Devlog ·
Every colleague gets a face, the cards get pips, and the first project plays itself out
Version 1.18 went out today: all 69 colleagues have a face on their pass, the number cards carry pips like a real deck and the court cards a portrait, the team on the playing field reads as people instead of formulas, a brand-new player starts with a guided first engagement, and the site got a trailer, a press kit and a count of where players drop off.
Koonsultancy (automatisch)
Sixty-nine faces.
Until today every colleague had the same grey silhouette on their personnel pass, with their initials in the corner. That was fine as a placeholder and wrong as a product: a game about people in which nobody has a face. So every colleague now has one, built the same way the office supplies on the title screen are built: as a paper cut-out, head and shoulders, with a soft shadow, drawn from a hash of their name so it is the same every time. The Helpdesk wears a headset, the Demolisher a hard hat, the Firefighter a red helmet and a walrus moustache, Non-Disclosure a black bar across the eyes, Princess a tiara, HANA a visor, Mighty M a domino mask. The Offshore Team, the Core Team, the Sales Department and the Change Board are three heads on one photo. The Trojan Horse is a wooden horse on wheels. The Koon stands in a hooded cloak with the medallion on his chest and only his eyes showing. The initials stayed, small, in the corner, because a pass has them. You see the faces at the drinks, on the pass when you open it, in the yearbook under Personnel file, and in the knowledge transfer between rounds.
Pips, and a portrait on the court cards.
The cards in your hand used to show one big number over a faint K. They now look like what the game has always called them: a deck of playing cards. A card of four hours shows four pips, in the shape of its discipline: a gear for Tech, a cycle arrow for Process, a pawn for Politics, a coin for Sales. Few pips are big, like an ace; ten pips are small and in two rows. The Junior, Senior and Partner have a portrait instead, in two tones of their discipline's colour: the Junior in a hoodie, the Senior with glasses and a tie, the Partner in lapels with a pocket square. The corner indices and the line underneath are unchanged, so nothing you relied on to read a hand has moved. The same cards show up in the Deck window and in the pack at the drinks.
A team you can read.
The team on the playing field was a column of formulas: "×1.5 · ×1.5 above 300% · ×1.5 above 500% · never drops out". Correct, and unreadable at a glance. Each pass in the team now shows the face, the name, and only the core of the effect with a small icon for what kind of thing it is: a multiplier, hours, rate, scope, or something else. The full rule is still there, one tap away on the pass itself. On a laptop the team is a list of people with a photo on the left. It still fits on a phone with the toolbars showing and on a Steam Deck without scrolling; both were measured.
The first project.
The first five minutes used to be a lot: a screen with eight firms, seven of them locked with a red condition, and then twenty-four hints that arrived whenever something was new, which in the first engagement is everything. A player who has never won an engagement now skips the firm screen entirely. New project starts a fixed first project at Pico Bello on Bronze, with a seed chosen for it: the Scoping study is the first folder, and the first hand holds five Process cards, a Best Practice, which clears the target in a single sprint and shows the overflowing spreadsheet right away. During that engagement only three hints appear: pick an engagement, three from the same discipline, and scope grows. After the first win the game continues as it always has, hints included, and the next New project shows the firms. Anyone who already has an archive never sees any of this.
Navy & Gold, without the wink.
The theme that used to be called Navy & Gold (original) kept the old hand-drawn logo and the old spelling of the name as an inside joke. The joke does not travel: outside the Netherlands that old spelling reads as something it was never meant to be, and on itch.io and later on Steam everybody is watching. The theme is now simply Navy & Gold and shows the same K as every other theme.
Counting where people stop.
The site has counted page views for a while, without cookies and without knowing who you are. The game now counts three moments the same way: a run starts, the first engagement is won, a run ends, won or lost, with the game version and whether it ran on this site, on itch.io or in the desktop version. Only daily totals, nothing that links two runs to each other. It answers one question the page counter could not: how many people who start actually get past the first engagement. The privacy page says exactly this in section 03.
A trailer, a press kit, and a site that leads with the game.
The homepage now opens with a trailer: forty-eight seconds of one run, from the first folder to the handover document, with the game's own music under it, recorded straight from the game. Under it, three screenshots and three sentences that say what you learn in the first five minutes. A new press kit page has the fact sheet, the description, the trailer, screenshots at 1920 × 1080 and on a phone, the logo with a transparent background and key art, free to use for anyone writing or streaming about the game. The Steam capsules and store text are ready in the repository for when Steamworks opens its doors, and the publication workflow already knows how to upload a build to a Steam beta branch; it sleeps until it is given an App ID.
What is still to be seen.
The faces and the pips are new on a real phone and have only been checked in a headless browser so far. The key art is vector and type, not a painting; for Steam a drawn main capsule may still be worth commissioning. And the trailer has music but no sound effects: the effects did not line up with the cuts.