Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Rejigging the workplace events

The original kudos game would have a very generic description of your day at work. basically, you randomly had a good or a bad day, and it just said "it was a bad day, and you got these tips, and hey, you got promoted".
The new one will be much better, in that it will reference your actual job, and the text will be job specific.
That means it will say "Today at the happy snacks restaurant, the customers were really friendly and you had a great day", and then that day at work will have carefully tailored effects on you, so the good days make you feel good and the bad days make you feel bad, but also, you can have stressful work days, boring work days, etc etc.

This has required some re-jigging of the way things are done, with new 'workplace events' which are basically different potential work days depending on your career. I'm also having some meta-categories, such as 'office job' where some events will apply to all of them, like boring meetings. When the whole system is in place, I'll be in a position to just sit there and write out a whole bunch of text that hopefully helps in a small way to make people feel like their characters life is different if they chose to be a helpdesk technician rather than a top chef.

Some people say that kudos shouldn't concentrate too much on work, as that's not a fun part of peoples lives, but I think pretending to have a different job to your real one is kind of cool, and not many games have a main character who is a biochemist or a human rights lawyer.