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Forensic Friday 82: The Great Rebrand & Steam Next Fest Post Mortem

Hey Readers! #

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? You may be wondering why Forensic Friday has been dormant for so long. It’s pretty much down to one reason. Development has been very taxing, and the last thing I have the energy to do is write these blogs on a Friday :(. The longer it’s left, the more I need to catch up on and it creates a deadly cycle. So this Forensic Friday will not cover everything that has changed about the game in the last 2 months. There are so many things that have changed, big and small, it wouldn’t be worth discussing (and frankly I wouldn’t be able to cover everything). What I want to talk about this Friday is what I am calling “The Great Rebranding”. Did I mention we were in Steam next fest? Yep. And it showed us a few things we must amend about the game!

Why are we rebranding #

Throughout Next Fest, we became increasingly aware that the game was suffering from an issue with first impressions. As we show it to people, its similarities with Rimworld and Prison Architect are too apparent to ignore, causing a lot of strong opinions about the game. Here is a summary of most of the opinions I’ve seen.

• This this/was this a Rimworld mod?
• This looks like AI mashed together Prison Architect and Rimworld, without any of the nuance of both.
• Did this game steal assets from Rimworld? How have the devs not taken this down?
• How is this any different to Prison Architect?
• Did they just clone Rimworld Anomaly?
• The UI looks exactly the same as Rimworlds.

A lot of strong opinions on the similarities, even if they may be superficial in some places. There seems to be a deep critical issue with the direction we took the visual appearance of the game. Something we thought would be welcome due to familiarity but has instead been rejected. I am not sure it’s a direction we can keep heading into as first impressions mean a lot. There is for sure a reality where we could avoid changing anything and be fine, but it’s really a matter of fact that we shouldn’t really be getting these comments at all!

Over the past 2 years we discovered the narrative aesthetic of the game being that of a corporate science dystopia with absurd anomalous happenings. And we have a really strong vision which we have started to carry out into the lore. But we chose this art style before we decided on the aesthetic we wanted, so a ludonarrative dissonance has slowly been building. There is a certain experience we want to give with our game, that we just aren’t hitting the mark with.

Resolving that dissonance would require a fundamental change to the visual art style, and also the very nature of “storytellers” in our game, which may not even exist in any recognisable form once we are done. The UI will also need to be completely overhauled and changed so that it bears no similarities to Rimworlds.

You may be thinking. Wow, thats a lot to change! And yes… it is. It’s on the level of a complete rebrand. But it may be necessary as right now we are really being held back from our less-than-distinct art.

What’s going to Change #

There are exactly 3 major changes we are making to Containcorp.

• The Art style
• The UI
• The Storytellers

We are changing a lot more than just that, but these 3 are the largest buckets. I’ll address each one individually.

The Art Style #

The art style will have to change from this amalgamation of Rimworld and Prison Architect to something more unique and in line with the narrative aesthetic we have started to establish. A Corporate art style. This means colours and shapes will become flat, with fewer shadows and more pop artish. None of those black stroke borders and gradient shading that Rimworld is known for. This will affect the look of the game in a drastic way, and will definitely help distinguish the game we think. I’ll leave a reference below for how it may look.

As you an see, flat colors, different shapes and a sort of grundgy pencil texturing. Looks very distinct! This artstyle is called “Corporate Memphis” and is probably what we need to distinguish ourselves whilst fitting the lore of the game, and tone. It’s notoriously hated, but mostly dude to its shape language. But we’ll just take inspiration from the colors and flat shading rather than the boring shape design language.

The UI #

The UI, as it currently exists, will have to go. We can salvage a decent portion of it, but we’ll have to change the way its arranged and organised to distance ourselves away from Rimworld. We have already started to mockup the new UI and its looking really promising. I’ll leave a big dump at the end of the this blog with all the new UI designs!

The Storytellers #

The storytellers are a big big issue right now. As they scream “OMG this is Rimworld”. Well, storytellers may need to be removed entirely, or changed. We were leaning into just changing them rather the ditching them entirely. The art for the storytellers as they currently are cannot survive the change. It may not be possible to salvage them, but great game designers are able to “kill their darlings”, so this might be a case where they are better gone than sticking around.

Replacing them will be storytellers. What? Well yes, we are keeping the event system, but the storytellers will need changing. Instead of being storytellers, they will be “Administrators”. They won’t influence the actual incidents that you receive but instead change the nature of contracts that you get, and even generate unique incident events and contracts. You may have noticed I am referring to entirely new ideas here, contract? Incidents? Well, this is just a part of the rebranding we are undergoing, where we are going to change the terminology of a lot of things.

Overall Rebrand #

It’s not just these changes that we hope to distance ourselves from influences. We are also going to remove all references to “Storytellers” or “Story Generation” from our game. The game will still be a story generation game, but we will earn that title, rather than market it as so.

