So, the rankings are in. How did my little minimalist workplace sim/sex game do?

• 7th place Overall
• 2nd place in Stealth
• 2nd place in Sound
• 4th place in Harmony
• 4th place in Novelty
• 6th place in Horny (!!)
• 6th place in Narrative

To say that these results caught me by surprise would be a massive understatement. Top three in two categories? Top ten in four others, including Horny? And 7th place overall, out of 62 total entries?

Well, to borrow a phrase from my own characters, these results greatly exceeded even my most optimistic projections.

Workplace Culture

For a long time, I wanted to make something set in a corporate workplace. Impersonal power structures, secret office affairs, long nights spent in tall anonymous skyscrapers — it's like the dystopia of cyberpunk but with button-downs and fluorescents instead of tattoos and neon. It always seemed like a potent setting to me.

At the same time, my own real-life experience of workplace culture and corporate doublespeak felt like it was coming to a boil, and I just wanted to do something with that frustration.

So, with all this rolling around in my head, when it came time to make something horny, what came to mind was:

What if it's a boss/employee role-play, but all the dialog is written like how people talk on LinkedIn?

The Lack of Visuals

Right away, the most blatant elephant-in-the-room about this game is the lack of visuals. Just text, typing sounds, and your imagination. What a bold move, right? To my relief, it seems to have been well-received, at least among the other jam devs. Many even noted how the lack of visuals seemed essential to the experience.

And here's where I have to confess.

It almost did have visuals.

Originally, the plan was to have some kind of looping animation of the two characters having sex, with maybe with some simple zooms and pans to add variation. All the dialog would still have been workspeak innuendo, but from the animation you'd immediately understand what was really happening.

In hindsight this probably would have been way out of scope anyway, but that's not why I changed my plans.

No, I changed my plans when Adobe recklessly announced the discontinuation of Animate, the animation software I've been using for years and was planning to use for this.

Realizing that I couldn't risk using a software package that could end up holding my work hostage, and knowing that I really didn't have time to learn new software and make a game at the same time, that's when I thought:

What happens if the game is only dialog, with no visuals at all?

This changes everything, I realized. Suddenly, there's nothing openly explicit in the entire game. By withholding visuals, it adds the ambiguity of "wait, is this actually about sex or am I reading it wrong?" Which also mirrors the theme of how corporate language says one thing but means something else.

It's perfect.

Later, Adobe backpedaled and announced the non-discontinuation of Animate after all, so I probably could have gone back to my original plan. But I was already convinced. This was the direction to go.

Pleasing Typing Sounds

By comparison, figuring out the audio was relatively straightforward. My thought process went from "I don't know what kind of music I want for this" to "what if there's no music, actually, and instead it's all office sounds?" to "what if the office sounds are also innuendo?"

I don't have much experience with audio, but I recorded all the typing sounds myself using the keyboard on my decade-old laptop. (I was originally going to use my brown switch mechanical keyboard, which I personally think has a more pleasant sound, but a laptop's slim-profile membrane keyboard honestly felt more in-character.)

I recorded four different intensity levels (plus the "deliverable" and subsequent aftercare), but there were a lot of re-takes throughout to get the escalation just right from one level to the next.

And if you were wondering what I was typing, well, I did save the text file:

(This is just an excerpt, it goes on like this for a while.)

A Narrative "System"

Of course, a narrative game needs a narrative system. Right?

Well, the narrative in this game really isn't that complicated, so something like Dialogic or even the lightweight dialog system I wrote for one of my previous games would actually be too much here. This doesn't need branching paths, and it doesn't need to keep track of player decisions. All it needs is to move linearly from one entry to the next.

And so— Behold! My entire script in a single array:

Just start at the top, and each entry leads to the next. Simple.

Each entry defines its "type" by the integer in the zeroth entry (did I mention each entry is also an array?):

• 0 for boss dialog
• 1 for player choices
• 2 for delays
• 3 for audio events

Some of these types also have additional properties, for instance every boss dialog has an integer that corresponds to one of nine predetermined locations on the screen, allowing me to control dialog position on an entry-by-entry basis.

(also it's funny referring to the "boss" here and having it not be like an end-of-the-level video game boss, but actually just a character who is your boss)

And for those cases where I need to support light branching? Well, how about an optional property to skip a line:

Hey, this is a game jam, right? No need to make the code clean, just need to make the code work.

UI Animation

For the animated dialog bubbles, I overlapped three or four (depending on the length of the text) individual bubble backgrounds, randomly selected from a pool of 16 textures, and then had each of them play a short "grow" animation slightly offset from each other.

This animation consists of a smooth continuous scale up, along with a stepped rotation every few frames, to give it a slight wiggle as it grows.

For the dialog choices, I used one image for the "cap" and then stretched a second image for the "swish," to try for a sort of highlighter marker look.

(I think it probably reads more like a paintbrush stroke, but it's also against a dark background, so the deck is already stacked against it. Still, the idea is there.)

No Really, Your Metrics Are Below Expectations

Well, this is a post-mortem, and here's where I note that it hasn't been all successes. The game's actual metrics have, uhh, greatly underperformed. (I'm sorry, I just can't stop with the workplace speak)

In the first 14 days, the game had 2.3k views — comparatively high for me (my next highest game in the same time period had 1.9k views) — but only 87 downloads, which is a conversion rate of only 3.7%.

For comparison, my other games in their first 14 days had conversion rates of 10.4% (The Demon, Lilith), 10.2% (The Poetess), and 21.1% (Jane).

So why such a low conversion rate?

Well, I'm no marketing expert, but I can see from my analytics that the overwhelming majority of my referral traffic is coming from people browsing the "nsfw" "erotic" or "adult" tags. Maybe they start out intrigued by the domme office lady theme implied by the post-it note cover image and they click through to see what the game is. But then they see the screenshots showing no visuals whatsoever, and probably most of them say, nah, I'm good.

And, honestly? For anyone who did actually click through, saw the screenshots, and then decided they weren't interested? They're probably right. Who would I be to try to convince them otherwise?

Thank You for Playing

Hey, if you made it this far, please take a moment and check out the other games in the jam! You can browse the ranked results by category or you can just look at everything that was submitted.

There are so many amazing, interesting, surprising, innovative, personal games here representing such a wide range of experiences. I'm very glad to have played so many of them.

And to everyone who took the time to give Please Come to My Office a try — thank you for playing.