Hello, and thank you for checking out BossMan. If you haven’t checked out BossMan, thank you for reading this all the same, and welcome to my first devlog of my first attempt at a game.
BossMan started roughly two years ago when someone referred to me as such. At the time, I was working as a head cashier in a large chain bookstore, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I was not a Boss, and at times even the Man part feels like a stretch, but it got me to consider what it means to be a “BossMan” and how ironically impotent middle management can be. Corporate culture makes for easy satire, so I let the thoughts ripen to a horrid, over-heated, under-ventilated, single-room catastrophe waiting to happen.
Once I considered that the company in the game should be the worst company it could be, e.g. one that reduces employees to numbers, does not pay said employees, and promotes violence as a managerial tactic, it was easy to think of the sort of game elements BossMan should have:
the player character should have a baseball bat with which to motivate non-player characters to do work.
the non-player characters should not always agree with this form of management, and should have some chance to shank the player to death.
the non-player characters are the only thing that can produce the widgets necessary to make money.
if the player fails to turn a profit by shipping widgets, they should be terminated from employment with the company.
These ideas are all well and good, I think, I guess, but I was facing an even bigger problem: I did not know how to program. Because I am a nearsighted fool, I neglected to take a single class in computer programming. Or rather, with just some basic HTML and some toying with Duke Nukem 3D code under my belt, I blamed my interest in computing for making me fat, strayed from the path in adolescence, and failed to stray back for over a decade. So now just about two years ago, I Googled around for the best computer language to learn, which shows you how much I knew about what it was I was hoping to learn, then settled on GameMaker: Studio because Hotline Miami had been made with it, there was a free version on Steam, and it seemed approachable enough.
To get my feet wet, I did the first few tutorials on offer and made the standard block-busting bouncing ball game. I recommend this just to acquaint oneself with the program, but you shouldn’t take my recommendations. It’s probably a good idea to do tutorials, period. So I did that one and about half of the next one, then took to YouTube to fill me in on the rest. My favorite GameMaker tutorials are by Heartbeast. Shoutout to Heartbeast. I struggle sometimes with video tutorials, but that dude does good work.
With that research out of the way, I had a toolbox consisting of “if” conditionals and a piece of code I had found on the GameMaker community forums for the random movement of deer. I was a few weeks out from figuring out how to call random numbers, but the non-player characters, we’ll call them interns from here on, were beginning to move.
The first iteration of BossMan was a cat herding game.
Idea for a game: Cat Herding: the Video Game
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