Machine Multiplayer Office is a goofy social deduction game for 4-6 players in which a healthy outsider has to mimick the symptoms of sick employees in order to blend in and be the last one standing.

It was made as part of the third semester collaborative project module at Cologne Game Lab in a team of 6 people. It can be downloaded here.

My Responsibilities

Over the course of this project, we had some organizational hiccups which required me to jump in and help with coding more than usual, beyond my design responsibilites.

Game Design

  • Designing and iterating upon the game system and its core loop

  • Organizing and conducting playtesting

  • Coming up with sandbox tools that are both fun and support the core social deduction

Project Management

  • Coordinated task distribituion and project timelines using tools like Trello, Miro and Notion

  • Held frequent meetings in order to check if we are following plan or changes are needed

Programming

  • Implementing and online-synchronizing several of the secondary interactions – Drawing, Making Coffee Stains, Crumpling paper

  • Helping our programmers debug the core system and make it run smoothly

Core Loop

In the game you play as one of 2 roles:

1. Machine – the regular worker at The Hole Company, due to the infiltrators’ presence they have started to develop different symptoms (impairments in vision, controls and motorics). They have to find who the healthy infiltrator is and eliminate them.

2. Infiltrator – a foreign spy, their presence has triggered the company’s self-destruction protocol, but their identity is yet to be revealed. Even though they don’t experience the symptoms Machines do, they have to act as if they have them in order to blend in and convince others of their innocence.

Each round you vote for the CEO, a person with the ultimate power, who is given a gun remote control and has the ability to switch off any player during their tenure. The players have to choose the CEO carefully by scanning who is the safest player to vote.

The game ends either when all Machines are kicked out, all Infiltrators are kicked out, or the self-destruction protocol has been triggered after a certain amount of rounds.

A visualization of the core loop
One of the symptoms (Rendering Malfunction) in action

The Office Sandbox

As a secondary layer of gameplay, we wanted to lean into the feeling of goofy fun you have with your friends, to balance the social deduction part and give it a lighthearted tone.

Me and the other designer that I worked with devised a way to bridge those two aspects of our vision by providing the players with a sandbox which, besides being a fun playground, also gives them the tools with which they can test each other for symptoms.

For example to test the rendering symptom, we have drawable sticky notes the players could throw out of view of the others to test their reactions, or coffee which you can throw to make stains and test if you are able to aim at the correct thing.