The Good Janitor

Escape reality as you, a janitor, deviate from sweeping floors to sweeping hearts through The Good Janitor. A CEO, doctor, nurse, and patient: choose your love interest and explore life together.

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Inspiration

The global pandemic introduced a myriad of challenges worldwide, a prominent example being the effect it had on the basic development of social skills and the hindering of interacting with others. We aimed to develop a simulation-type game that would allow users to practice their social skills in a harmless and entertaining way.

We also acknowledge the extreme toll the pandemic has taken on students’ mental wellbeing, and wanted to make a project that could act as a form of positive escapism and stress relief. We strongly believe in the subtle power of comedic relief and light-hearted activities in the midst of everyday taxing lives. We hoped to bring this power into JamHacks7 with our project, The Good Janitor.

What it does

The Good Janitor takes you through an interactive story set in a hospital. The user plays from the perspective of a janitor who finds themself in various romantic encounters. Within conversations there are prompts for the user to choose how to respond to a question or situation, leading to different pathways and revelations. Ultimately, the user is able to choose which love interest they hope to further pursue and discover more about them and their relationship together.

How we built it

The project was coded completely in Processing 4.0.1 using our own hardcoded GUI. All of the art and character designs were also hand drawn by our team with the exception of certain background images which were taken from various stock images.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we ran into was settling on a coding language. Initially, we had hoped to use python by using the Tkinter interface on Visual Studio Code. However, we quickly learned how finicky and tedious the interface was when applied to our idea, and finally settled on using Processing, as it was one of our known languages and we knew its efficiency with coding animations.

Another challenge we faced was simply our time management and setting ambitious, yet realistic goals for ourselves and our project. The Good Janitor is a project that started as an idea for a hackathon but has quickly grown into a project that everyone in our team is deeply invested and involved in. We have grand plans and ideas for this project, and it was difficult to reduce it down to only a demo for the sake of meeting the submission date with a quality project. We made schedules and plans to help maximize the amount of work we could do within the given time, and focused on the parts of our project that we believe are the most important to convey our vision.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Something that we are deeply proud of is our ability to collaborate together to contribute to our project in our own unique, specialized ways. One of our members coded, another wrote the dialogue, and the third hand drew all of the images. Our final project would not have been possible unless all three members worked together, and our execution of that is something that we are beyond satisfied with.

What we learned

What became clear to us very early on was the importance of efficient communication and organization. Since each team member had a unique contribution towards the project, it was incredibly important for us to be able to communicate in a manner that was both efficient and effective. Furthermore, since there were multiple components to our project, between the coding and the art, proper organization was crucial so that each component could be tracked easily.

What's next for The Good Janitor

As of right now, The Good Janitor is only a demo. As if like a little sneak peak of a much bigger project, there are many things we hope to add and develop within the project. Most importantly, we’d like to further explore all of the specialized endings for each love interest. We also hope to add more user input to create more deviant pathways so that the experience can be more personalized and surprising. We also hope to add more convenient features such as a way to go back on your choices as well as more art to make it more visually interesting.

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