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Human Resource Machine is a single-player puzzle game for the that originally launch on the Wii U in 2015 developed by Tomorrow Corporation. It revolves around an office worker moving objects from the inbox to the outbox as a programming metaphor. The game was also be a launch title for the Nintendo Switch in 2017.
Gameplay[]
The game includes approximately 40 programming puzzles, each considered one "year" of the player's avatar tenure in a corporate structure. In each puzzle, the player creates a list of instructions from rudimentary commands to control the movements of their avatar on an overhead view of an office; the office includes two conveyor belts, one an inbox that sends in either an integer or a single alphabetic character represented as a small box, the other an outbox to receive these. The office floor typically also includes a number of marked number spaces that can hold one box each. For each puzzle, the player is told of a specific task, such as adding two numbers as they come in on the inbox, or sorting a zero-terminated string of characters, delivering these results in the proper order to the outbox.
Development[]
Human Resource Machine was developed by Tomorrow Corporation, a development company founded by Kyle Gabler, Allan Blomquist and Kyle Gray. The game is considered by Gabler as an extension of earlier titles where they have applied gamification to other principles; World of Goo (developed by Gabler and Ron Carmel under 2D Boy) applied the game idea to the concept of Hooke's law, while Little Inferno used the game nature to explore the value of time. The development team saw that the same principles could be applied to computers and used that as the basis of Human Resource Machine. In contrast to Little Inferno, which Gabler stated was difficult to talk to the press without revealing a major revelation of the second half of the game, the concept of Human Resource Machine was very simple to grasp and without any secrets to keep hidden. They decided on using the office environment as it made it easy to create real-life analogs for assembly language concepts that players could grasp, and making it easier for the player to build up the list of instructions. The game was fleshed out by developing the on-screen dialog of the supervisor explaining the task in language that was clear to understand but still has "a little bit of sassiness" to it, and that such language was used consistently across the whole game.
Reception[]
The game got positive reviews.
External links[]
- Human Resource Machine at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Human Resource Machine at GameFAQs