Play Business Venture
Asset Liquidation: Serious Business's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Seriousness | #64 | 4.301 | 4.301 |
| Overall | #209 | 3.951 | 3.951 |
| Audio | #248 | 3.767 | 3.767 |
| Enjoyment | #300 | 3.863 | 3.863 |
| Creativity & Theme | #446 | 3.959 | 3.959 |
| Visuals | #569 | 3.863 | 3.863 |
Ranked from 73 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game Engine
Unreal Engine
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Comments
Enjoyed this a bunch. The corporate jargon was done perfectly, too. Great job!
Yeah - I leaned heavily into the satire with that, really went for the corporate-core vibe. I'm glad the humour landed well and that you enjoyed it! Was a total blast to make.
I love the idea of just spinning around in your chair to avoid social interactions. Cool game, very polished!
It was such a dumb mechanic and I wish social interaction worked like that in real life
It actually does! People just won't like you if you do it.
Fun game! I did find it a bit hard to see where to go sometimes with the heavy shadows (made some passages look like walls). One minor (maybe) bug is my mouse disappeared on the end screen, not sure why. I think the spinning to reorient yourself could be a bit faster, but the actual movement system is very fun and intuitive. The visuals are also pretty great!
I've heard the mouse thing has happened to a few people, and I've been trying to figure out why. My best guess is the menu state is somehow not setting right in that specific scene.
The stylistic choice of having harsh shadows was one I went with to try and make the game pop a bit, but I can definitely see why with the wrong light angling that might look a bit strange - if I continue this project stuff like that is high on my list of tweaks to make. I spent a lot of time refining the visual style to try and be a bit more unique with this one.
I'm glad you liked it - thank you for playing!
Let me tell you, chairs were rolled, lights were pressed when told not too, papers were shredded, but most important of all... my assets were liquidated. Great Game!
The chars do in fact roll, and Business Metrics and Market Value is up. Business is in fact booming.
Thank you for playing!
This is so creative in so many ways. Great animations and top notch humor!
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it - I've been told the humour landed really well and I'm glad it did, it was really fun to write and put together.
Some of the animations - such as characters and such - were actual MoCap I managed to get done. Though the intro wasn't - I lost the files, and had to improvise in Blender - but the other stuff you see was.
TOP NOTCH !! THIS WAS SO FUN!!!!
only issue i had was getting confused with why i couldnt enter the toilet when the man went in, would be nice if the change in end toilet location was more obvious!
Yeah - I should have made it clearer when the objective text changed, maybe with an animation that plays of it bobbing or something. It was actually something I noted down and just - totally forgot to do as I then lost the notes, set the place on fire, burned it down, had it rebuilt, found the notes, lost them again, and ended up in hawaii. Somehow.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game! It was a blast to make, and I'm glad that's the only thing that felt off about the whole thing. Thank you for playing!
This is an extremely serious game.
We have some important action items to address, and really I would like to do a deep dive before EOD. There's some low-hanging fruit, and I believe we can move the needle given enough mental bandwidth. If you need to circle back on any points, we can take this offline, or we can look to put a deck together for review. /uj
Ok, enough jerking. This is extremely fun, and kinda relatable actually. The game under the surface is super simple; go from point A to B and perhaps C and repeat 5 times until you win. But it's dressed up enough that it feels more exciting. There's some nice environmental storytelling which I loved - the guy running into the toilet, the party button and the *spoiler* on the last level.
I can appreciate how much you've made yourself and that's extremely admirable. The assets all looks nice, the music is good too, but the sfx and voice acting really shines in my opinion. I like that everything is a physics object and there was some nice extra juice in there such as the filing cabinet exploding papers, I imagine there's more that I didn't stumble across. The movement controller feels nice and smooth, and the inertia of spinning is well managed, sometimes these things can be a bit much.
I think if I had to find some critique; I would have enjoyed a bit more to the gameplay loop and less homemade assets. But equally I completely understand and actually appreciate that fact you have done so much yourself. I think the game was a perfect length, and if it was longer it might start to overstay its welcome or become repetitive. There was a little smeary-ness graphically, I'm assuming that's TAA and I would have loved for an option to disable anti-aliasing or to change to something else. But these are pretty minor points for the sake of having to give feedback on.
All in all I had a great deal of fun, I love the theme application. Thank you.
