By Polystyrene Man

Introduction
Today I am proud to release my final game, Another Day in the Life of Bob, a sequel to the first game I released, A Day in the Life of Bob.

This game follows the same premise as its predecessor, where there are no clear goals except for the ones you set for yourself- you may choose to make a lot of money, or you may choose to live on the streets. You might work as a surgeon, or you might sell plants. The game only ends when you die, and unlike in real life, that could potentially be... never!

Screenshots/Download



To view screenshots of the game, and to download it, click here.
Alternatively, you can download it by clicking here. The game is 28MB.
Here is a link to the game on YoYoGames.

I should note that unlike my other games, I am not including an editable for download. I wrestled with this idea for a while, but my reason for not making the editable available is that one of the game's most import aspects is its surprises. I feel that an open-sourced version would ruin a lot of what makes this game interesting and fun.

That said, I'm happy to give away scripts or anything- just request it.

Controls
Game play is very simple: Bob is moved using either the arrow keys or WASD. It's best to try both of them and see which you prefer, because they also offer different styles of movement.

Beyond movement, the rest of the game is essentially played with the mouse. Use it to navigate through menus and such.

F4 toggles fullscreen/window, Esc brings up a save/quit menu, and ctrl-S saves the game. Also, pressing shift-ctrl-Z brings up a cheat window.

All of this can be explained in-game by pressing F1.

Final note: The game contains some mature themes and a bit of language, but I think that all actions are balanced by appropriate (and predictable) consequences, just as in real life. I am not trying to promote any kind of behavior, merely acknowledging that it is a part of life. And just as in real life, you make your own decisions.

I hope you enjoy my last game!

Looks like I've found a game which will make me spend some time on it for sure.

I have to explore it, because everything seems just perfect, the game play is smooth and so the music is.

The graphic work brings up some good ambiance to it!

The versatility of making our own choices is huge.

It's sad that you'll never again grace us with your works of genius. ;_;

I've already told you what I think of this game, but I thought I would post anyway.

10/10

This is the only gamemaker game I can think of that I actually wonder about when I'm not playing it. Great job, poly.

I remembered the first game and loved it. This game was great too, but I strongly disliked the room backgrounds. Overall, really enjoying the game so far
Edit:
LOTS of glitches by the way. I did extract the game too.

I've been looking forward to this for ages. Really good fun!

i played bob 1 and i didnt like it much...but im gona try bob 2...just becouse i want to...lol

A lot of fun, awesome graphics, a lot to do, and overall I really dig this.

Lots of glitches though (teleporting into a room and getting stuck in an object), and I couldn't get the save system to work right at all.

Aside from That, really nice!

Whoa wait, teleporting? There shouldn't be any teleporting... how'd you get that?
And saving- what exactly is the problem? Does it just not load? It seems to work fine for me.

Anyways, I'm glad everyone is enjoying the game!

Saving - Upon pressing ESC and clicking on save; after I save, I get a repeating sound effect until I press ESC again and going to leave.

Farming Patch Glitch - Keep clicking over on the inventory or something, and I was able to choose buildings and menu sprites to put in my farming patch, upon going all the way over, I get an error message which forces me to abort.

Upon a new month and getting my teacher degree, I got an error message, and two teaching degrees.

First time I went into a farming patch, I think I click on the field and I got an error message.


One of the glitches made me angry because I didn't save after all my hard work (getting all the degrees, 3500 intelligence, maxed out all the jobs, etc.)

Thanks for the bug reports. Looks like you were very thorough in your playing!


These I can fix.


These I can't duplicate. Do you remember the exact error messages that you received?

And nodata, I just tried loading a game and for whatever reason, it doesn't work anymore. That one could take a while to fix, because I can't think of anything I did that would make it stop working all of a sudden.

I'll get a fixed version up in a couple days. In the meantime, keep reporting any errors that you encounter.

I think it would be better to first click on a Harvesting tool and then click on the space to harvest instead of having to click on To Inventory all the time.
Also, when I sold sunflowers, they disappeared from my inventory (as they should do). However, I still had them in the Seeds and was able to plant them.

So much stuff to explore!
This absolutely pwns the original, and so it should.

Haha lovin' it so far, kinda stuck in a room of salt atm though lol

You have to use the arrow keys, the WASD-controls won't work to get out.

Not sure if you even plan on continuing your work on this, but it would be really neat if you made it so aside from having to be rested to take a test when your ready to get your degree, the grade you get on your final exam is determined by your short term happiness, (the happier you are, the better you will do). If you graduated with a better degree, maybe you can get promotions faster, or paid more money. Just a thought.

Having a lot of fun with this... Trying to get my band up and running, but we cant get a gig at the stadium quite yet.

Upon trying to harvest fully grown pot plants, I'm confronted by this error:

I like this game's graphics, and I think it's very well-made, but I wish there was some concrete goal to it (it gets repetitive after a while), and for some reason I was unable to load my file after a while.

I'm still playing the game, which is great, by the way. I've found some error messages, most of which I forgot now, sorry.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

When I click on the pill in the inventory, it gives me an error message.

