PawperworkPawperwork

You are the cog that makes the paperwork turn.

Pawperwork is an idle game that lives on top of your other windows, in a strip of screen you can leave open while you use the computer for anything else. There is a desk, a stack of papers that never stops arriving, and a cat with a stamp. Pull the package in, stamp what is inside, send it out the other side. Then hire an intern to open what comes in, let the cat stamp on its own, put a dispatcher on the outbound tray, and go find the next bottleneck.

[hr][/hr]

The job never changes. The scale does.

Every tier of the bureaucracy runs the same three steps: collect, stamp, dispatch. What changes is what you are stamping and what stands between the steps.

Produce enough and you get promoted. The tier above is yours now, and everything you built so far keeps running underneath it and feeding it. A promotion only ever adds. Nothing you built ever shuts down.

• Desk, you stamp a single sheet of paper
  
• Room, folders of ten sheets
  
• Bureau, pouches of a hundred
  
• District, boxes of a thousand
  
• Metropolis, containers nobody has counted
  
• and five more above that
  

Ten tiers in all. They stop being about buildings well before they stop being about paperwork, and the last thing you seal is worth a billion sheets of it.

Only the Desk turns paper into credit. Everything above it feeds the tier below through a physical pool, so the whole tower is one supply chain, and when it backs up there is always a place you can go and look at.

Nine things to fidget with while you wait

Idle games leave your hands empty. Each tier above the Desk hands you something small to do instead, wedged between two steps of the loop. Pick one up when you have a spare moment, put it down when you do not. The line keeps running either way.

They are not busywork. Doing one well marks the unit, and the mark is still on it when it reaches the bottom of the tower, where it turns into credit. Every one of them starts in your hands, and every one of them can be handed off later. The automation trades your attention for throughput and pays for it in accuracy, which you then buy back level by level.

• Formatting, sweep a matrix to draw the shape being asked for
  
• Numbering, divide the digits in your hand across the open orders so each total closes exactly
  
• Stencil, tile the silhouette on the bench with the pieces you were sent
  
• Calibration, hold a sinking valve inside the requested color band while the line keeps delivering
  
• Mixing, close the truck with the two primaries that make the secondary color on the order
  
• Dock, pack the shapes coming off the crane into a truck grid without leaving gaps
  
• Board, trace a path of adjacent tiles that adds up to the total being demanded
  
• Sequence, always rail the lowest number left on the bench, and remember which one that is
  
• Sorting, send each folder down the conveyor that matches the color it arrived with
  

Three threads run the length of the tower

Color, shape and number are not decoration. Each one is created on one tier, transformed on another and spent on a third, and it rides down the chain inside the unit itself.

The pump in the Star System makes a primary color. One tier down, the truck on the Planet mixes two primaries into a secondary. Four tiers below that, the Room sorts that exact secondary onto a conveyor. Miss the pump and the mistake arrives at the bottom of the tower much later, as paperwork nobody can file.

Get it right and the unit carries a mark for every mechanic it passed through. The Desk credits all of them at once.

It admits that it is sitting on your desktop

Pawperwork is a desktop app with no window frame, a transparent background and an always on top window. It comes in four shapes:

• Mascot, just the cat, its ink pad and the papers, in a small corner of the screen
  
• Desk, the stamp and the two trays around it
  
• Line, the whole production line at once
  
• Fullscreen, the same line, maximized, for when you actually sit down to play
  

Meeting mode multiplies everything you produce for as long as you are on a call. Flip it yourself, or let the game notice that something on your machine is holding the microphone. That detection is off unless you turn it on, it reads only what your operating system already shows on its own privacy screen, and it never leaves your computer, because there is no networking anywhere in the app. The game also counts how many hours you have spent stamping while in a meeting, and does absolutely nothing with the number.

The game saves itself and credits you for the time you were away.

The cat does the stamping

• A second hand. The cat picks up a second stamp. The two arms alternate, each with its own ink and its own trip to the pad.
  
• The headbutt. It drives its face into the tray and stamps an entire batch at once, spending no ink, then sits there dizzy with birds circling its head until it recovers.
  
• The nap. When the line is jammed, starved or out of ink, the cat sleeps and banks the wasted time. Wake it up and the tier runs hot until the bank is spent.
  
• Stampbots. Further up the tower, someone signs a contract and autonomous units arrive at the bench. They work in parallel with the cat, they never touch the ink pad, and they keep stamping right through the moments the cat spends refilling.
  

A career, and then another one

• A talent tree, where every node is unlocked by the one before it. Speed, capacity, accuracy, headcount, value, efficiency, recovery and throughput.
  
• Hire real copies. A tier can hire copies of the tier below it. Not a multiplier: each copy is an actual line running its own loop and pouring into the pool underneath it. A Map tab shows the entire chain, the pools between tiers, and exactly where it is choked.
  
• The golden document appears on its own, pulses, and multiplies everything the Desk credits, if you click it in time.
  
• Seal packs are what your credit buys once the upgrades run out: collectible seals in a range of rarities, each one multiplying the whole run.
  
• Quit your job. The prestige reset. Everything is demolished, the run converts into rank, every stamped sheet is worth more forever, you gain a title, and your résumé gets one more line. It is the only thing in the game that takes anything away from you, and you are the one who chooses it.
  

The short version

• Idle and incremental, played in a strip of your screen or in fullscreen
  
• Ten tiers of bureaucracy stacked on each other, each one more absurd than the one below it
  
• Nine small fidget mechanics to fill the waiting, each with an automation path and an accuracy curve
  
• Three attribute threads that cross the whole tower and can be ruined far from where you touched them
  
• A talent tree, a prestige reset, and a cat