What I Asked For
The original idea was basically an office simulator, except the office is a video game.
I wanted to take all the familiar parts of working in a modern office — deadlines, meetings, coffee, broken computers, stressed-out coworkers, people who somehow appear to be sleeping at their desks — and turn them into the mechanics of a little retro management game.
Visually, I wanted it to feel like something that could have existed on a home console in the early 1990s: tiny pixel-art employees, cubicles, CRT monitors, simple animations and a slightly ridiculous amount of activity happening at once.
The important part was that the people couldn’t just be static sprites. I wanted a little system that could assemble different-looking employees and then show them actually doing things: typing, drinking coffee, going to meetings, getting stressed, fixing things, celebrating, sleeping and generally trying to survive the workday.
The name was obvious:
Billable Hours.
What It Is
Billable Hours is a browser-based retro office simulation built around a tiny animated workforce.
The office is populated by procedurally assembled pixel-art employees using interchangeable character parts, which lets a relatively small collection of artwork create a much larger cast of characters.
Those employees can move through different states and animations based on what’s happening in the simulation. They work at their computers, drink coffee, attend meetings, repair problems, get stressed, fall asleep and celebrate when something actually goes right.
Underneath the deliberately primitive 16-bit presentation is a simulation tracking the people, their jobs and what’s happening around the office. The fun part is watching all of those little systems collide and turn an ordinary workday into controlled chaos.
It was built in Phaser, which handles the game loop, sprites, animation and interaction in the browser. The character artwork is assembled and rendered programmatically rather than treating every possible employee as a completely separate sprite.
The result feels somewhere between an old management game, a digital ant farm and every office I’ve ever worked in.
And, naturally, the most important number is billable hours.