Jobpocalypse

Intro Card
Gameplay

Inspiration

With the global economic situation, layoffs in the tech industry have become more and more commonplace over the last few months. This has been dubbed by many as a ‘tech winter’, and this served as the main inspiration for our project, Jobpocalypse.

What it does

Jobpocalypse is an action shooter game in a retro 2D style, whereby the player takes on the role of Timmy, a graduating Computer Science student looking for a job. Timmy has to battle waves of HR recruiters with his trusty resume and overcome the sea of rejections to survive this tech winter.

Throughout this journey, Timmy will realise that the intro to data structures module that he took 2 years ago is of little relevance for “survival” (read employment) and will have to upgrade and build industry-relevant skills in order to beat back the recruiters.

Will Timmy emerge out of this job-seeking hell? Or will he fall to the endless sea of rejections?

How we built it

Jobpocalypse was built solely using C++ and SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library), which we used to access various interfaces of our computers to ease game development.

The sprites utilised for this game are a combination of open-sourced sprites from GibbonGL and custom sprites that we created through LibreSprite.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing the game mechanics. This being the first game-development project we embarked upon, we underestimated the importance of ensuring the game interactions are balanced for a pleasant gaming experience.

Developing with C++, an Object Oriented Programming language resulted in many interlinked components which required greater collaboration between members.

Including small details throughout the game such as having corresponding sprite movements and enemy knockback makes the game more realistic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Produce a working game Created an enemy system that provides a good challenge for the player

What we learned

Issue resolution was a key aspect that we picked up. Over the last 24 hours, many, many issues popped up and our team was fortunately able to resolve these issues through effective communication.

What's next for Jobpocalypse

We hope to create a more robust application with more optimisations for a more streamlined experience. We also hope to create more modes of play such as multiplayer or a more varied enemy type to make the gameplay even more fun.