Fornication Optimization

Fornication Optimization was a casual game that puts you in control of a chaotic server room. Dash around and fix machines in line with your boss’ instructions to make sure those pesky end users dont lose connection for more than 30 seconds or they will forget about each other forever and you’ll be responsible for a lost love… and nobody wants that.

This game was developed by myself and one other during the 2021 GMTK game jam, being uploaded for people to play for free on Itch.io. The game was my first experience with game jams and an eye opener for “crunch like” environments and scenarios.

Fornication Optimization’s design was derived from the theme given of “Joined Together”. The idea here being that your goal as a player was to keep the would-be couples joined together over the internet by making sure all the electrical bits are in order!

There were multiple times during development where we ran into major technical issues regarding the mechanics of the game. Specifically having procedurally generated server rooms. This probed very challenging and ended up being something we canned due to the time restrictions of the jam being only 48 hours of development, and by this point we were already about half way in.

Another technical issue was the randomizing of wires the player would have to fix and connect to fix servers. I found it challenging creating a reliably random algorithm that would effectivley achieve what i wanted to achieve. I ended up utilizing a method for shufling a deck of cards, but substituted my wires which ended up giving me my desired result.

The game so far as we were concerned was a success, submitting within the 48 hour time limit and being able to have a working product by the end of it was more than enough for us to be satisfied with the project.