The Oof Rooms

Overview:

The Oof Rooms is a single-player visual novel focused around a burnt-out office worker and the monstrous office workers they meet after an especially odd trip to the storage room. It offers 1 to 2 hours of playtime and 2 separate endings.

Throughout the game, the player will be tasked with not only communicating with their new coworkers, but also helping them with tasks they just can't seem to get done on their own. 

To play the game, simply click or click-and-drag to interact with dialogue options and mini-games. 

Credits:

• Pete Cimino - 3D Background Artist, Lead Writer
• Olivia Elmers - Scripter, Technical Artist
• Madeline Kerr - 2D Character/Concept Artist, Illustrator
• Laksha Parajuli - Sound Designer
• Truong Pham - UI Artist, Prop Artist

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Progress Documentation:

Our initial idea was to create a game where the player themself was pulled into a new world and made to interact with it. With our time frame, we knew a game based around character creation would use up a lot of resources, so we decided to go for a heavily story-based game where the characters addressed the player directly: a visual novel with a blank main character slate.

Several ideas for the story genre were tossed around. Horror, comedy, a slice of life... In the end, we decided to settle with a happy medium: an office worker from a regular, cookie-cutter world being whisked away into a goofy, parallel world full of monsters.

Story: 

The story was designed to be simple, while still long and detailed enough to be immersive to the player. This is primarily a character-driven game, so the majority of the focus was put into making each of the monster characters (as well as the player character) as likable and fleshed-out as possible within the timeframe of the project. During the development of the game, each section of progression was written in a narrative sequence, following a general story map. 

Character Art Progress:

This image is a rough gist of how our characters were created. After creating an initial sketch to map out a vague idea, our character designer (Madeline) went in and designed a turnaround and simple concept sheet for each monster. After this, the final sprites were created. This specific picture details the creation of the main monster character: Gus. 

Environment Art Process:

The decision to have all of the backgrounds be 3D renders was made fairly early on in development. (Pete may have just finished playing Danganronpa and liked the look of 3D backgrounds in a visual novel, but who can know for sure?) We tried a few visual styles before settling on the look that we used in the final game, rendering in both Unreal and Maya. The final product environments were rendered in Maya, using Arnold Renderer with toon shaders. 

As for the environments themselves, the process was simple. It was a pretty even mix of prop modeling/texturing and lighting. Due to the nature of how these environments would be used, there wasn't much importance put into performance-optimizing techniques such as retopology or trim-sheets, since the models would only be seen in the context of still images. 

UI development:

The theme for the UI is office. At first, the concept stuck closely to the office color scheme, but later it was changed to match the overall mood of the game.

Mini-games:

These are designed to be very simple and straightforward puzzles. The goal of mini-games is to make the player experience more engaging. The aesthetic of each game matches the character that is in charge of that area.

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2) IT Wing

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Scripting and Tech Art:

On the scripting side, we started by building up basic functionality. The dialogue system was by far the most complex part of the game and required the most work and fine-tuning, and it was never really done until the very end of the project.

Once things were more or less working as intended, we started putting in as much visual player feedback as possible in the form of position and scale manipulation, shaders, particles, and dialogue tags. To fit the game's atmosphere, we tried to keep it as bouncy and colorful as possible.

Sound Design:

Our team came together and created a soundboard at the beginning of the project. We decided in a general sense we wanted everything in the project to have some sort of under-the-sea presence to it. We did not have a dedicated sound designer when we started this project, so after some deliberation we assigned one of our spare scripters to head all the sounds in the project. Project in its completed phase utilizes the initial theme atop varying character personality-related music and an assortment of sound effects to make the story really come to life.

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Inspiration and Research:

Since this game primarily takes place in a fantasy world, most of our "research" was taken from personal experience. We did, however, take a lot of inspiration from media like The Office and Monsters Inc. 

Looking Forward:

As this was created as a senior project, many of us will be using this game as a portfolio piece, and/or something to put on our resumes. Not much discussion has been put into continuing the game past this course, as we will all be graduating soon and have jobs to find; however, we really enjoyed working on this game and finishing it together. We're really proud of what we accomplished!