Summary
I decided to undertake writing a videogame that takes longer than a single game jam. I am going to continue jams as they suit my ADHD very well, but I am undertaking a larger project.
Plot
The game is called Underqualified (working title). The premise is that you are a someone who was looking for a job in the tech industry. You may or may not have embellished your resume a little too much and now you have landed a job that you are extremely unqualified for.
Mechanics
This game will have several core mechanics. Some things that I am thinking of off the top of my head could be:
1. The tasks given to you are given in esoteric terms, and coworkers do not slow their roll in this regards. Tasks would be purposesfully confusing, but the company would have all the internal documentation you need (right....)
2. There will be both a chat and email system, where the user will get to choose responses to both. The email system may be closer to a quest/job system with the chat program being the actual NPC communication - we shall see.
3. The OS that you are given looks old, stuff cannot be easily resized, etc. But there are a _ton_ of settings to fiddle with (which I am hoping to distract the players with because an underqualified employee would certainly tinker with settings far more than they need to be to just pass time or distract themselves).
4. You uncover some sort of embezellment plot or _something_ - not sure yet. But this is not important.
Current Progress
I have decided to start with just the basic window system first. Today I spent far too long trying to get the player to be able to click and drag a window. It was conceptually difficult for me because I am a self-taught programmer.
My first snag in this process was being unable to drag the window properly in the X direction. I had tried to do a quick dx = mouse.x - pos.x but this just caused my window to sit still, as it should....
The soution was rather clever if I do say so myself... What I did was give the window a central button that, if clicked and dragged, would place the window.pos.x value at 1/2 the width of the window.size.x value. The mouse snaps a little but it looks natural to the player.
Next Steps
Obviously I have a lot more to do, but the next steps are to read a file! Display text in the window in a text area and let the player scroll around.
So much fun to be had!