Forensic Friday 80: Happy New Year, Bring on 2025!
Happy New Year! #
Hi, and welcome to the end of year Forensic Friday! We hope you’ve had a happy holiday period, and the impending post-holiday season depression hasn’t kicked in yet! As usual, we have a few updates to let you know about, and then we’ll jump right into a recap of 2024 (which is extremely similar to last year, since that worked so well). First thing first is some completely outside of the game developments, our own merch shop!
Merch shop incoming #
Over the last week, we’ve been developing our own merch store, since who wouldn’t want to wear Containcorp merch?? #ad
Jokes aside, the merch store is close to being finished - we’re just going to do some product quality tests before selling anything, since selling bad quality stuff isn’t what we do here + we don’t have a full-time customer support agent at Plasmarc Studios, yet! This will likely take a few weeks, then we’ll officially open the store. It’s our first time creating anything of this sort, but everything seems to be working as intended so fingers crossed we aren’t setting a random server on fire somewhere!
The merch shop will (hopefully) help us fund some future community events, general upkeep of our online presence like our website and this blog that you’re reading on, some kickstarter incentives with discount codes + it’s just cool having game specific merch to rep ourselves! We’ve previously only had merch as part of our “Field Agent” tier and higher on patreon. I’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible that we don’t expect any patrons, but if you want to help support us long term then that is the best place to do so, and in return you could get some exclusive merch + some exclusive early news about what we’re up to. However, if you just want to get your hands on some physical items straight away, now you will be able to!
Playtesting to the Masses #
We believe the game is in a good enough state (game design and game-breaking bugs wise) that we will now be happy for anyone playtesting to stream or release public videos showing Containcorp. We do want to remind people that the game is in the earliest pre-alpha stage, so bugs will inevitably be a problem, but we are happy for any videos containing in-game footage / early thoughts on the game etc. and actively encourage people to do so (with an accompanying link to our website appreciated - https://containcorpgame.com/)! Of course, feel free to plug yourself in our Discord if you do, and if you have any questions / queries then reach out to us and let us know!
A year recap #
So with all of the news out of the way, let’s take a look back at some of the highlights (and generally weird moments) of the year!
In January… #
We started the year off with a stupid bang. After 6 months of not realising our font for all our blog posts were wrong, we finally fixed it!
Lexiii started contributing to some of the no context moments of all time
Unfortunately, Peter was added to the Containcorp universe
A creepy mask haunted the server, I sure hope that doesn’t come back to prank us…
In February… #
Our new EATS classification system was introduced for all new anomaly documents
Lexiii tried to start a cult
Little did Lexiii know that he was in the precense of some experienced cult members…
In March #
David celebrated his birthday with one of the announcements ever
We released Forensic Friday 69, which was important because funny number
In April #
We kept up our consistently inconsistent forensic friday schedule
The server was quite…
In May #
We got a first listen to the trailer music composed by Can, which you can find in Forensic Friday 71
Containmment breaches were added to the game
In June #
Our first anomaly, S-0033 - “The Propulsive Brick” was added to the game
The great XML refactor happened, one of our last refactors before pre-alpha!
In July #
Jared came and spread their wisdom
We almost got cancelled, and 4 years of development were in crisis
In August #
Jason introduced “Casedown”, allowing us to display anomaly documents from our wiki, in game. You can read more about it here
We discovered that spelling wasn’t our strong suit…
…but we did improve
In September #
Klebi rebooted Saint Iblis’s merch quadrilogy
Our Ethic’s committee were caught in 4k being extremely ethical
We got on the good side of the meme format after 4 years
In October #
We designed and release our new game website, where it was noticed almost immediately
The Z-levels got too much (not really)
The creepy mask returned again AND IT PRANKED US GODDAMNIT
In November #
We finally released the game in pre-alpha!
With a few game breaking bugs and design issues delaying key releases, civil unrest occurred…
…mainly in the form of memes
In December #
Christmas came and went, and was summarised in 3kb
Our 2nd anomaly was added to the game, Le Fishe!
2024 ended with us learning that not only could we not spell, but we also couldn’t count… and it had to be 119
Case Closed #
So that wraps up a whole year. 2024 wasn’t the year of early access that we keep promising every single year, but it did result in our first pre-alpha release, and solidified our plan to enter this year’s Steam next fest, which runs at the end of Feburary. This will also coincide with our Kickstarter campaign which will hopefully power us through to an early access release, sooner rather than later! 2025 will actually be the year of Containcorp (we’ve said it enough times that jinxing doesn’t apply anymore) and we’re so excited heading into the new year to actually get this show on the road!
Finally. I’d just like to say thanks to our small, but growing, community on Discord who have waited patiently as we stumbled through the last few years, all the playtesters so far who have helped us find and solve game design issues and bugs, and you for reading this! We do have some community events and competitions planned in 2025, so if that interests you, make sure to join our Discord server. Have a Happy New Year everyone!
Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios