Hired or Homeless

by dqso

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.22

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.06

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.82

Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.70

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.92

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.32

Hired or Homeless is a top-down interview survival game made in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 59 on the theme Signal. Words are your signal. Choose them carefully.

Pick up the right phrases, bring them to the interviewer, and land the offer. Choose the wrong words - and you're back on the street.

You're a developer lost in the job market jungle. Recruiters roam the map and fire questions at you - but you can't just type anything. Answers are scattered across the world as word tokens, and you can only carry 9 at a time.

Built with Go and Ebitengine. Art and sounds sourced from various free assets; music generated with AI.

Controls:

- Move: WASD / Arrow keys.
- Collect tokens: approach and press E / drop 1–9.
- Interview: approach a character and answer questions with 1–9.

Accessibility options available in settings:

- Disable complex technical interviews on Go, JS, C#
- Start with a house already purchased (no rent payments)

Comments16

debugman1820 Apr 2026, 23:36

Interesting premise and it was pretty intuitive.

PastMoments21 Apr 2026, 00:35

Interesting concept, it's nice that there's a lot of flexibility to answer the questions.

xotraz21 Apr 2026, 01:22

Very funny game! I did not manage to pass the second stage interview since I do not know Go, Rust or C#. :hole:

dqsoauthor21 Apr 2026, 13:30

@xotraz Thanks for playing!

There's an option in settings to disable technical interviews :wink:

Nathanial21 Apr 2026, 13:44

"Do you enjoy writing documentation?" "For extra pay"
Realest developer interaction ever lol. Fun premise, I did not do so well in my interviews because I was enjoying the funny answers.

Rhookx21 Apr 2026, 14:07

the option for technical feature is a nice touch, cool concept, works fine, didn't find any bugs, overall good game, well done !

2Inkling22 Apr 2026, 01:16

This game needs a trigger warning 😭. Very cool concept, though. I think it would have been easier to select the choices with mouse rather than number keys, and some more immediate feedback would have been nice for figuring out how the game evaluates answers. Then again, the real life interview process is opaque and unintuitive, so it's kind of realistic lol.

Nordin22 Apr 2026, 17:33

Very cool concept, I think the game was quite intuitiv

JoeGreen24 Apr 2026, 10:45

Fun concept! The system with different response options is really well developed. My favorite is 'For extra pay' 😅

LDJam user 42463225 Apr 2026, 09:15

I'll write a comment for an extra pay :)

Great concept, well done!

shadow6426 Apr 2026, 07:12

Job Search PTSD 2026: The Game! Woof. Hilarious and brutal at the same time. Great idea. Well executed and fun to run around an experience the panic in a new way. Congrats on finishing!

OddballDave29 Apr 2026, 12:49

Ha! This one gave me a good laugh. I liked giving inappropriate answers more than giving correct ones which probably didn't help my cause, but I think I did okay. Simple idea, but lots of fun running around trying to find the right answers. Good stuff :8ball:

noneegy30 Apr 2026, 11:55

It is a fun little game. The idea is cool. Good job!

okkolobr3 May 2026, 14:23

"While" "complex128", "yeah" "a few hours". "select" "i'll think about it"

Alexandr Gerya5 May 2026, 14:21

just kept picking the funny wrong answers and somehow got hired anyway guess the dev knows how interviews really work

freamdev7 May 2026, 15:45

As someone who works in IT I don't understand why "5 years" was not an acceptable answer for "how fast I can fix a critical bug". Pretty funny game, had some good laughs.