Yeah - I tried to cram enough into the game levels to make it interesting, even if the core loop is simple, and the control scheme of just "spin chair, push to exit" is simple enough. It's the icing on the cake that I tried to make really sweet on this one - stuff like the filing cabinets, the water coolers, coffee mugs etc.
The use of homemade assets for everything was partly because that was the challenge I set myself - how much can I make solo, in seven days, on my own? I spent some time colour grading to try and make it all feel unique and pop - which thankfully it seemed it did. The aliasing issue might actually be due to motion blur, which somehow turned itself back on when I did some bug fixing/packaging for Linux. Not sure how that happened. Not integrating and setting up some settings for graphics is also something I wish I could have done more of, too.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game though! It was a blast to make, and I've learnt some great lessons for future stuff from this.
On par with masterpieces like Honse!, Sea Honse!, and Honse 3: The Joust!.
I feel like this is impossible - such masterpieces are far beyond my caliber, made by teams of many talented people, and I am but one man.
Thank you for your praise though - I am glad you enjoyed it!
This is a great entry! I found the use of corporate slang very funny, and the amount of custom work is very impressive. I loved the menu screen with the moving camera for each option, it made the game feel very polished. Well done!
Thanks! I spent the entire last day polishing and making it play smooth to try and make as good an impression as possible. I'm glad that worked out well.
I originally had planned more corporate vibes soundtrack stuff too but decided to mix it up for the last few levels - so tried to instead have it kind of ramp up into something more unique by the end.
Oke so that was pretty good but unfortunately it started laggin for me as soon as the turtorial was over :c the tutorial ran fine but when lvl 1 started it suddenly befacme a lot sower!
Still though I wasn't so bad it was impossible to play and I always admire people who go for 3d cuz I know It's a pain to do! The game mechanics work quite well! spinning around on a desk chair is classic and it feels very smooth! There were some good jokes in there as well!
Overall, very solid! Good job guys!
Amazing praize from the people behind such classics as Honse!, Sea Hobse!, and Honse 3: The Joust!.
Sorry to hear it lagged on your end - weirdly past the tutorial is an odd one, as the tutorial has instances of everything our of bounds to shader cache and speed up load times for the rest of the playthrough. I'm glad to hear that it worked regardless, and felt smooth in spite of that.
Thanks for the feedback! It could just be the fact there's more geometry and entities in the later levels - given I made this solo though I'm glad the humour lands as well as it does.
Thank you for playing!
haha for a good portion of the first level I just made myself continually spin and try to time kicking off... very dumb idea but I eventually figured out how to not be so dumb 🤣 Good game :)
Damn, for a game about shitting your pants this game is soo good! No idea If you made the music or not, but it gave so much personality to each and every level! Voices that you hear and overall humour are top notch, loved every second of it
If I had to give a negative feedback on anything it would be the theme itself. We don't really spin and when we do (during people interactions) it feels more like a burden than a fun mechanic to engage with. I felt wanting something more mindful so I trully spin to win, like boosts or drifting for points or something like that
Did not stop me from having a lot of fun. Third level might be a bit too long but I am glad I made it to the end, last level is pure cinema! Loved the game, my guy!
Game about shitting yourself and I loved it, can you imagine that? =D
It was honestly such a dumb premise but the fact it works is even funnier. Music was all my own work too - pretty much everything in the game was either custom made or heavily modified to be custom (EG the character models being retextured off mixamo) - I set myself the goal of making everything I could. I even got some time in with a recording studio and some family members who do voice acting for the VO.
I do agree I probably could've incorporated more spinning - the main idea behind it being the spinny tank controls and how hefty the chair feels - and ironically trying to avoid the coworkers does mean you end up wanting to do a bit less spinning.
Third level also did originally have more varied routes, but I cut them for time as I wasn't happy with how polished they'd end up, and wanted to focus on some bug fixing instead. I'm proud with the overall outcome at least - and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Brilliant little game with the only nitpicks I can find being stuff like sometimes text is a bit hard to read on the bright backgounds but thats just a nitpick.
The mechanics are nice and finely tuned and I enjoyed the agressive chair spinning to assert yourself to escape social situations and I love the audio and vocals done for it all, only addition I would make is that you could just slam into your coworkers before they can engage you in small talk but thats just a me thing :p
I did consider a mechanic where bumping into them would cut them off prematurely, but I felt like it might trivialize the danger they pose.
The text seems to be really inconsistent too - sometimes it's fine, other times it's not, and I'm wondering if the adaptive contrast I tried to set up just wasn't working and I never noticed. Originally the objective marker was also really difficult to see so I had to tweak that too - it's one of the few things I wasn't happy with come release.
