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Forensic Friday 66: The Shuttle Bus Dilemma

Hey Readers! #

Hey everyone! Welcome to Forensic Sunday… Forensic Monday… this joke never gets old (￣ ‘i ￣;) (Blasted internet thingys putting this face on seperate lines) Anyways, this week we are keeping short and sweet because, to be frank, we have hit a small roadblock! Or perhaps a redirection. Mostly due to vehicles in the game. Turns out, the initial implementation was rather lacking, and we spent a week implementing a highly complicated and overengineered solution, to something that would be a lot simpler if we just refactored. So, that’s what we did. However, the cost is that we have been held back in the process!

Currently, I am taking on a new dev and showing them the reigns, which means my time isn’t always spent blazing through features! The investment will soon be worth it, but it takes time for new devs to acquire the knowledge to develop fast. However, we have seen a considerable speed-up in the implementation of UI, which is a less technically demanding task and very suited to parallelised work!

Anyway, let’s get onto what I’ve been working on this week.

Existing Category C Menu #

This week I’ve been working on the very exciting feature of giving Category Cs a menu of their own.

You can see there is a lot of information about cycling, which is something we’ll explain in future Forensic Fridays! However, the UI should be relatively self-explanatory. If you are curious about what cycles are:

Category C goes through something we describe as cycles. when a Category C joins the Corporation, their memories are wiped and stored. They are returned to them once they are finished, and the memory of their time at the Corporation is erased. However, the Corporation soon found out that they could keep rewiping their memories forever, and from their perspective, it would always be their first time on the job.

These periods of wiped employment are called “Cycles”. Cycling then is the process of wiping memories and reemploying them as a fresh volunteer. The abnormalities come due to the process being imperfect. The more times you cycle people, the more memories from previous iterations leak through, subconsciously, then consciously (eventually).

Through the UI, you’ll be able to decide when to cycle them and such. Neat!

There are a few more sections to the Category C profiles we want to expand on, but they’ll likely stay empty for some time. Especially Misconducts, as this is a feature we likely won’t have for a while, or maybe even in the EA release. But I just included it here for completeness’ sake.

Sprites for Pumps #

Pumps have sprites now! Which is odd. For the past 2 years, they have just been beds. So it’s a bit odd to see them finally get the artistic love they deserve. However, the pipes have some graphical issues that need to be amended, so they haven’t reached their final form yet!

Case Closed #

Well! That was a short one! This case file is pretty light (and pretty late)… Development is more of a slow and steady race now. Between looking after the new dev, and commitments outside the world of game development, I can’t commit hours upon hours on this project. So it’s just a case of persistent and continual work here…

Containcorp is something of a long-term project. Even once we release the game, we expect 5+ years of development before it reaches 1.0. We aren’t focused on any fixed release window, or making X sales within X months, but rather the long term and where the game is headed.

And if that’s the case, then slow downs and speed ups in development, ups and downs, lefts and rights. It all means nothing in the grand scheme of things. Heck, even if we release next year instead of this year (I’d like to stress this is unlikely but it could happen!), then that’s okay. A year is a drop in the water considering the lifetime we hope to achieve with this game! But without the few readers we have, it’d be a tough road to drive. So thank you!

All that soppy stuff aside, time to file this case away. Have a good week, and see you on Monday (in the discord server), for Mythological Mondays! And Friday for the next Forensic Friday where hopefully the shuttle bus hurdle is resolved!

Ciao!

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios