The Life of a Corporate Drone by Slashee the Cow
So you've got a job. And a family. And you gotta eat, right? And you need some you time. And after all that, you do need your sleep.

You don't actually have time for all of this. Something has to be sacrificed somewhere. But what? And how long can you last?
Instructions
On the first screen, press a number to pick your character. I meant to have a much nicer selection mechanism, but I ran out of time. In game, just use your arrow keys to move from room to room. Try to keep the bars for all your resources as high as possible - a bar goes up when you're in its room. Your mood affects how quickly your bars go up, and if any of your bars are in the red that'll really affect your mood. On the final screen, just read what it says and press enter to quit (but not before you share your time!) If you want to play again, just run the game again (a friendly retry option is something else I ran out of time for.
Things missing
- Your speakers aren't broken, I just ran out of time to do sound.
- I haven't fully tested every single way of doing things, so it might be possible to cheese it, though I tried to brute force my around the brute forciest of cheeses, so feel free to take that as a challenge.
- As I said in the instructions, no friendly wrapping. Something else I ran out of time for.
Made in Python (3.whatever I had installed) and pygame. I've been able to make a Windows exe which I think works, I was having trouble - you'll know if I haven't fixed it because time will fly. For my friends running other OSes download the source code zip, extract it and run CorporateDrone.py (you'll need pygame installed, if you don't have that open a terminal and run pip install pygame).
(As well as adding the Windows exe, I slightly changed the source code zip - I forgot to set some variables I was using for testing back to what they should be)
Ratings
| Overall | 330th | 3.196⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 329th | 3.054⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 277th | 3.12⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 270th | 3.424⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 303th | 3.149⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 162th | 3.068⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 285th | 3.067⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 58🗳️ | 34🗨️ |
One question I had though - once a bar becomes fully red, is there any way to fill it back up? I was kind of confused by this and after a while I was down to only 4 bars that weren't red and I was able to just kind of keep those full indefinitely.
Anyways, great job! Cheers
To answer your question, no you can't restore them - letting some things go so you can keep the rest going is a sacrifice you have to make. I should probably have made them affect your mood a bit more because if you let the real time consumers (sleep and work) die, it's probably a lot easier to maintain the rest.
Solid Submission Well done :D
No worries, I'm caught up on my shopping and chores, and I'm still 5% happy.
@loligxp Thanks!
@BloodyOrchidDC I agree! It's so much easier to spend all your time there once you're a superhuman who doesn't need to sleep or eat, too.
@khaotom There's just that **_one spot_** you can't get out, isn't there?
Great concept, nice graphics, even with a day night cycle! The first days feel a bit rushed due to all the bars going down. But once you settled for some of the rooms, it becomes very easy. Nice game! And with completing this review, I didnt went to the shops anymore and now I'm dead in the arcade after 30 days and 8 hours :-)
@Pukami I'm surprised they didn't kick you out! Don't blame me though, I just created the bar, I don't run it.
@vilix64 Is it maybe disturbing because of the uncanny valley? You know it isn't real, but it's just *so close* to real life.
@tomdeal Good thing you kept a diary, I'm sure someone from your old family might want to know what happened. But as a gamer, I can't really think of a better way to go.

Good concept and big bonus for character selection :thumbsup:
@blodyavenger Would that make you a vampire? I think it depends on whether your chores involve working at a blood bank. Although if you've lost your ability to work, I guess you don't, but... I suppose you could just vampire for the fun of it. (Is vampire a verb?)
Maybe have it end when you have 3 tasks remaining?
Good entry. ;)
@isaque-picao-sanches Thanks!
@jhell Yeah there was a lot more I could have done but it nearly killed me doing what I did... my RL bars were pretty much empty, other than work and sleep maybe had a little bit left. I considered putting the bars next to the room they apply to but I was worried they'd get a bit lost visually with all the pretty colourful things around them and I wanted to make sure they were easy to stay on top of.
@mruniverse Good to hear you're in a groove that works for you. One of the things I've thought of since I finished is keeping track of money, after all how could you shop if you don't have a job any more?
@s4m4di Thanks for that! My ego (is that a bar I have to add in the post-compo version?) gets a nice boost from people who like my work.
@bingdom I didn't have time to run through (or even think of) all the different options for what you could have left. If you only have one left it forces it to go down faster than you can bring it back up, and with a low mood if you have either of the big tasks (sleep, work) left you shouldn't be able to manage those with how low your mood will be, but you can handle a couple of the little ones. With what I've seen people have left though if I were to update it I'd probably make it automatically adjust how much you need of each task depending on how many you have left (I mean if all you have left is shopping and chores, they must be _pretty_ important to you, right?).
@itsjustjord Thank for that!
