Choose Your Burnout

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