A downloadable game for Windows

Dream Job is a fast-paced arcade game made for kids with accessibility in mind. The game takes place inside the dream of a supermarket cashier who has but one clear goal: to scan as many items as possible before sunrise!

Each item is a fully rotatable 3D object that the player must twist and turn to locate the side with the barcode. Once the correct side is found, the player scans it to score points. The faster you work, the more magical or mundane items you get to scan before time runs out. Players can also build up combo multipliers by scanning multiple items in a row without mistakes. So be careful, scanning the wrong side will reduce your score and reset your combo multiplier! As the night goes on, the pressure rises, and you get less and less time to find the barcode. Do you think you have what it takes to keep up and beat the high score? Well, there’s only one way to find out: by getting to work!

How To Play

Controls - Keyboard

A - Rotate item horizontally

E - Rotate item vertically

Spacebar - Scan/Select

Esc - Pause Game

Controls - Xbox Adaptive Controller

A - Rotate item horizontally

B - Rotate item vertically

X - Scan/Select

Menu button - Pause Game

Team Members

Programming: Erik Fanki, Rasmus Eriksson, Pulak Dhar

Game Design: Christopher Arias Gauthier, Emil Särelind, Markus Merio, Rayan Jibril-Alakki, Simon Aghed Luterkort

Animation & VFX: Emily Morales Chavez, Philip Lindh, Strahinja Dobrosavljevic

Development Summary

Dream Job is the culmination of three weeks of intensive development at Futuregames Stockholm. Because of the short timeframe (3 weeks), we let the brief and project requirements lead the way, resulting in a very actionable concept based around a simple, yet fun, core mechanic, tailored to the Xbox Adaptive Controller.

We took inspiration from arcade titles in general, but our main source of inspiration was the iconic game Tetris, with its never-ending pressure and focus on rotations. Our simple control scheme, working together with the big buttons on the Xbox Adaptive Controller, proved to be a great solution that resonated with all our playtesters.

By taking the time early on to make sure everyone on the team shared the same vision, we set ourselves up for an effective workflow that kept meetings to a minimum.

Since our intended audience was kids from the ages of 10 to 12, we made sure to implement plenty of feedback tied to the core mechanic, not just to provide an engaging experience in terms of visuals and audio, but also to help the players make sense of the high-paced gameplay. We also made sure to create a colorful and surreal atmosphere level-wise, to draw the eye during those brief periods of calm, and evoke feelings of curiosity, joy, and mystery.

During playtests, most of our assumptions proved to be true, but we also learned a couple of new major insights: the difficulty could be increased, and responsiveness in terms of input had to improve. This led us to allowing the player to interrupt animations earlier, as well as speeding up the transitions between items.

The big takeaway from this project is how important it is to scope properly and have faith in the original design. By keeping it simple, we as a team could, in a very short period of time, reach high levels of both functionality and polish.