@danilo-freire I didn't want to leave out Mac users, it's just that I don't own a Mac and AFAIK there's no tool I can use to compile Python code into a Mac program from a Windows computer, likewise I don't know of anything that will convert it into HTML5 (especially with the libraries like pygame). If you download [a version of Python 3](https://www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx/) then install pygame by opening up a terminal and running `pip install pygame`, you can run the game by downloading the source code, extracting it into a folder and running **CorporateDrone.py**. If anyone knows a way I can create a native Mac or web version from a Windows computer, let me know and I'll be happy to do it.
I also didn't have time for a tutorial. I was hoping the bars going completely red was going to be obvious (since it covers up the meter at the bottom that shows you what zone it's in was supposed to indicate something different was happening) but *everything* is obvious to you when you've been working on something for two days straight and are sleep deprived because of it.
I really like how this is real-time, and how you take advantage of that with the time commuting. I think you could go further pushing other aspects. It'd be really cool if the bars affected each other, like you need to shop to eat, or if you don't sleep your other bars increase slower. And then you need a way to explain the connections.
Great job!
@stepan-shabalin Thanks for the suggestion - I looked at pipenv but unless I'm missing something it doesn't seem to be quite what I'm looking for (I'm looking for a tool that can create standalone executables for various platforms - preferably ones I'm not running myself, cause I don't have a Mac, and as far as I can tell that just packages up the Python packages you use to make it easy to run on another machine with Python already installed) - although if I'm wrong about that feel free to correct me.
@tanis Remind me next time to include instructions, even if it's just a screen you have to read before you start playing (obviously an interactive tutorial is better, but that takes longer). If you lose the really time consuming bars (work and sleep) it's really easy to juggle the rest so if I make an updated version I'd want to make it automatically rebalance what you have left so that it does fill up your time.
@benburgh Thanks for the suggestion. I'd already thought of having money (gotta work for money, gotta have money to shop, go to the arcade, etc., although to make it not impossible if you lost your job I'd have to make it so you could get poor quality food which doesn't fill you up as much for free). As for the not sleeping, that already sort of exists, if any of the bars are still active but in their lowest zone that makes your mood lower, which makes bars go up slower, but I understand how having a bit more of an effect for things like sleeping would make sense.
I hope my irrelevant thoughts helped you 😁
I think I had a glitch on my first game though: I had a couple of bars already set to 0 when I started? Left me a bit puzzled but it didn't happen on my 2nd and 3rd tries...
Like others said, I believe it's a bit too easy to live indefinitively with only 2 bars to take care of. But I think your game is rather nice, congrats! :)
Was a little tricky to see how everything fit together. On my first playthrough I ended up had chores left, but it ran down faster than I could fill it up, taking my out on day 13. On my second, I ended up with "food", "chores", "play" and "shopping" left, and was able to keep all four in the green indefinitely. Ah well, taking time to get everything balanced during the compo is basically impossible, eh?
All in all I really liked this one!
@nekonyo The -2 days in the results is a bug from how the in game time is handled, it starts at day 1, hour 9 but that's when no time has passed in game so I had to subtract 1 day, 9 hours from all the times at the results screen, but sometimes it bugs out and says -2 days (in my case it was usually -2 days, 15 hours) - I noticed it but didn't have time to fix it, the problem is probably that I made my own class and functions to handle that time (always a good idea, just search [The Daily WTF](https://thedailywtf.com/) for date functions). I did hope to add an "in memoriam" screen at the end that went through things one by one saying when you lost them but I just ran out of time.
@vasco-freitas Yeah, those are great ideas, and I probably would have thought of them if I hadn't been too busy thinking of all the other ideas I didn't have time to do :smile:
@smilewood Thanks! The bars rising and falling at different rates was one of the things I made sure I implemented first - we might like to have to game as much as we have to work and sleep but I don't think that would be making much of a sacrifice :wink:
@linky439 Thanks! A few other people have reported that bug, I don't think I ever experienced it myself but testing time was sort of limited due to having too much "brute force coding till it works" time. I did get around to forcing it so that if you have one bar left it'll always go down faster than it goes up but I didn't have time for extending that to two or more (which is a little more complicated than just setting the bar increasing rate to like 90 percent of the bar decreasing rate for one bar).
@rjhelms Thanks! Yep, as I've said in most of my comment replies here, balance was something I didn't have time for... plus when you're that sleep deprived and hungry (look after yourself folks, I didn't, as much as I should anyway) your silly brain keeps telling you "I came up with these numbers, *how could they be wrong?*"
@justcamh The problem with giving up sleeping, eating and doing chores is that playing games is a lot less fun when you're tired, hungry, and... nope, can't think of a downside for that third one.
It appears the timers are running while you select characters, cause i started with couple meters already red and failed. Also it seemed that sleep at some point got unquenchable, even when i was doing it, it would go down faster than i gained it.
Overall pretty nice little game.