When I posted the first draft of First Week of Corporate, I honestly wasn’t sure if anyone would sit through the whole thing. It was fifteen scenarios long, fully dark-themed, and built around a life I pulled directly from my own life: being a university student trying to survive your first week at a large multinational while balancing your studies.

Turns out people did sit through it. My rowing teammates played it. My colleagues at my part-time job played it. My siblings played it. That feedback told me the concept worked. What the feedback also told me was that fifteen scenarios was too many.

What Changed Since the First Draft

The most significant structural change was cutting from 15 scenes down to 12. My classmates and professor flagged that the game was too long, and honestly, replaying it myself I could feel where the energy dropped usually around scenario eleven when the narrative arc had already resolved in your head but the game kept going. Cutting three scenes wasn’t just about length. It forced me to identify which scenarios actually earned their place. The ones I removed were redundant. 

The other major change came from accessibility feedback. My professor pointed out that some players might not be able to distinguish the colors clearly. I had never seriously thought about contrast ratios before this project. I ended up running every foreground-background color pair in my game through the WebAIM Contrast Checker, which implements the WCAG formula directly. Twelve pairs in total. Every single one passed WCAG AA, which is the actual legal and industry standard. A few failed WCAG AAA, an enhanced standard designed for severe visual impairments that most commercial products don’t meet and I believe that that was acceptable. But getting there required rethinking the background and text colors entirely. The muted grey text that was genuinely hard to read (#5a5650, contrast ratio of 2.75:1 a clear fail) became a warm mid-grey (#87837f) that now passes at 4.90:1. I learned more about color theory and accessibility from fixing this one issue than I had in any project before.

The game also now shuffles which choice maps to A, B, or C on every playthrough so you can’t memorize “always pick B” on a second run. You actually have to read.

What I Learned

Three things I genuinely didn’t expect going in:

First, code demands attention in a way I underestimated. I had to think about what happens when a player picks a specific combination of choices across twelve scenes, and whether the ending they reach actually reflects that. I ended up building a simulator that ran 10,000 random playthroughs to verify that all six endings were reachable and that the Rising Star ending wasn’t too easy or too hard to get. That’s not something I thought I’d be doing when I started writing scenario dialogue.

Second, writing scenarios is harder than it looks. Each one needed a setup, a tension, three choices that feel genuinely different not obviously good or bad and outcomes that change your stats in ways that compound believably across the whole game. Getting that balance wrong means players feel manipulated rather than challenged. I rewrote several scenarios multiple times.

Third, debugging is not easy. When something breaks in a narrative game, it doesn’t always throw an error. Sometimes the wrong ending quietly fires, or the progress counter is off by one, or a choice that’s supposed to branch to a different scene doesn’t. Finding those issues required actually reading through the logic carefully rather than just running it and hoping.

What I’d Do Differently

I would have started with accessibility in mind. I also would have playtested earlier. Getting my teammates to play the 15-scene version before submission would have caught the length problem. If I had more time, I would expand the game itself by adding a leaderboard so players can compare their endings, sound design to reinforce the corporate atmosphere, deeper branching with scenes that only unlock based on patterns in your earlier choices, and a short questionnaire at the start to personalize the experience.

Play it here: First Week of Corporate