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Siti Aisyah Mat Zainal
Siti Aisyah Mat Zainal

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Choose Your Burnout

April Fools Challenge Submission ☕️🤡

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

Choose Your Burnout
The inevitable simulation of modern work culture.
What I Built

I built a game that solves absolutely nothing.

Choose Your Burnout is a dark, choice-based simulation where every path leads to the same destination: a slow, optimized collapse.

You start by selecting your career:

The Corporate Labyrinth
The Disruptive Alchemist (Startup)
The Freelance Mirage
The Academic Basement
The Gig Economy Engine

From there, you make decisions that trade:

Sanity
Sleep
Energy

…for:

Money
Ego
and the illusion of progress

There is no winning state.

Only different versions of “this seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Demo

🔗 Live Demo:
[👉https://chooseyourburnout.netlify.app/]

Code

🔗 GitHub Repository:
[👉 https://github.com/aisyahz/Choose-Your-BurnOut.git]

How I Built It

This project is powered by:

React + Vite – for fast iteration and a clean component structure
Tailwind CSS – for brutalist, high-contrast UI control
Framer Motion (motion/react) – for cinematic transitions, glitches, and subtle tension
SVG + layered rendering – to build the “Digital Mask” face system
The Burnout Engine

At the center of the experience is a reactive face:

A pseudo-3D Digital Mask that evolves based on your stats.

Sleep ↓ → eyes droop and blink irregularly
Sanity ↓ → asymmetry, glitches, red flickers
Energy ↓ → head tilts, movement slows
Ego ↑ → forced, unsettling smile
Money ↓ → structural fragmentation

It doesn’t just display stats.
It becomes them.

Key Features
🧠 The Burnout Engine

A living, degrading face that reacts to every decision.

🧭 Thematic Career Paths

Each path has its own visual and psychological identity:

Corporate → structured, grid-like, suffocating
Startup → chaotic, pulsing, unstable
Freelance → fragmented, isolated
Academic → slow decay, heavy inertia
Gig → fast, repetitive, algorithm-driven
🧪 Premium Glitch Aesthetic

A sculpted dark UI with:

chromatic aberration
flickering overlays
system logs
subtle instability

Everything feels… almost under control.

📸 The Screenshot Weapon

At the end, you receive a final report:

A dramatic “digital eulogy” of your decisions.

Designed to be shared.
Designed to hurt.

The Vibe

Polished.
Cold.
Slightly accusatory.

It looks like a productivity tool.
It behaves like a breakdown.

Why I Built This

I wanted to explore a simple idea:

What if we treated burnout like a system…
and optimized it?

Not to fix it.
Just to measure it. Beautifully.

Prize Category
🎯 Community Favorite

This project is designed to be:

instantly understandable
visually memorable
screenshot-worthy
painfully relatable
Final Line

“You did everything right.”
Productivity: 0%

Hashtags

ChooseYourBurnout #GameDev #IndieGame #UIUX #BurnoutEngine #DigitalArt #WebDev

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