I got an error message when I clicked on the salt and the sunflower. I was being stoopyd at the time.

There was a place where I got stuck in the rocks, it's where I went left of the Carrot of doom and hopped between the screens, I got stuck in the rocks. (I was just trying to get in the cemetery. )

While I am spoilery now, can anyone tell me if they found all the easter eggs?

I'm kind of surprised, these are all quality responses. I wasn't really expecting that from the GMC!

nodata... I should have asked you to beta test...

And everyone with error reports/suggestions, my goal is to have a new version by this weekend (I want to give a bit more time for people to find bugs and such).

Well I'd be happy to beta-test / keep looking for errors and reporting them.

While you are updating, could you please make a function to turn the music off? Only if possible.

I had a kind of quick-fix for the music playing, I just removed the song files out of the Sounds folder and kept them safe in another folder. The problem is that none of the sounds I left in played after that. And another thing, I've returned the songs this morning to play with them on and it seems my savefile has disappeared... I'll edit in if I can load it. It'd be a shame if I lose it, I got all the diplomas.

And looking back at my previous post, I noticed egg on my face. I meant I went right from the Carrot of doom to find myself stuck. I did that twice, come to think of it... I can't seem to learn from my mistakes.

Edit: I loaded it, yay for diplomas!

Edit again: I don't know why, but now when I quicksave and try to press OK to make the dialog box go away, it doesn't go away until I press the x button of the dialog box...

Edit once more: This is my last edit for this post, I promise.
I can't seem to deposit money into the bank, it doesn't give me arrows to choose how much to deposit. And also when in the farm, I got an error message by not having any seeds chosen and clicking on the soil. I know this was said before, I just confirm it.

And just so you know, I don't hate the game, it's really good.

I've found bugs. You obviously used instance deactivation, because if you click on a sunflower while the person who buys them is not in the view, it returns an error. Also, I opened the game again and tried to load my game, but after it loaded the data, the game returned me to the menu, and I could not get to the saved game. There are some things you could fix, but other than that, it's a good game. I've only found 17 Easter eggs .

You have to use your keypad to enter numbers. I didn't use arrows because it would get frustrating to deposit/withdraw money in increments. This allows you to be more precise.

Thanks for everything else- I've fixed a bunch of it. Still can't explain the loading bugs, though. It seems to work sometimes but not always. I'm not doing anything fancy, just game_save() and game_load().


K, I'll be able to fix this easily as well. And I definitely had to use instance deactivation. It would be much too slow otherwise!


Keep in mind that not all of them are lying around in plain view! Some of them are given to you by certain people.

I've signed up to do this review for GMTech Issue 16. I'd just like to know one related thing - since you seem to be frequently updating the game, when can I take a copy of the game and review it? I don't want to start now only to have a major bug fix released three days after.

Thanks.

Yeah, I remember a while back I was working on a project and had a similar problem (at least in the way the game responds). I assumed the error had something to do with the time-lines I was using to set variables. If you saved in the middle of one of the time-line transitions, it seemed to corrupt the save game file. Unfortunately, this caused me to abandon the project.

I know that other people give you the eggs.

And I think I know why my game is lost. When I saved my game, my computer kind of locked up for a while. I'm guessing that somehow, I saved the game while I was in the menu, and so the game saved me at the menu. Not good. You should put a check before game_save() making sure the room is not the menu, or use custom saving.

Ive found a glitch. When I went into the room with all the saltshakers and that snail i went and collected the two easter eggs and then left. I then went to the woman again and went to the saltshaker place and the eggs where still there I could keep on getting as many eggs as i wanted.

Ok, I've uploaded a new version of the game. I was able to fix every glitch that I could duplicate.

It turned out that the save/load bug was a result of the game_save() function being in a switch statement, so the game would save itself as it was restarting... Yeah, I can't really explain it that well... essentially I couldn't find a way to solve the problem, so I had to take away the "Quit & Save" option. Obviously you can still save, then quit, though.

This garden bug that people are bringing up- I'm sure it exists but I can't seem to make it happen. It pops up when you click on a blank plot of land? I need some more info on the type of error and the circumstances which cause it.

Also, I appreciate the suggestions that weren't bug-related, but I don't really have any intention to change anything about the gameplay at this point. Mainly this is because the loading-to-coding ratio is not very friendly and my computer becomes very sluggish when I work on the game.

Yes, that is the problem with game_save(). It waits until the end of the step to load the variables.

How about changing the cursor from an arrow to a speech bubble when the player is over something that they can talk to. That would not be too hard to code, would it?

Ah, this makes a lot of sense... Not being able to save and load the game was my main concern, I'm off to continue playing the game and continue to report any bugs that I may encounter..


Awesome game Polystyrene Man.

Looks and plays fantastic, Very good job mate.

I love everything but the name. Good job

Aha- I forgot to mention that I didn't come up with the name of the game. Someone else suggested it (I've forgotten who) and I liked it.

Pleased to see everyone is enjoying it. Also nice to see a decline in the number of bug reports!

