HeavenX

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• Announcements·17 Sept 2026Official

  HeavenX Devlog 0022

  Dev On Edict:I've been working on Edict, the email system for HeavenX's story systems on the virtual desktop, for about two weeks now. Thought I'd write this week about the 'Check Thread' node I introduced for the quest system as part of that, since it ended up leading to some unexpectedly cool results.Every email thread in Edict keeps an append-only list of everything that happened on it - an email arrived, you replied with this specific option, a reply window closed because you never answered, you reported something as phishing and you were right or wrong about it. Nothing in that list gets edited or deleted, ever. Check Thread's whole job is to read that log from anywhere in the story, any quest, any amount of time later, and branch on what it finds, so designers have full control over what happens in the story. It's also cool that not answering an email is an action that's logged too. If a reply window closes because the in-game day advanced, or because a follow-up email from another employee showed up before you answered, that gets recorded all the same. There's no "player did nothing" gap in the system, I tried to capture as many events as I could think of related to how real world email works. A designer three quests later can ask "did they ever ignore that email we sent them" and branch the story from there. Real world email works the same way, and that's exactly why I built it like this. Send someone a second message before they've answered your first and you've changed the conversation whether you meant to or not. It's designed to do that on purpose: a new email on a thread retires whatever reply options were still open, logs them as ignored, and presents new reply options if available. The story system just recognizes that nobody followed up on the thing they meant to answer, because they never did. The bigger engineering bet under all of this is picking history over flags. We could've given every thread a `hasReplied` bool and a `lastChoice` string and c...
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• Announcements·11 Sept 2026Official

  HeavenX Devlog 0021

  Dev + ArtRecently we've been doing more experiments with the visual style of the Office. The most interesting of those, in my opinion, is with the old PlayStation dither effect. Sure, it's seen a lot of use recently, but we have some ideas on how to do something unique with it.I think dithers and halftones are interesting visual effects in general. With just two colors and dots of the right density we can create a gradient without any of the in-between colors. So, in a way, geometry is a part of value. As for how it works in practice? It's fairly simple. We're using the Bayer matrix. (In my research I saw several people proudly declare they were using the original PlayStation's dither matrix. It was just the Bayer matrix shifted over and squashed.) The PlayStation generally rendered with 5 bit color, so the colors we actually have need to be rounded color. The matrix gets added to the color before we round, and the dither pattern emerges from that. The john of truth is a common testing image for our teamFor our tests we also added depth into the mix. Depending on how far something is from the camera we can change the scale of the dither. It gives a bit of feeling that further away things are lower resolution, even if they aren't. This may or may not make it into the final game, but it was fun to play with. On the texture side -- we're also employing some photoshop techniques to pre-treat our trimsheets. This step helps keep things consistent before we apply post processing on top, which gives us lots of flexibility at all stages of the process: This sheet in particular is a test for the vending machine that exists in the breakroom. There are some duplicates present on the sheet because we're still testing and experimenting with style and geometry. More to come. Narrative Creating something intentionally boring is an engaging task. I wrote up in-universe information security guidelines for world-building purposes. This task had me reading transcripts from govinfo.gov...
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• Announcements·20 Aug 2026Official

