PROCRASTINAIRE: Solitairy Confinement

A game about playing Solitaire at work while keeping your boss happy.

No more papers, please!

THE GAME

You are an office employee tasked with the everyday struggle of endless paperwork. Stamp this, staple that, shred those, clip these, sign here…

The pile of work is always growing. To catch a break every so often, you turn to your one solace: PC Solitaire.


THE OBJECTIVE

It's 5 minutes to 5PM. Your work day is almost over. Complete your paperwork as it comes in and play a little Solitaire on the side. The more tasks you complete, the higher your salary at the end of the day. Due to an accounting error in your favor, doing well at Solitaire also increases your pay.

Remember, you only need do enough paperwork to keep your employer happy. Try not to make too many mistakes either. If the pile of work reaches the angry devil sticker, the game is over and your boss will have words with you. Depending on your particular locale's employer protections, this may mean anything from a citation to termination.


HOW TO PLAY

Procrastinaire: Solitairy Confinement is a balancing act of two activities; paperwork and Solitaire.

PAPERWORK

New tasks appear in the 'IN' box. Click and drag the sheet to the center of your desk and perform the actions indicated in the attached note. If your task list does not include shredding, click and drag the sheet into the OUT pile and move onto the next one. Sheets that need shredding do not go to the OUT pile.

NOTE: if your tasks include shredding, make sure to do that last! Any unfinished tasks on a shredder sheet will lose you points.

SOLITAIRE

Solitaire follows the rules of standard PC Solitaire. Make piles for each suit at the top of the screen in ascending order, starting with Aces. You can manipulate cards into stacks of alternating colors sequentially from highest to lowest, in order to uncover hidden cards.

Voting results

Overall
2nd
7%
7.200
Graphics
4th
20%
7.900
Audio
2nd
7%
7.550
Gameplay
2nd
7%
6.400
Originality
2nd
7%
7.500
Theme
8th
47%
6.050

This game entered in the Team competition (15 entries).

Comments (19)

GanbareGames
 • 5 years ago • 

Well that's really cool even if it's impossible to beat solitaire in 5 minutes.

Kleinzach
 • 5 years ago • 

I absolutely love the mood created by the game. The mix of boring paperwork with somewhat more interesting solitare while constantly looking at the clock was great. Great concept and really well executed. The elevator music going on in the background really worked as well.

The closest thing to compare it to, as you elude to above, would be papers please, but that game brings the tension of making moral choices with feeding your family. The lack of immediacy was very refreshing in your game.

Also, well done with the graphics, the vector-based images provide a very finished looking style for something made in just two days.

cloakedninjas
  • 5 years ago • 

You have no idea how hard I pushed for us to call this game Please, no more papers!

treslapin
  • 5 years ago • 

Go to sleep @cloakedninjas

Raindrinker
 • 5 years ago • 

Amazing! This game is so polished cohesive and everything! What a team! Would love to have time to actually finish my solitaire game tho :< Its hard enough to balance the 2 things to make me also play agaisnt the clock. And I think an ace bugged and I couldnt place it.

And I'm not sure if I can just shred a paper if it has a shredder on it or if i should o the things that are written either before, or all.

Also I started on the hard difficulty by mistake cause I didnt realise they were difficulties :D

Amazing work! Love it.

aj4y
 • 5 years ago • 

Awesome Design but time seems a bit less.

Wan
 • 5 years ago • 

Really impressive and all around polished entry! You guys are seriously talented. The concept is super funny, and like @Kleinzach says it well it does an interesting job gamifying the boring life of repetitive office work. It really proves that the Paper Please concept can be reinvented in other ways to pass different mood & emotions.

I was quite impressed when I understood the card backgrounds were actually used as difficulty levels, and especially when I realized each difficulty had its own music variant. Otherwise not much to say about the art, apart from it being awesome and polished :)

Little nitpicks:

  • I would have preferred if the items were more spread apart on the desk, and especially not that close to the sheet I'm working on. That means accidents & issues picking/putting down the right item.
  • Props for re-implementing Solitaire, now I always seem to have one or two cards that glitch out and become stuck out of the piles and unusable, which is too bad because I had a chance at finishing the game at some point.
  • 5mn is indeed a bit long

More a suggestion but I would have liked to work on several sheets of paper at the same time.

hyperlinkyourheart
 • 5 years ago • 

Probably my favourite of the games I have played so far. The degree of polish is just amazing, as is the art, music and gameplay - they all combine really excellently to capture the mood of the end of the day in an office. Great work all round!

Antti Haavikko
(@anttihaavikko) • 5 years ago • 

I'm officially giving up. Didn't remember how hard solitaire is to actually beat. I think the time limit was too strict. I think I managed to reach a conclusion of unwinnable deal few times even though after few tries I was just straight up shredding the papers without even looking at them. I think this final try ended up being my best try score wise.

And the "scoring" makes absolutely no sense to me. Why am I getting negative pay for successful actions and some earnings for playing cards? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Wasn't a huge fan of mixture of some things needing clicks and some needing drags, I think everything should have been unified. And speaking of dragging stuff, the drop locations were annoyingly small (both for items and cards) considering it's a game where you're pretty much supposed to be looking at a different spot than where your mouse is.

Not quite sure what the mark on the upper left corner here was supposed to be? Shredder? So should the other things be done first and then just shred it? That doesn't seem very logical…

On my first run, I tried to do all the proper actions and still coudn't keep up with the growing pile of papers and not even think about trying to focus on playing solitaire bar few cards here and there. I was under the assumption that I'd have to do just enough work to get paid, try to play solitaire at the same time and then manually punch out at 5. But sadly it ended up being a single day adventure where you pretty much just need to pick whether to do work or just play solitaire.

Dunno if it was just on my end but after a run, back to title and playing again, the inbox refused to work at all. Had to refresh between all tries. And I think in the end of the second shuffle round, there is a weird double card glitch.

Loved the ability of cards to overflow the screen :D

Good job! Very cool idea and well executed if not counting forementioned balancing issues.

HuvaaKoodia
 • 5 years ago • 

A very pleasant atmosphere! Well… I went for the spooky cards first, due to nostalgia, without realizing the decks also doubled as difficulty selection. A very frantic atmosphere! I do like how each deck is accompanied with fitting music though.

After the initial disaster gave it 4 more tries (refreshing the page a few times when things didn't seem right) and was dealt 4 impossible hands. There's a reason Klondike solitaire is pretty much only used to slack off work: it is dreadful! The few bugs are a nuisance and the most helpful feature of the bog standard Windows Solitaire is missing. Double clicking a card which can go to a foundation should automatically do so.

The mix of menial work and menial play seems innovative enough at first, and it kind of is apart from Job Simulator, but further analysis reveals an important design flaw: You don't need to work at all! The accounting mistake is so vast that shredding a few papers here and there, and half completing a match of solitare will net the career procrastinator a hefty sum. No actual task juggling required! This means we are left with an inferior version of Klondike, the solitaire to ruin them all…

Top job on audio visuals, the rest needs some tuning.

Overall: Above average (6)
Graphics: Great (8)
Audio: Great (8)
Gameplay: Bad (3)
Originality: Good (7)
Theme: Below average (4)

PS.
Refreshed one more time, played on spooky. 23 actions required, 11 actions completed (only shredding), 6330 net pay. What's going on!

cloakedninjas
  • 5 years ago • 

We revisted scoring and end-game conditions at least 4 times during the weekend. Originally the win condition was going to be complete a game of solitaire, but due to the often unwinnable nature of it and the sporadic glitches with cards, we decided there was no win condition, you just go as far as you can.

There was also originally no time limit, because Solitaire can take a long time (I know I suck at it). But again, the unwinnable aspect meant your game could get stuck with no end, so we decided on a 5min time limit. Perhaps a little too low, in hindsight maybe card backs should come with different time limits.

Perhaps we should have made the game minesweeper! 😄

cloakedninjas
  • 5 years ago • 

Oh and "Actions expected" is the number of Post-It icons. "Succesful Actions" is the ones you got right.

If you got all right, they would be the same quantity but the balance for successful would be 0, as you made no mistakes.

I guess we should have made that line red to show it as more of an "accuracy tax" of your payslip

euske
 • 5 years ago • 

My favorite entry so far. Totally unique take of the theme, and the graphics and audio are top-notch. I really loved the chill atomosphere! My only complaint is that shredding tasks make no sense, let alone placing three staples on a sheet…

My best score was 101/102 actions. Solitaire? Pffft, I'm workaholic.

Antti Haavikko
(@anttihaavikko) • 5 years ago • 

@cloakedninjas Cool, I think that brings a bit more clarity to the confusing scoring sheet. But I'm pretty sure it showed me -0 when I had everything correct. And the scoring is so heavily slanted towards solitaire and missed actions being penalized so little that it's pretty much pointless to try to even do any work at all. Maybe that is a lesson for real life.

And another thing I had in mind earlier but forgot to write about was an issue with the card graphics. The font isn't that super readable anyway and then you cover half of the digits/letters. I had to quite often start counting cards from the topmost one to figure out what the lowest one on the stack was.

treslapin
  • 5 years ago • 

Unfortunately I didn't have any time to balance the point system. If we have time to implement a new system after the jam concludes, it may look something like this:

  • +5 for placing a card on the board
  • +20 for placing a card on the 4 slots
  • +1 for each task completed correctly
  • -20 for each task missed
  • -%25 for breezy difficulty
  • +%25 for spooky difficulty

and maybe

  • x2 bonus for completing every task correctly
  • x5 bonus for completing a game of solitaire

So the penalty for doing things wrong is greater than the reward for doing them correctly. That way the player is incentivised to play solitaire, but also to do just enough paperwork to not get fired. Will need to test it a lot before I'm happy with it. :)

I also want the scores to have a decimal, so 8990 points would show as $89.90. :D

Antti Haavikko
(@anttihaavikko) • 5 years ago • 

@treslapin Oh crap, that just made me realize that I completely ignored the 4 slots while playing. No wonder it seemed way harder than I remembered. Guess it's been quite a while since I last played solitaire :D

Baconinvader
 • 5 years ago • 

Learnt how to play solitaire purely for this game! It's quite fun (the game, that is) and very stressful, even on lower difficulties. I never actually managed to win the solitaire game, but that just be because I suck. The graphics are well made and nice to look at, and I like how both the music and difficulty changes with deck selection. Nice job.

smbe19
 • 5 years ago • 

Very entertaining game and very well made. The solitaire part seems to be a bit buggy sometimes. For example I was not able to move any Jacks, which made it a bit difficult to progress… But the office part is very nice. I just don't understand, why I have to sign a document if I will shred it the next second ;)

cloakedninjas
  • 5 years ago • 

@smbe19 You gotta do what the boss the says, no matter how ridiculous the request :D

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Play on itch.ioFreesound.org creditsOSTGithub source

Authors

dorkulon
cloakedninjas
treslapin

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