Office Inc.
Office Inc. is a game created in Unreal Engine 5 in 2023 as a fun side project based around a meta narrative. The game primarily revolves around the player, #427, solving puzzles while our voice acted Narrator insults and humours the player.
The aim was to make a meta narrative game aware of how little resources the game developers had making it, using this to amplify its humour.
01
Ideation
The creation of this idea was to make the game representive of the game developers who didn't have enough time to make the game. This became one of our core creative leading pillars.
The story follows the player called David (#427) who works at a boring and normal 9 to 5 job, doing repetitive and meaningless tasks. The Narrator is there to make sure David does his tasks but after realising that the game is not finished he creates some simple puzzles until David reaches the bosses office.
02
Level Design
The level design process was a mixed effort but I was the primary lead on how the level was put together.
We started off with creating our puzzle rooms which used simple buttons and pressure plates. These were design by Jacob and then given to Quinn and I to place into the level. Following the narrative the levels are relatively easy, starting off easy to then slightly harder at the end.
Once our puzzle rooms where in place I joined them with hallways that nearly lined up with the length of time of the dialogue recordings we had from our voice actor Zach Gillon.
I spent several hours decorating the starting office room a this was the room the game devs were supposed to have spent some time on creating. The room has some extra doors which have brick walls behind them to build the unfinished effect.
From here there is a corridor to an elevator which once progressed past the level become significantly less "finished". The main change was we removed the roof of the level which the narrator does point out when you first come to it. Throughout the rest of the level there is barely any wall textures and the only main textures and objects are found in the puzzles rooms, again following the idea of there not being enough time to make the game.
03
Timeline
Over a 12 week period we made this game, working on bits when we had free time as all the developers involved were also making our major project Bobbi Bones.
Because of this a lot of the actual making of the game happened mainly over 3 weeks.
The demo we had to make a needed to be a 10-15 minute experience.
04
Challenges
Our main challenge was the time constraints, originally I had wanted to work in some AI enemy or interaction but a few weeks into development I was struggling quite a bit and so we had to cut it to prioritise other things.
Another complication was combining multiple Unreal Projects together, eventually we set up a system that only one person would work on the project at a time. We used GitHub which did work with syncing but taking these precautions made sure we didn't get conflicts in our code.