  HeavenX Devlog 0020

  DevDevelopment of the office is ongoing without anything particularly worth noting, so lets talk about documentation. It's boring. Both writing it and reading it. However, like any other infrastructure, its absence is keenly felt.Getting the previously mentioned outline shader working was purely a fight with documentation. The version of Unity we've been developing on fell into an awkward space between updates of the graphics pipeline. The way this would be done in older version of Unity no longer worked, but what we should be doing instead was unclear.We upgraded Unity to a newer version to sidestep the problem, but that wasn't the end of it. Unity has their recommended, "easy" way of doing things, and that way produced blank textures. What finally worked was using the old way; the mismatched parts of the API had been fixed.Even now I'm still unclear on what I was doing wrong.If you have the time, write documentation for whatever it is you're doing. Even if you're working alone. I can't count how many times I've forgotten how something I made works. Worst case you're reinforcing that knowledge so its easier to remember or reason about later.NarrativeEndings are important. Even the most casual enjoyers of film and television can likely name an on-screen ending that didn’t land for them. The final bite leaves the strongest aftertaste. Much can happen between the sweet beginnings and bitter ends of stories, but it is most often the final moments that linger after the credits roll. That said, sticking the landing is irrelevant if your story didn’t have the momentum to get off of the ground in the first place. Infrequently discussed, though just as important, are the beginnings of stories. Whether it be the first page, scene, level, sequence, or chorus- there must always be a hook.This week I pitched a few different introductory sequences to the rest of the team. They were analyzed for narrative strength, complexity, and impact on scope. One sees the player at an orient...
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• Announcements·6 Aug 2026Official

  HeavenX Devlog 0019

  Player-choice and participation in narrativeIt can be daunting to work on a project of this scale. When I think about the road ahead, and the sheer amount of work required to complete the game’s story, it has helped me to look backward at the project’s origin.At HeavenX’s conception, the game’s narrative was going to be delivered via intermittent drops of reference documents. These were internal memos provided to members of the Neo-Frontier Program (your department in the Zhaoxing Heavy Industries ecosystem) that would elucidate the setting, world, story, and characters. Functionally, these were page-long lore dumps the player would receive via their in-game email inboxes. The first issue with this manner of storytelling is the fundamental lack of player input. The plot is dictated to you, the outcomes are inflexible. For the scale of the project proposed at that time, this was acceptable. However, as the gameplay systems grew the story began to feel like an accessory rather than a contributing part to its larger whole.The story had to be elevated alongside the gameplay. With that, it was decided that while the reference documents would remain, the player would also be able to interact with their coworkers. Dialogue choices made during these interactions would either boost their loyalty to their employer, or to a wild-card element that would alienate them from the power structure of Zhaoxing Heavy Industries. This opened up an avenue for player-choice and participation in the narrative.And still, dialogue trees weren’t enough. While the story itself was strong, we decided that merely selecting from a few lines of text to sculpt the future of the company, perhaps the world, was insufficient. The advent of the 3D office, and the project’s reorientation toward immersive simulation, got us thinking about the necessity of using space itself. Why not be able to visit the restroom while on the clock, for example? Maybe the player spends too long in the bathroom one day, an...
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• Announcements·30 Jul 2026Official

  HeavenX Devlog 0018

  I read something recently that I have been thinking about a lot lately, and it's the reason I'm writing this. The phrase "luck surface area" was coined by Jason Roberts in a 2010 "Codus Operandi" blog post, and the idea is simple: your exposure to luck is roughly the product of how much you do and how much you tell people about it. Do a lot but tell no one, and the work goes unseen. Tell everyone but do nothing, and there's nothing worth finding. You need both. The surface has two dimensions, doing and telling, and the bigger you make it the more chances luck has to land on you. This devlog is my personal reflection on both halves, and about the fact that I'm good at one of them and bad at the other. On Doing: We've been working on HeavenX for over two years now. Possibly three. I genuinely lost track somewhere. I think we started around August of 2023, but I stopped counting a while ago because the number started to feel less like progress and more like a weight. There are still many years of work ahead of us. We're making good progress, but all of it is in pursuit of something great, and greatness is slow as fuck. The "doing" part is the part I don't think people appreciate enough. You have to struggle. You have to work hard, extremely hard, on the thing you want to make, especially if it's grand and ambitious. And I wouldn't have it any other way. That's not to say it'll work out. It could all be for nothing. But I choose to believe that the more I do, the greater the chance we succeed, so I do. This puts me in direct opposition to basically every game dev influencer out there. Ninety percent of them say the same three things: make something small, make a horror game because those always sell, catch a trend on the way up. There's real merit in that advice, and a lot of it is true. But it's also worth pursuing things that take more from you than they give back for a long time. Pour your life into the design, the process, the mechanics, the feel, the story. Make a ...
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