Hate to say it but I have yet to be able to load a saved game successfully. Since I had been using the save and quit button, I thought it would remedy the situation, but I still can't load a saved game. I have yet to run into any other bugs though..

I first played the game on YoYo, and I loved it. But I saved and when I tried to load it locked up. I was hoping the bug-fix version would help, but it throws random variable errors in the new one. Disappointed...

This game is very well made! A few issues I had with it, though:

If I went left from pac-man I get stuck in the rocks by the carrot of doom.
What, exactly, is the carrot there for? And I can't use my gun on him, if I go near him he doesn't do anything.
I got the musical degree and played at the club, but then what? The manager suggests bigger venues, but there is only one more which won't even look at my band.

I liked it, though it got tedious after a while.

IM GONNA PLAY THIS RIGHT NOW!!! =O

Remember me? =P orange08?

After Im done downloading ill play and edit.

-orange08

You're not supposed to kill the carrot, I can tell you that much! Just make sure you talk to people and do what they ask; you should be able to figure it out. As for playing music, the music degree helps you to improve your skill faster but it doesn't make the stadium available. You just need to practice.


Hmmm... you'll have to remind me...

I pmed you about me making a similar game to A day in the Life of Bob Game. Recently I have decided that I wouldnt make a game that was too much like yours... mine will have a story and wont be an arcade game like this.

Well.. anyways, I found a bug. When I go to the guys house to play guitar, i practiced until I was like at 200+ I saved the game. And a while later I found that when I go into his house it says: "You've broken in now to steal some money" or something like that.

-0range

Very interesting game. I found a way to get infinite money (as far as I can tell). Just work at the restaurant, and when you're out of energy, buy a meal. Then work some more, then buy a meal. Keep it up, and you'll be rolling in the dough.

yah I am finding this is a great game, but it is being held back by errors. I wish I had been good and recorcordered them all for you. Also I did vanish from the map at one point. I went into the woods where the pack man guy is, talked to him, then went on and reached a spot where there is what appears to be a graveyard and a large carrot however my guy was gone, somewhere off the map I can only assume, I ended up just quitting the game...


But good job on the game, it is very cool... I am sure once the bugs are hammered out everything will be peachy.

Very well done, everything is very polished.
I enjoyed a Day in the Life of Bob, and I enjoyed this even more.
Amazing job, to bad it's your last game I've enjoyed all of your games.

One small glitch though: In the the room with the snail and salt, there is 2 eggs. But once you get the eggs, leave the room, and come back, the eggs are there again. Maybe you didn't make the room persistent... since I also notice my guy is wearing his blue shirt when I entered it, but outside I'm always wearing my green shirt.

Some gameplay suggestions would be:

1. An extra job or 2, like a Fire Station Guy, an Accountant, a librarian, or even an electronics shop guy.

2. There should be some different effects when Satan steals your soul, like you turn gray in "A day in the life of bob", your guy goes into a deep depression, etc. Or maybe you should give the player more power.

3. An extra bar for hunger, which would add further yet fun challenge for the game, so even if you used 20 grams of crack, you would still need to go get some actual food every now and then.

5. The brothel was sort of um... not the greatest idea. Not saying it's bad, but there's lots of kids on YYG who I'm sure are playing this game and running into that. But that's just me. Apparently nobody else minds. If you were to replace it, then add something else but with the same boost, like some psychedelic arcade where Bob gets really hyped up.

6. The Rehab station doesn't seem to have a button to begin rehabilitation. Maybe the button is only there when Bob is seriously screwed up, or maybe it's just a glitch.

7. Make it to where you can only have so much crack before bob begins to go insane, to where he loses health, or something else weird happens.


Well, that's all of my suggestions for now. I'll probably come up with more in the future

EDIT: I found yet another glitch. You can buy the mansion for 5,000,000, but you can sell it for 45,000,000, thus giving you instant unlimited money It would be a good idea to fix that.

Sad to hear that this is your last game, I really liked it.

fun game, im a crack head teacher living in a box.

is it possible to acually become addicted to the crack becuase i bought like 30 grams and nothing happens when i smoked them all.

Addictions happen over a period of time, so you just have to keep doing it day after day. Eventually it will happen, don't give up on your dreams!


Yes, the buttons only appear once you're addicted to something.

no my dream is cocaaaiiinnee haha, jk really

gout stuck in beetween a tree and the border of the world. was a dumbass and saved there aswell. is there a way to get out?

The breaking-in to the band guy's house happens to me too after I broke into the other house by the school. You get in easy, but once inside it's exactly like you broke in.

Also, game maker's saving method has problems with persistent rooms. I was having pretty wierd things happen with it a year or two back which is why I've stopped using them.


This is definitely just as good as A Day in the Life of Bob, and, if I do say so myself- even better.




-Zac1790

Defenately one of my favorite GM games, if not, the favorite.

I loved everything about this game('cept the bugs, of course ). It was so worth the three years of waiting. I'm not too happy that this is your last game... but at least your last game is your best. Really, amazing job. 10/10

(just as a quick suggestion... why not make the quote at the title screen change into a different one every time you load the game? It would seem kinda neat)