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DancingEngie3 years ago (2 edits)

Christ, this brings back some corporately mandated memories. This isn’t just any parody, it’s clear you have experience with the subject matter. The details were spot on - corporate slides, uncharismatic presenters, instructional vids ripped straight from YouTube, terrible UI and a lazy and cynical gamification aspect to the whole thing. It’s all there plus some punchy dry humor. Definitely gets points in the SBIG department.

But as much as I feel like you did really have fun creating the whole thing, it’s just too long for a casual player, and was hard to engage with. Most of the time I was watching slideshows or videos, and with no overarching narrative and middling pacing, the joke did languish after completing one section. I think that with a tighter scope and focusing on just one aspect, alongside a solid hook to keep me going, this could’ve been a great little satirical piece.

Still, I enjoyed what I did experience. I will now wash my hands, but only because I want to seem polite after this interaction.

PS: my anti-virus thought ITALauncher.exe was malware. Just FYI.

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XCVG3 years ago(+1)

I've actually never worked for a gigantic company, though I have had to go through some institutionally-mandated fun in the past.

I agree 100% on your criticisms. In fact, I realized the same thing during my first full runthrough of the game. Unfortunately that was on day 6 or 7 of the jam, so I released what I had anyway with only minor tweaks. I'm not sure if I'm going to do a full postmortem on this one, so I'll summarize briefly my thoughts on it here. Originally it was just going to be cybersecurity/online safety training, but when the "one button" modifier was announced that made me think of emergency stop buttons and gave me some new ideas, so it was expanded to a bigger experience with 4-5 areas. At that point the plan was to only do the stuff I had good ideas for, and just leave the rest as missing content. But then I realized the more was missing the less real it looked, and the focus became "add more content" instead of "add good content". I think that was my greatest mistake; some of the content here is just filler, and at some point the parody of a boring corporate pseudo-game becomes a boring corporate pseudo-game.

I'm not sure why ITALauncher would get flagged; it's a .NET Framework executable with about 8 lines of code. Fortunately you don't actually need it to play the game, it just runs Austin.exe (the actual game) and exits.

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DancingEngie3 years ago

Thanks for adding your thoughts. Not to complain of anything, as this is what allowed me to actually participate in the first place, but I think the jam being (around) two weeks long as opposed to, say, one weekend does allow this sort of feature creep to take control over your project.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is something to be mindful of; content is king, that’s true, but as you said, “not a lot of good content” is better than “a lot of meh content”.

P.S. I didn’t really mean to insinuate you worked for a corporation. This type of “institutionally-mandated fun” is kinda uniform everywhere :)

P.S.S. A program starting another .exe file raises some eyebrows, maybe? VirusTotal says at least 2 anti-viruses consider that file malware (interestingly, not my own, which just makes this even weirder). But then again, I have to ask why that frontend is even necessary when Austin.exe works fine.

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XCVG3 years ago

I think two weekends/one week is about the ideal length; there's always a risk of feature creep but it strikes a good balance. Keep in mind a week, or even a weekend, is different for a NEET, a student, and a salary worker. Two weekends is about the shortest jam I'd consider doing in my current position. I've done some 1- and 2-month jams and the risk of feature creep is much more pronounced on those. Magical Girl Game Jam 2 was 2 months long and my initial game idea for that was so horrendously overscoped that I ended up scrapping and salvaging it into something completely different.

Why does ITALauncher exist at all? It's 100% because ITALauncher sounds more like a real training executable. Could I have renamed the other exe? Yes. Did I think of that at 11PM a day before launch? No, no I did not.

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