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Show HN: Pro Office Calculator – How deep does the rabbit hole go?

2 pointsby rjinman11 months ago
I developed this game back in 2017&#x2F;18 while bored out of my mind working as a junior web developer. It was partly to entertain my friends and colleagues, but I decided at some point to put it on Steam for free. You can find it if you search &quot;Pro office calculator&quot;. It also has an official website at proofficecalculator.com.<p>The game is written in C++ and remains my largest project to date at around 25000 LOC.<p>It starts off as a normal calculator, but gradually transforms into much more. The storyline touches on themes of alternate universes, time travel, the singularity, etc. In terms of gameplay, I would take common elements of software design, such as trouble-shooters, installers, dialog boxes, etc. and distort them in as perverse a way as possible. It at times involved making creative use of the GUI toolkit (Qt) to do unconventional things.<p>The game includes a Doom-style 3D engine, which I found extremely challenging to develop. I never looked up how to do it as I wanted the satisfaction of deriving my own rendering and collision algorithms. Consequently, it&#x27;s horrendously slow, which is why the resolution is so low. It has most of the features of the original Doom engine, plus a few more, like portals and the ability to look up and down. I used Inkscape as my level editor, because from Inkscape you can export SVG images, which are just XML, which is easy to parse - I just had to figure out how to represent all the level geometry and game objects in an SVG image.<p>It got a bit of attention when it first came out, but not much as I never really bothered to promote it. I&#x27;ve decided on a whim to post it here today :)

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