itch.io

Thanks for playing!

I've actually only done a little bit of Head Office Mandated Fun, so I'm pretty happy I managed to hit the mark according to several people now.

I always try to have a bit of meta stuff going on. I think the last two I did (Beach Defend 2000 and RiftBreak) were more interesting and certainly more technically interesting, but this one worked out better than I'd expected. I took a bit of a risk in presenting it as a training game wherever possible; the cover art is incredibly plain and the game page offers few clues on what this actually is, as well as the fake "web version". Kayfabe is only broken in two places: a bit of bold text on the game page, and in the README buried one level in the documentation folder. I think, though, if I hadn't gone all the way it would have been a lot less immersive.

The Disaster! game almost didn't have the "scene that people were upset about but is the only part left in" at all. It was the last thing I implemented, and for most of the week I didn't even know how I was going to do it. It's not perfect, and it's not exactly what I wanted, but I thought it was hilarious the first time I saw it in action so I decided to roll with it.

As for being a bit of a drag, yeah, that's something I discovered during my first full playtest and in retrospect I wish I'd gone for shorter, more focused content, especially given the length of the jam. At some point it edged away from being a parody of mandatory corporate fun and became mandatory corporate fun. If I ever do a full postmortem I'll probably focus on this aspect, but I've already shared some thoughts on it in other comment responses.