Maintenance

by maxthedoom

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.55

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.65

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.74

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.90

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.77

Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.73

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.36

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.38

A game where you work as an IT guy/system administrator, and are tasked with ensuring all of the company computers are online. If you see one of them down, you need to investigate what's wrong with it and fix it. From time to time, you may also receive an email giving you tasks about the PC.

The whole system is so unstable, there's barely any downtime - or rather too much of it!
Especially considering problems arise more and more often the longer you go on.

Controls are mostly explained in the game, but the basics are, you move with WASD, and interact with things by pressing their buttons when you get close enough.

Genres: simulation

Comments21

Dustin Brown5 Oct 2021, 02:50

Stressful! But fun. Also, a very self-aware game. I enjoyed it in a masochistic sort of way.

SamarthMP50025 Oct 2021, 03:18

This is a pretty interesting concept, I have always wanted to be managing several computers, just like in a large database!

teenythanos5 Oct 2021, 03:28

This looks awesome, but Microsoft security isn't having your .exe :slight_frown: But it looks like it nailed the theme!

ThatANoNoWord5 Oct 2021, 05:26

The game has a really good concept. The standard of having to manage computers in various ways is neat. The placing of objects and windows is also a neat feature. I think the drives and rebooting of computers are a bit weird and complicated. Other than that, the game is great!

Anark0B3N5 Oct 2021, 05:46

Dude.. that reminded me of my ACTUAL life.. IT SUCKED!! Jk, that was awesome, great idea, it even almost gets political!

Magic_mike5 Oct 2021, 09:25

Nice concept! I seem to suck a bit at it tho with only 8 problems solved as a pb

WYL TEAM5 Oct 2021, 12:10

Nice idea, but tutorial is not so complete

Maxthedoomauthor6 Oct 2021, 00:11

@thatanonoword Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I didn't really think about people who don't know much about sysadmin work, especially the drives, I gave them serial names - 0BCdf12_ISS1/2, but I should have just called them drive 1 or drive 2, I'm betting this confused a lot of people. And probably shouldn't have bothered with different manufactures.

Maxthedoomauthor6 Oct 2021, 00:13

@wyl-team Yeah you are definitely right. The tutorial was pretty much the last thing I did, I wanted to write down more stuff like, you can order hardware and more details about the raid repairs, but I ran out of space on the monitor sprite, and didn't have more time to implement something like another page.

Maxthedoomauthor6 Oct 2021, 00:14

@teenythanos Yeah, I've seen that happen with a few other downloadable games :/ I'm not too sure how to mitigate it.

Maxthedoomauthor6 Oct 2021, 00:19

@anark0b3n Heheh glad to hear it's "realistic" enough. I don't have direct experience with onsite system administrators but I do work with them remotely, so this is a bit of how I imagined their jobs at first hehe.

Simpathey6 Oct 2021, 04:13

The game was fun! I would spend time improving the UI and also adding a visual tutorial in a post jam build.

Maxthedoomauthor6 Oct 2021, 04:40

Thanks for playing it on stream @simpathey! I'm thinking of making a bit of a bigger build where you're introduced to more and more computers and more tasks over time, with some story. I'm kind of getting Papers Please kind of vibes of it when I think about it. If I do end up doing it, I'll improve the UI and explain things a bit better, and polish things up like the fullscreen issue.

Sceef6 Oct 2021, 07:15

Great job!

JPatchZ6 Oct 2021, 07:17

Very different than we usually see. Congratulations for the creativity.

bamberga6 Oct 2021, 07:47

Made me remember night shifts from a long time ago. Captures the mood really well but i wish it ramped up more slowly instead of just throwing you in the deep end.

LazySeal7 Oct 2021, 18:10

I like it! Really addictive, like that realistic. Maybe some unobtrusive background music there would be nice. And don't understand it that I could not close the PC while it is loading. Would like to close it more quickly.

loveboxf11 Oct 2021, 15:06

It's a pretty simple yet fun game! Having to worry about starving to death adds to the worry of having enough time to do maintenance on the computers and ordering new fans and PSUs. I would say that the art is lacking but it gets the job done. I am very thankful you included visuals to the errors so that I can save time by grabbing the right parts. Great work!