Show HN: MakeWorks 98 – a game in a desktop simulation

Hi HN. MakeWorks 98 is a low stress game set in a simulation of a late 90s desktop.

You play by doing the job: answering mail in Lookout Express, chatting with simulated colleagues in Natter, adding up favours in the spreadsheet, and doing small Paint jobs. Over a year of in-game days you get promoted, people join and leave, and a daft office story goes on.

You can also slack off with Solitaire, FreeCell, Mahjong, Draughts, 2048, and a word puzzle. There are plenty of Easter eggs (try Run regedit). Some bits get unlocked by playing for a while or doing daft tasks.

Technical bits people might find interesting:

- Everything on screen is drawn by a GUI toolkit I written in C#. Windows, menus, tree views, list views, drag and drop and colour schemes all draw their own pixels, with bitmap fonts. Nothing uses native widgets or HTML. - The game uses raylib (Raylib CS wrapper) and via the browser as .NET WebAssembly (AOT) drawing to a canvas. - Saves live in IndexedDB as a zipped copy of the "C: drive". You can download that zip as a backup and restore it.

I made this after making the GUI toolkit, which I made because of my love of the aesthetic of this time.

I should mention that this doesn't work well on a phone sized screen; you really need a computer to play. I should also mention that I did use Claude Code to write a good chunk of this after I had established the drawing/widget core.