Super Realistic Post Office Simulator (SRPOS)

Super Realistic Post Office Simulator is an action roguelite about sorting mail quickly and accurately at your new job! Carry or toss mail into the correct boxes to earn more money, then spend your money improving yourself to work your job better! Balance your increasing workload with your investments to keep working without getting fired.

This is definitely the project with the silliest premise I worked on, and it was developed over a 4 week period. It's also one of the first projects where I began trying to take a more "backseat" approach, focusing on making the game work well in the back end, and letting others work on the front end aspects, like game/level design. This was around the period of university where it was becoming more important to find your "niche" so you could fit into a team. Most people would desire drifting into a conceptual/creative design role (which tended to be very easy workload-wise), and I ended up being one of the few people comfortable with system building and programming.

The idea with SRPOS was to make a game that's brutally simple at its core, but very satisfying to play. This is the very concept of what a roguelite tends to be, and SRPOS was my first go at that genre! For a long time up till this point, I was beginning to realize that I really liked independent development. I enjoyed having a hand in every part of a project, and was learning that roguelite games were very good for my type of workflow. If a simple loop ends up being endlessly deep or satisfying, you can squeeze a ton of awesome playtime out of relatively little workload.

SRPOS is very far from an "endlessly deep or satisfying" game. The gameplay is pretty monotonous and underbaked. The concept was pretty large for such a small development time, so the levels ended up being pretty barebones, along with some upgrades being rather pointless (looking at you, trampoline). The "investments" system giving a permanent detriment to your ingame income is also rather confusing to grasp, but is an interesting concept I'd like to explore more eventually.

However, this still exists as my first roguelite project, and has some funny & silly things in it to explore! Definitely a favorite of mine to talk about. I worked on it with these others:
- Cole Stranczek
- Nick Rice
- Sean Forrester