Play as a middle aged office worker, Cole Cube a middle-aged office worker at BS Solutions. It is not a business solutions company, but, rather, it acts as a middleman, connecting other businesses with business solutions companies. It is an utterly pointless company that doesn’t produce anything and is the epitome of excessive bureaucracy.
While working, you can browse through the newest e-commerce platform 'Bamazon' to buy products and power ups instantly, respond to work related mails through the latest application 'b-mail', get a new high-score on the new game of the year 'BOSU', all while avoiding the boss!
But don't forget to keep your viewers happy because work doesn't pay!
Game Design
The game will take place over the course over a work week of 5 days. Each day you are given a list of daily work objectives to complete within a 9-5. If you complete the tasks you will move on to the next day.
The Gameplay Loop
It act's as a traditional rhythm game with a combo, score etc. The better your score, or higher the combo is, the more views you will attract. If you spend too long doing work, your viewership will decrease.
The higher your viewership, the more chat donations you will receive. You can use the money to spend at the store to buy power ups or decorations to modify your office space or surroundings, that may or may not keep the boss away.
The longer you play the rhythm game, the higher the boss suspicion increases. You can see the boss walking, before finally sneaking up on you. If you are caught the game ends. However, to decrease suspicion you can do work related tasks such as sending emails, or talking to coworkers.
Each Day
Each day a new beat song to play will be revealed, and the truth behind the world will be unlocked through story emails, and will be given different tasks with increasing difficulty. The boss will check up on you more often, and you will be forced to multitask in order to proceed.
The Goal
To be able to stream rhythm games for your fans without the boss catching on, and to become a successful streamer.
Shader, Effects, UI/UX
In order to give the game a sense of polish, juice and fun we really wanted to push the idea of having animations in our game. We did this in various ways with shaders to manipulate lighting and effects or through more subtle things like lerping colours or having the hands move when you're playing the rhythm game.
I wanted to create a minimalistic UI style and to keep most of the UI elements onto the in game screen. So we create subtle indicators such as the boss position rises, when your boss suspicion levels increase, or things like how the game settings can be accessed through the computer screen. Or how you can tell the length of the day depending on the bar on the top of the screen as ir moves from yellow to blue (like the skylights).
Implemented URP and implemented toon shader kit, and designed 2D shader materials for all objects in the scene to keep to give it a cohesive feel despite using both 2D and 3D elements. Also utilising other features such as Unity's built in shadows or light colour contribution to get items to glow and have a reflective light texture when in "gamer mode". One of the important detail was that while playing the Rhythm game in game, it feels fun and bright (the disco lights on the ceiling and a glowing RGB statue on the table!) compared to a more standard stoic look for when doing work tasks.
Final Design after 5 Months
First Iteration after 4 Weeks
Project Management
I served as project manager for a team of 7, and was mostly involved in keeping people on track, delegating tasks, compiling playtest feedback and seeing what we should prioritise and move later back in the schedule. As well as managing how many tasks each person had, and too make sure they don't have too much on their palette at any one time. After compiling that data, we would hold a biweekly meeting and I would lead the discussion to talk about any potential bugs, or game design issues and how we should fix them, or to rediscuss scope or immediate changes etc.
I created this spreadsheet to organise this data, and keep track on who is doing what tasks in conjunction with our group discord where we share ideas, meet, and post bugs and update statuses on task. Everyone works in a slightly different way so the way tasks are written and are delegated and written are changed depending on who they're made for.
Some images of the planning whiteboard I use and track down our tasks, and discussion so that everyone can follow along visually and audibly. After writing our ideas and points down, we'll also delegate tasks to everyone (you can see their initials noted down) and I'll transfer these into the Sprint Backlog Spreadsheet which you can see above.
Art Direction and Concept Art
