee list, project overview etc.) and more on the actual game screen, so you don’t have to break immersion to control the gameplay.
Even after those, there’s plenty more to do before I’m willing to release the alpha, but I’m definitely more confident that things are heading in the right direction now.
If you have any comments, suggestions or criticism, then you can leave them right here or email me at [email protected].
And thanks for looking forward to the game!
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