Inbox Zero
You are back from vacation. You have 99,999 unread emails.
Follow EvoloveDev here to hear when the full game comes to Steam.
Clean up your inbox with your cursor. Clock out or stay for overtime, your choice. Spend what you earned on coffee, a bigger monitor and an intern. Come back tomorrow and delete more.
Inbox Zero is a short, active incremental game. Each workday lasts under a minute, and every upgrade changes how the next one plays.
What is in the demo
- A short story told through the emails you get. It starts with a letter from the CEO about what happened while you were on vacation
- Reply chains, exploding zip attachments, auto-reply pulses and interns who delete email for you
- Five kinds of email. Newsletters send spam when you unsubscribe, and urgent emails cost you time if you miss their deadline. Keep your pointer off the phishing ones
- Four promotions, from Mailroom Clerk to Team Lead. Each one is a challenge with its own trick, and you get a bigger screen after each
- About 20 to 30 minutes from start to finish
Controls
Just use the mouse. Esc if needed.
About this demo
This is the opening of a longer game planned for Steam, where the goal is to take the counter all the way to zero. In the demo it stops at one, because the last email is the full game's final boss. The full game also has more promotions and new functions like Select All and macros. Your demo save keeps going after the ending if you want to keep deleting.
Feedback is welcome.
Made with Godot.
Music: "Local Forecast - Elevator" and "Bossa Antigua" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Development log
- 0.6.0: the demo has a story now3 hours ago
- 0.5.0: every promotion comes with a bigger screen1 day ago
- 0.4.2: the demo now has a proper ending1 day ago
Comments
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It would be nice to not automatically start the promotion as soon as you buy it, so you can buy it first and then spend the rest of your money on other upgrades.
Good idea, thanks! I'll change it for the next update: buying the promotion no longer starts it. The button becomes a switch instead, so you can pay, spend what's left on upgrades, and start the challenge when you're ready (or switch it off and play a normal day first).
Love all the new indie simulation productivity games!!
Really glad you're enjoying it!
Completed the game with all spam answered and upgrades got, very nice. I got 2 small nitpick though if you don't mind.
First, I think the phishing mail shouldn't be allowed to spawn right on top of the cursor. unless you plan to add an upgrade that makes that impossible, I think you should make an exception so that it won't spawn and insta-lock you right then and there. alternatively, make it so that you have a brief window of time to respond to the mail spawning on top of you, because no one likes getting spawn locked like that.
Second, it seem there's a bit of a visual error when you drag around in the upgrade menu, the upgrades is placed on top of the black outline & header thing which looks really strange. Thankfully it doesn't seem to cause any problem, but it still look weird.
Thanks for playing it all the way through, and for both notes.
The upgrade menu one is fixed in 0.5.0: the tree now slides under the title bar and the outline when you drag it.
You are right about the phishing mail. Nothing stops one from appearing right under the pointer, and getting locked by something you had no chance to see is not fair. It is not in 0.5.0, but it is on the list for the next update.
Really fun and well executed little game! 100%ed the upgrades by day 37 with around 70k emails to go and hit inbox zero on day 53. Would love to see more of this.
Thank you for playing. Planning on doing gradual updates on demo, and currently working on the full version.
This one was so much FUN! Great idea and upgrades. Only thing is one last infinite upgrade so we can have zero inbox easier. I mean you don't have anything else to spend money on after beating final stage. Hope it becomes better. Good job so far.
Thank you for playing. What stage did you get full upgrades? According to that might add new upgrades and stages or as you suggested add infite upgrade.