Our marketing efforts will brand Containcorp through its absurdist corporatism and bountiful anomalies and the chaos that ensues. Whether you generate cool stories will be something that you’ll experience, but we won’t outwardly promote that as an expectation.

Injecting New Influences #

Since we are revisiting the very identity of the game (or lack thereof), it’s a great opportunity to really find some inspiration outside of game media to make Containcorp as fresh and unique as possible. This is the list of current inspirations I’ve decided would give Containcorp some identity. Instead of predominantly pulling from one source (Rimworld and Prison Architect) we are going to really diversify, so the game is greater and different than the sum of its parts.

Below are all the influences and what part of the game identity is influenced by it

Non-Game Media #

Severance (TV Series)

• Corporate tone and horror
• Memory wiping of Interns
• Visual look of office spaces and research labs

—

Maniac (TV Series)

• Uniforms of researchers and interns

—

SCP (Wiki)

• Anomalies and case files
• GOSI groups that can invade your facility

—

TVA From Loki (TV Series)

• Technological anachronism (old tech mixed with new tech) of the TVA
• Look at the facility guards
• Visual look of non-office/industrial spaces

—

Dune (Movie)

• The OSTF are like the Sardukar and are the board’s private army. They don’t use guns but actually exclusively melee and hand-to-hand combat weaponry. They have Dune-like shielding and thus do not need weapons. The reason this shielding isn’t used by everyone is that it requires complete skin replacement, tying them to the suit.

—

WALL-E (Movie)

• Buy n’ Large inspires the Containment Corporation n’ Commerce subsidiary, which handles the selling of anomalous products and branches out into other industries
• The global domination in all markets and sectors by the Corporation

—

Game Media #

Resident Evil

• Inspires the Umbrella Group (a Private Military Corporation) in the Universe

—

Black Mesa from Half-Life

• Multiple breaches are called a “Failure Cascade”
• The Board’s OSTF get a buff when killing things, even their own people

—

Aperture Science from Portal

• Weird History of Corporation
• CEO eccentricity
• Future Trailers will mimic the same mini-trailers Portal had
• Absurd Humor

—

Gate Cascade Facility from Abiotic Factor

• Ideas for what we could let players build. See this link.

—

Evil Genius

• The director is the target for invasions, but workers get x2 productivity boost from their presence

—

Rimworld

• Story events and character modelling
• Invading NPCs (mostly inspired by SCP)
• Future features concerning the world map

—

Prison Architect

• Construction Gameplay
• Managing Interns (like prisoners)

—

Artistic Influences #

1940s-60s Aesthetic

• Corporation’s in-universe branding and style
• Promotional artwork

—

Corporate Memphis

• Look of objects and NPCs in the game

—

Well, that covers all the new inspirations we are drawing from! The only ones that existed prior were SCP, Rimworld and Prison Architect, so we have definitely diversified a lot more.

Out with the Old, In with the New. #

Changing Terminologies #

Other than the big changes I mentioned above there is a ton of multiple smaller things that need to change on a superficial level. Here is a long list of most terms that will change:

• Architect Mode => Build Mode
• Grants -> Contracts
• Storytellers -> Administrators
• Story Events -> Incidents
• Raids -> Invasions

Other than those, there is one other change:

• Storytellers are replaced by 4 temperments, Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic and Phlegmatic, which change how incident events are served to the player

That should cover most of the changes. Now onto branding!

New branding #

A major issue with our branding before was that it put our storytellers front and centre, which screamed “Rimworld”. The whole concept of storytellers is too closely intertwined with the identity of Rimworld. Inseparable from it. So we’ll be removing all the storyteller characters from the branding! If you want to see what the new steam capsule looks like, I’ve left it below!

Here’s the old one for comparison.

The UI Redesign #

Here is the dump of all the UI designs I promised!

The New In-Universe Mascot #

I’ve designed an in-universe mascot for the Corporation. Introducing “Boxxy”. He’ll show up in tutorials mostly, but you might catch him placed around other places in the game. Right now he will be replacing Sophia as the one who gives the interactive tutorial. Say hi!

Finding our Identity #

Ultimately this comes down to finding our own identity. We don’t want Containcorp to be a game people like because “it’s like Rimworld”, or a game which people only try out because they think it’s going to be like Rimworld. No. We want Containcorp to stand on its own legs. And for that, we need to create a unique identity. Someone looks at our game and says “Ah that’s Containcorp” not “Oh is that a Prison Architect mod?”.

This art overhaul and rebrand is the first step (and the biggest) in many to achieving that goal. A lot will be changing month of March, so to all you old-time readers. Thanks for sticking by. For all of you who are reading a Forensic Friday for the first time, Hello!

Case Closed #

I’ll try and get Forensic Friday back to a weekly schedule, but actions speak louder than words so we’ll see. Time to close this case file for now.

Case Closed.
The Team
Plasmarc Studios