Escape The Employees by Benjamin Leroy
An office boss forgot to put coffee back into the coffee machine. Impossible for its furious employees to work in these conditions. There is only one solution for the boss: to run away.


Controls : - Move : WASD/ZQSD - Interact : E - Shoot : Left Click - Punch : Right Click
Thank you for playing our little game. And promise the next time we will not forget the coffee.
| Link | https://leroy-benjamin.itch.io/escape-the-employees |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/escape-the-employees |
Ratings
| Overall | 1115th | 3.409⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 395th | 3.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1206th | 3⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1783th | 2.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 784th | 3.786⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 198th | 3.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 846th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 57🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
I seen only the start of the game and from what i saw it seems pretty beautiful, sadly i couldn't play it!
For the bugs we retested several times on our computer as well as those of other people and we had no crashes. There is a wait time of about 12 seconds during the intro screen maybe you thought it was a bug. @mayzhy
Characters pixel art is nice. The music create a badass experience. I appreciate the support of azerty keyboard.
You should speed up the left and righ movement of the character. The font is not easily readable, but the GUI is clean.
Good job.
PS : the run animation is cool.
Excellent game - nice work! :slight_smile:
Feedback done on stream (from what i can remember, could be incomplete) :
**Positive :**
- Graphic style works well overall. Animation were good. Walls changing on the different floors was also a cool detail.
- The setting / story is quite fun.
- The use of Bins as 'Chests' & Vending Machine as Shop were nice idea that fit perfectly in the office setting. Same with the different objects becoming weapons : Pens, Computers, Briefcase, etc...
**Negative :**
- Theme isn't really implemented, only "deeper & deeper" is going down the floors of the office.
- It lacks in progression curve overall. Difficulty doesn't seem to change the further you go. There's so few upgrades. Overall balance suggestions : More upgrades, smaller and cheaper : Attack Damage, Attack Speed & maybe Move Speed upgrades, costing between 15-25 gold. No rooms with 3-4 enemies on 3rd floor, & more rooms with 4-5 enemies on floor 0. Higher chance of looting gold & lesser chance of looting hearts. So that you actually get to buy upgrades & they help you against an harder difficulty near the end.
- Enemies spawning next to you when entering a room can be unforgiving.
- The melee attack felt useless as it had a way too big cooldown.
- Attacks (among others) lacked impact as there was no audio sfx.
A fun game overall, though it has room for improvement.
The art is really nice and fits very well together, and the little details like the numbers on the elevator are very neat.
The music choice was really good, too, though it was preexisting.
I did find that the hitboxes on some objects were a bit wonky, and the player and enemy have very unusual hitboxes for this kind of perspective. Usually in the games that use this tilted perspective, only about the lower 50% of the character sprite is actually physical, since the map is so compressed vertically due to "perspective".
Maybe because of that, I found the game a bit unforgiving, I couldn't finish it nor get enough money to buy the upgrade. I think the item prices could really use some tweaking, since I would often go through enough rooms to lose 2 health points just to be able to afford buying one back.
I think my main gripe is that the game quickly gets... same-y. The rooms are basically all identical - the items inside them may vary but it's not enough to stop it running into the [10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem](https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator). It doesn't help that there are only two types of enemy, and the same boss gets re-used for every level without any difference in behaviour. By the time you reach the third level it just feels a bit stale.
Another thing worth noting is that punching doesn't seem to work very well (right-clicking did nothing about 90% of the time), and feels redundant anyway. Why would I fight enemies up close and risk getting hit when I can just spam projectiles and kill them safely from across the room? You need a way to make the punching mechanic actually useful - perhaps a shielded enemy that blocks your projectiles, and you have to punch the shield away before you can hurt them?
I think all this really needs is a bit more variety, and a bit more content. A post-jam version where the environments and enemies are more varied, and you have a wider range of power-ups to choose from, would be fantastic fun to play.