0.2.0 - One where the world answers back

Six weeks since the first build. The short version:
your rivals fight back, the game has music, and the state will hand you a country to run.
Save files from 0.1.0 open here and keep everything.

Most of what is fixed below was found by one person playing for one evening with a pen and a piece of paper.
There is a devlog about that: She took notes on paper.

The big three

• Era five: a government puts a country on your models.
  Eight sectors of a state, from filing permits to national defence, each paying more in a day than most of the campaign earns in a month. Each one also eats capacity your paying customers no longer have, and failing one costs billions rather than reputation.
  The gate is a five year safety record and it is the only thing in this game money cannot buy.
  One severe incident costs about three years of it.

• Smear a rival and their lawyers turn up.
  Paying for a story about a competitor used to move two numbers and end there.
  Get traced and their counsel rings your phone, a notice before action lands in the inbox with a figure and thirty days, and refusing it can put you in front of a court. Refusing is 45 per cent to reach a hearing. Ignoring the letter is 60, because a refusal is an answer and silence is not. A campaign that lands cleanly is still only a suspicion, and nobody sues on a suspicion.

• The game has music.
  Three loops instead of one, so the office is no longer silent: a piano in the menu, mallets in the office, something higher in the model creator. Plus four new sounds for the page turning, the phone and a message arriving. Every note is computed when the game starts rather than loaded from a file, so the download does not grow by a byte.

The loops and the four cues were written by Samanta mary-dev.
Crossfade that joins each loop to its own beginning is mine, and it took two attempts: the first produced a genuine click, caught by a test she had designed and could not run.

Added

• A real world map.
  Natural Earth outlines, 177 countries, replacing six shapes drawn by hand.

• The basement is a room you walk into, drawn in 3D, with cabinets you buy, carry, place and sell. Cabinets do not age, but chips get hotter: a room filled in 2023 is quietly throttling by 2027, and the fix costs you a slot.

• 47 achievements, with a screen in the Escape menu.

• Four Operations research nodes, the first that improve the room rather than the model.
• A rival that copies you. One lab now builds whatever you are selling rather than following the calendar, so specialising is something a competitor can take off you.
• Corporation tax has a clock on it. An orange strip names the year, the amount and the days left.
  Miss the date and the bill moves to next year with nine per cent on top, and the game tells you so on a card instead of letting it grow quietly.
• Separate SOUND and MUSIC sliders, side by side, neither inside the other.
• A phone that keeps what was said, and short guided tours you can ask for again at any time.
• The people you hire stand in the office you pay for, and clicking one opens who they are.
• The creator names the architecture families you do not have yet, with what each would cost and which research opens it.
  It used to list only the ones you already had, so a family you had not researched was not named anywhere in the game: you found out hybrid state space existed when a node handed it over.

Changed

• A training run no longer hides the product you are selling. Starting a second model used to replace the corner panel for the two hundred days the run takes.
• Every product on sale has its own chart, so with two models you can see which one is carrying the company.
• The world map fills its panel. Choosing Europe used to leave 41 per cent of the box empty.
• The upgrade tiles say what the market is at, so the levels a new model ships with stop looking like they came from nowhere.
• The cash achievements are reachable. The old ladder started at a hundred million dollars, which measurement showed was above anything a full campaign reaches.

Fixed

Forty nine of them are written up in the changelog. These are the ones you would have noticed:

• The founder can be a woman. Fifty four Polish lines were telling the player what he had done. Polish puts gender in the past tense, so the bug existed on exactly one side of the game. Eight of the fifty four survived the first pass because they hide gender somewhere a search for past-tense endings cannot see: an adjective after "you are", the compound future, and the pronoun for "alone". One of those eight was the button that skips the tutorial.

• A founder you did not name signed the company page "Anonymous", which reads as a real person with an odd name rather than as a blank. It had been reported in August and fixed in two places out of five.

• The official company page always showed the newest model, whichever one you clicked.

• A letter from the game's author was never in the game. Two different texts shared one address in the phrase book, and the second silently replaced the first. A duplicate key is not redundancy, it is two facts sharing an address.

• Clicking a person in the office did nothing in the case where the raycast missed them.

• Eighteen readings printed with a comma on a Polish machine: 0,70x, $20,00.

• The tutorial repeated itself and skipped steps, because the strip was being rebuilt between your click going down and coming up.

• The game refuses in Polish. When you try something the game will not allow, it tells you why,
  and seventy nine of those sentences were English in the Polish build. They are written beside the
  rules rather than beside the screens, which is why eleven passes over the text walked past them.

• Three finished pictures nobody was drawing. The model creator has eight stages and showed art
  on two, while the illustrations for the data and compute pages sat in the same folder as the two
  in use. The compute screen, the one screen about the fleet, drew a bare heading over a banner that
  had been on disk the whole time.

Saves

Format v52. A campaign from 0.1.0 or anything since opens here and keeps everything in it.

Two things cannot be recovered for an older file and are left honestly empty rather than invented: the month of trading history each model now keeps, which fills itself in over a month of play, and the conversation with Emil, because every line in it was about a company as it stood on one particular day.

Under the hood

• 1115 EditMode tests across 117 fixtures, 31 PlayMode across 8.
• 2,722 phrases, English and Polish, both complete.
• 59 research nodes across five eras and four tracks, and every one of them has an icon. The
  last nine arrived as files in the wrong folder, where Resources.Load cannot see them, so all
  nine would have drawn an empty disc with no error and nothing in the log.
• Eighteen catalogs stopped storing text, so nothing on screen is stuck in the language the game started in.
• 184 source files changed since 0.1.0: 30,575 lines added, 2,604 removed, over 96 commits.

Known and not fixed

• The scripted campaigns in the balance probe peak around $71M. If you get far past that, the top of the achievement ladder may still be out of reach, and it will be measured again rather than guessed.
• Licensing an architecture family with money is not a route you can take. Every family is opened by research that hands it over, so the price on the creator's list is information rather than an offer.
• The furniture shop is suspended in favour of the furnished-move option.
• Nobody has clicked the basement cursor in a test. The grid is tested and the click-to-tile mapping is not, because Edit mode sends no pointer events. The first real click is yours.

If you play it

The one thing worth telling me is the exact moment you got confused.
There is a link inside the game for it, and it is worth more to me right now than a hundred downloads nobody opens.
Free, and the code is public.

Marcin Firmuga, Radom, Poland. Work by day, code by night.