Thank you for playing though, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Very polished game, I honestly don't know what feedback to give. If I bought this game on steam right now I would be happy with it. Well done!
I've had a few people say this, and it's honestly such a huge compliment. I'm glad it's turned out as well as it has, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Following a full annual review, I'm pleased to report strong performance across the key metrics of enjoyment, creativity, theme, visuals, audio, and incredibly serious conduct. The overall deliverable was highly cohesive and demonstrated excellent alignment with the stated business objectives.
For next quarter, I'd recommend down-sizing the motion blur pipeline (particularly with respect to text-based assets) and upscaling the at-a-glance visibility of objective icons to reduce stakeholder friction.
Overall, contributions were valued greatly and should this trajectory continue, we would be happy to revisit the possibility of a remuneration review cycle in 5-10 years.
Management Comments:
"Project efficiency and KPIs hit after significant story points spent on polishing and QA of deliverable environments.
Unfortunate mishap during product review phase resulted in Motion Blur pipeline re-integration, despite design specifications stating otherwise. This was not caught before full release. The relevant employee responsible has been docked 3 years pay and sent to work in the remote office of Detroit.
Objective markers for sprint goals went through numerous phases, and the final version was ultimately not refined to a standard that would have been liked due to last-minute pivot to bug fixing."
Status: APPROVED
Thank you for playing!
Pretty polished game! I love the concept and the execution of it is also awesome! The mechanics are quite simple but very well implemented in the level design! The audio is also good with awesome choice of music and sound effects as well. Its quite serious as well I would say. Awesome work!
I'm really happy with how the music turned out - I spent a good chunk of time just trying to iterate and write something for each level, as I decided fairly quickly I wanted unique sounding songs for each one to really set the vibe.
Started more corporate-core, slowly leaned into something more techno ish I guess?
Also spent a lot of time polishing levels and I'm glad the consensus is that was well spent time.
Thank you for playing!
Unique concept and great polish! Love the music. Just one thing though, I agree with the other person on the motion blur, it felt a little jarring for this game.
I think it returned after I built for Linux, as I remember the first windows build didn't have it - but I made some minor bug fixes before the deadline and I think the motion blur returned when I pushed both through.
Glad you enjoyed it though! The music was something I spent a lot of time working on.
The game is really polished, congratulations in making this in a week, I love tha variation in goals and music, only thing that bothered me was the motion blur, but besides that the game felt good, it got a little tedious after the 4th level only because repetition, however I'm still impressed at the variety in each level, and that you managed to create so many
Thanks! The fourth level is the longest one, yeah, and initially I had more planned for it but I ended up cutting some sections to streamline - it's probably the weakest of the bunch in terms of level flow.
The motion blur was meant to be disabled but I'm pretty sure when I packaged for linux and did some last minute bug fixes I broke that and turned it on again. I love modern technology.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game though! I spent a lot of time polishing and trying to get the core game loop feeling good, and it seems like that's paid off.
This game is awesome. I love the movement mechanics and humor of it. The goal changing and adding variety as you go was well received. The only suggestion I have besides some UI polish is to add range to the power when you land in the yellow; gradient towards green in the dead center or something. I think you have a highly marketable concept and game here that would work great on mobile as well. I'm no Unreal expert but I know what went into this and I'm impressed this was made in 7 days and it came out flawlessly. Great job!
I do feel like the push mechanic is a little underutilized, initially it was a lot stronger but you'd go all over the place and it made precision really difficult. I think I'd probably refine it some more for a full release, for sure.
Glad you enjoyed the game though! I spent a lot of the last day just polishing and making sure everything flowed and worked nice. The UI being mostly basic imagery was deliberate but I do think I could have spent more time making it stand out a bit more.
I enjoyed how serious it was, and the mechanics to move around were fun when you get used to them! I wish there was a bit more oomf to a perfectly charged spin, and maybe a tiny bounce of of walls but great work!
Originally was going to have some bounce off, but found it got too chaotic too quickly - so instead made it that if you angle your wall bounces you spin a bit, to give you the possibility to bounce off a wall at an angle and reorient.
I do think that if I keep running with this, the charged spin-push will definitely need a bit extra work to make it more worthwhile, as its a bit more situational at the moment. It's on my notes list as one of the things I want to improve at some point.
Thank you for playing - I'm glad you enjoyed it!