I’m a huge fan of NBC’s sitcom The Office. I first watched it a few years ago, and I remember the first time I saw episode Booze Cruise as if it had been yesterday. I literally had to pause the episode so I could get myself together, stop laughing and start paying attention again.

I’ve watched the entire series, and now I’m rewatching it following Office Ladies, a podcast by Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. Each week, they discuss a new episode of The Office, talking about behind-the-scenes stories and interviewing other cast and crew members.

The dream

All of that goes to say: I really like this TV show. And then something odd happened: one day I had a dream about a The Office-based game. In this game, Stanley Hudson was the main character, and the goal was to get through the day of work from 9am until 5pm. If you are reading this, I suppose you have watched The Office, so you know this would be totally in character for Stanley.

I woke up thrilled by this idea. Coincidentally (was it?), this dream happened a week prior to a free game development course provided by Alura Online for which I had registered. I have about 5 years of professional experience in software development, but I always worked in projects for heavy industries. I had never had any experience with game development before (except a Snake game I developed 2 years ago, but it’s really not the same thing. I might get into that in a future post).

First steps into the game

Next thing I know, I’m drawing sprites for the game dev course and ellaborating ideas for the game: it must have pretzels, the scorecount will actually be a clock starting at 9am, and the goal is to avoid colliding with Stanley’s boss and co-workers until he gets to 5pm.

When there’s a collision with another character, Stanley’s stress level increases. If it gets from 0 to 100, he dies (a direct reference to season 5 episode 13 Stress Relief). Crosswords are collectable items, and in the game they work just as they would for Stanley in the show: time goes faster (clock timer fast forwards 30 minutes) and stress is reduced. And, of course, he has to collect pretzels!

Next steps: game development and storytelling

This was my starting point. In the next posts, I’ll talk more about the game dev course, my experience developing this game, the challenges I faced and, of course, lots of The Office references.