Play Another Job
Overview
“Another Job” is a text-based interactive fiction game about the dreariness of work. The game tries to get the player to feel the tension between needing to spend time to make money to survive and spending time in their life actually doing things they enjoy.
I collaborated with Connor Yankowitz on the game. They helped with worldbuilding, brainstorming, and editing/writing narrative. In particular, they took an editing pass and rewrote the prose, as well as implemented the staff lounge passages.
Revisions
Initially, I anticipated to personally focus on rewriting the plot and narrative of the game. I brought on Connor, expecting them to contribute art to the game. However, they expressed interest in writing for the game, and since they’re more experienced than I in creative writing, I decided to split up work differently.
Instead of focusing on writing, I pivoted to actually building out the game’s core loop. At the end of P2, the day cycle was pretty much smoke-and-mirrors. The game implies to the player that days progress, but truly the game always ends after the player goes home from work, gets up, and goes to work the next day. In-game days factor very little into the game experience.
The core feature of the day cycle is charging the player daily rent as an incentive to go to work. In the current hard-coded daily rent system, the player only gets charged rent twice: once when they start the game and once right before the game ends. I therefore wanted to build out the rent system so it actually charged the player rent at a consistent time every day. I thought a good system for this would be some kind of Banking App that keeps track of how much rent the player owes. Additionally, I felt that expanding the game beyond 1 day required the player to have some more agency over how they navigated the world. Therefore, I also wanted to give the player a centralized interface for traveling around the world, rather than having travel occur through passage links distributed throughout the game. Given both of these needs, I decided to implement a “smartphone” with several apps that gave the player game state information and some agency over the world. In fact, the player already has a watch that they’re checking regularly, so I added these additional features to the watch and made it a smartwatch. This is where the game’s RistWatch came from. Implementing the RistWatch was the first big revision to the game.
Actually implementing the RistWatch involved rewriting other parts of the game as well. For one, I anticipated the player would find navigating the game world confusing if I didn’t create a “tutorial”, of sorts. I revised the introduction to guide the player through using the RistWatch. Then, I thought that hiding the player’s money display at their desk would drastically change the feel of the programming mechanic. I made the money display diegetic to complement the addition of the RistWatch.
Playtesting the new additions revealed how even relatively minor changes to the game’s introduction completely changed how players approached the game. Most notably, players felt the game was far more directionless than previous playtesters had. They mentioned not realizing that rent was due daily. Additionally, some features of the RistWatch interface made it difficult for playtesters to navigate. For example, I initially left the “look up” link at the bottom of the page, where it had been in the earlier version of the game. That made it difficult for playtesters to notice, especially when they had to scroll to bring it on screen. Based on playtests, I refined the introduction to make more explicit the goals of the game, and I tweaked the RistWatch interface to make it easier to navigate.
Unfortunately, In the current version of the game, there are some non-functional interfaces, specifically the Health and Contacts screens of the RistWatch. The Health screen displays some non-function status bars that indicate player stats – Hunger, Thirst, and Rest. I intended for these stats to deplete as time wore on, and for the player to need to maintain them or else lose typing efficiency. There is some infrastructure in the code to implement these stats, but as we needed to scope down to meet the project deadline, other features took priority. Additionally, the Contact screen was intended to help players keep track of characters they had met in the game, and fell out of scope as it became clear we wouldn’t have time to write out additional, fleshed-out character interactions.
Overall, I feel that fully implementing the game’s day cycle brings it much closer to the product I had envisioned when I started the project way back in P2. I’m also really grateful for Connor’s help with writing, I feel that their humor and creativity really added depth to the narrative. Their work really breathed a lot of life into the project.
I think it’s pretty likely that I will continue with this project, past this class. I feel happy with the direction the game is moving in, and I’m excited to see what the piece becomes as it continues to evolve.
Playtests notes and takeaways
Below are selected notes from each playtest, as well as background information on the playtesters.
Playtester 1 – Early 20s nonbinary person. Some familiarity with computer games.
- Played a super buggy version of the game that broke often
- “Oh that’s going fast” – about clock
- Some trouble navigating the RistWatch interface e.g. clicked the wrong links when looking for where money is displayed, calling an autocab
- After failing to buy coffee from the autobarista 3 or 4 times, just gave up
- Second time, just ended up buying alcoholic coffee and was surprised when they were still able to program as fast and that they didn’t get in trouble.
- “I wonder what Evil inc. does?”
- “I guess I’m supposed to be evil, but I’m pretty bad at my job”, said after helping Mateo
- “Personally, I would not want to go to the work social. But I’ll go to say hi to Mateo”
- Forgot workday ended at 7pm, repeatedly mentioned a 5pm end to the day.
- Failed to notice the time until it was the next day – “Oh it’s AM, I worked all night”
- “Oh it got very real suddenly”
- “What, I didn’t respond to him?” about convo w/ Mateo at work social
Takeaways: Clarify RistWatch interface, e.g. rename “map” to “autocab”. Identified the game-breaking bugs and prioritized those over other changes. Additional worldbuilding details and background info might help the narrative.
Playtester 2 – 60s woman. Self-described as having little familiarity with video games.
- Took a while to realize they needed to click on to advance dialog. But were able to figure it out on their own – “Guess I just click on these blue dots”
- “Ok looks like only the blue things are available” – tutorial guided the player through using the RistWatch, but it’s debatable whether it was successful at teaching them what the RistWatch was useful for.
- Laughed at “It’s not technically copyright infringement”
- “I don’t know what an IDE is, what is that?” And didn’t try typing in the box
- Explored every link available before sitting down to type at workstation.
- “Oh I earned $0 dollars”, said chuckling. “Guess I should go back and do some work”
- “Didn’t feel like I had a goal, more like I was exploring to see what all the options were”
- “Oh, it looks like I’m stuck in an endless loop” at home. The game would have progressed if the player called an autocab to work, but because the link to the RistWatch was purple they thought they had explored everything.
Takeaways: Adding some minimal but more explicit instruction may help players navigate the game e.g. “click to continue” or “type here”. Systems that are designed to give the player feedback seemed successful at guiding them to complete certain tasks e.g. “You have earned $0 this shift” causing this playtester to return to work. Need to emphasize the pressure that rent should be putting on the player.
Playtester 3 – 60s man. Some familiarity with old-school adventure games. Avid player of modern mobile games, especially word games.
- Had a little trouble navigating the interface.
- Took longer to spot “pending payment” link and click on “Pay now” button
- Didn’t know you needed to scroll.
- Needed to be told to type
- “Unclear if you’re earning for yourself or for the company”
- “I didn’t really know what the goal was.”
- “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. Seems pretty linear.”
- “I was hoping chatting with him [Mateo] would lead to a choice”
- “Seems like a real oppressive place to work”
Takeaways: Clarify game goals, refine RistWatch interface. Seemed frustrated by lack of choice in the game, but did come away picking up some of the vibes I was trying to get across e.g. “oppressive place to work”
All playtesters:
- Player’s got sense of time in the game right off the bat from the new tutorial
- Laughed at at least one of the jokes!
