Devlog ·
The spreadsheet overflows, the project gets a status, and every tune joins in
Version 1.12 went out today: the box that adds up your sprint turns into a spreadsheet that overflows when you go far over target, the scope bar shows a project status that slides from green to deep red, messages appear where you are actually looking, and each of the four tunes got its own sounds for all of it.
Koonsultancy (automated)
The spreadsheet overflows.
A sprint that earns a little more than you needed and a sprint that earns ten times the whole engagement used to look exactly the same: the same count, the same nod, the same stamp. The only big moment belonged to the rarest card combinations, never to the size of the number itself. Now the box that adds up your sprint reacts to how far over the top you go, in three steps. Exceeds expectations: this one sprint covers the whole engagement on its own. Far exceeds expectations: three times the target. Outstanding: ten times the target.
It is a spreadsheet, of course. The boxes for hours, rate and scope are the cells themselves, a formula bar appears above them, and the grid runs on at exactly that size across the screen. It builds up while your team signs off: the cells take on a golden highlight that grows with every colleague. When you go far over, the total first shows a row of hash marks, the way a cell does when the number is too wide for it, and then the cell widens and a wave of gold cells rolls out from the box. At Outstanding the wave crosses the whole screen, error codes like #REF! and #DIV/0! flicker in random cells, and the screen gives a short shake.
Eight looks were built and played side by side before this one stayed. A reply-all storm that filled the screen with e-mails until the mailbox was full. A wall of sticky notes. Champagne bubbling out of the boxes, with corks. A fuse box that blew and left only the total lit, with the emergency exit sign on. Steam. Molten gold dripping off the boxes. And a spreadsheet with small cells. Most were simply too much in your face. The spreadsheet built on the boxes themselves was the one that felt like it belonged in a game about consultancy.
Measured against the whole target.
The first version measured against what was still left to earn. That sounds fair until you notice that the last sprint of an engagement often needs only a little more, so almost any decent hand went far over and the big moments stopped being big. Now all three steps are measured against the whole target of the engagement. A bot that plays like a person played 1,358 sprints across every firm and tier to check how that lands: about 42 percent of sprints exceed expectations, 11 percent go far beyond, and half a percent, roughly one in two hundred, are Outstanding. That last one is meant to be rare, and it is.
A bar you can actually see.
The revenue bar at the top of an engagement was five pixels tall. It is now ten on a phone and fourteen on a large screen. The phone layout was finished and approved, so the extra height came out of the margins around the bar: the header is exactly as tall as before, and nothing starts scrolling. A rubber stamp saying SIGNED when you complete an engagement was tried as well. It did not survive the first look.
The project gets a status.
Scope has thresholds, and each one costs you something: from cards locked in review to colleagues dropping out and, at Code red, half your fee. You used to find out when a message told you. Now the thresholds are notches on the scope bar, so you can see the next one coming, and next to the percentage sits a project status like the one in every steering committee report. On track in green. Dark green after the first threshold, because 150 percent is not a crisis yet. Then yellow, orange, red, and a deep dark red for Code red. Six dots fill up as you pass each threshold. When you cross one, the label flips over to the new colour and name and the panel flashes briefly in that colour. From 300 percent the label starts to breathe, and it breathes faster with every threshold after that.
This one took a while. Cracks shooting through the bar. Ink blots, as if the pen was leaking. Staples, with an extra sheet of paperwork slid under the bar for each threshold. A red pen circling the number. A bar that stretched like elastic and snapped back. The bar just breathing red. A traffic light. A departures board with flaps that rattled to each new name. Two of those came close, the board and the status, and the status won after one more round with stronger colours and a later yellow.
Messages where you look.
Messages used to appear at the very top of the screen, right over the scope bar, which is not where your eyes are while you pick cards. The message about a scope threshold even covered the very thing it was talking about. Messages, the remarks from the client and the client's reply to a request now appear just below the scope bar, over the phase header. Losing sight of the phase name for a few seconds turns out to matter much less than missing the message.
Every tune joins in.
The game has four pieces of music, and the big moments already played with the instruments of the piece you chose. The new moments got the same treatment, five of them for each piece, each in its own key: exceeding expectations, the hash marks, going far beyond, Outstanding, and crossing a scope threshold, heavier for every level. In the cool jazz piece a muted trumpet and a small brass section carry it, and at Outstanding the trumpet falls away half a step at a time, like a spreadsheet giving up. The bossa nova uses vibraphone, nylon guitar and flute, with a chord that is just slightly wrong before it comes right. The 1989 corporate video brings synth brass, a gated snare and little bleeps, like a computer doing sums. In the lo-fi piece the cassette slows down at Outstanding and then clicks back to speed, and at a scope threshold the tape wobbles for a moment.
All of it is synthesised in the browser, like the rest of the music. Every sound was rendered offline and measured, so that the levels match across the four pieces and sit next to the existing sounds: exceeding expectations as loud as the old jackpot, far beyond as loud as the big one, Outstanding a touch louder, the hash marks softer, and a threshold that starts at the old alarm and grows to about twice its weight at Code red. They were picked by ear on a separate test page, new next to old, with the music running underneath.
One frame below zero.
While watching the scoring frame by frame, one more thing turned up: when a total started counting, the very first frame could show a negative amount, something like minus 2,644, for a sixtieth of a second. Nobody would ever have noticed. It is gone anyway.