HAE Stack

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• Patch Notes·13 Aug 2026Official

  Major Demo Update - New task, tons of improvements & bug fixes.

  Progress continues at reasonable pace. Will the game be "done" before the end of the year? It's possible, but who knows. I'm heading out on vacation in a couple of days and wanted to get the latest build out before then, and I think it settled down just in time.Major UpdateBreaking ChangesThis new demo build includes some changes to the story flow, an additional task, and some modifications to previous tasks. Due to the way the game tracks story progression, if you continue using the same save file you will need to do a partial save reset that will remove your chat history and task progress. You will retain all your Person & Place associations, so it's not a total save reset, but I know it's not ideal. I'll try to keep major breaking updates to a minimum, and think about alternative ways to handle them in the future.If you aren't interested in the new content and want to continue playing your previous save, you can select the "v2026-06-19" build in Steam by right clicking on the demo -> Properties -> Game Versions & Betas.=========SPOILERS BELOW========EXIF MetadataThe biggest addition to the demo is the inclusion of EXIF metadata and tasks associated with it. EXIF is a metadata format that's part of images from cameras & other devices that includes a ton of useful (and potentially horrifying) data. For example: Date & Time information and GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken! By default, most phones will automatically include this information in every photo you take, and if you share that photo directly without stripping out the metadata, it can be viewed by anyone. So of course, it made perfect sense to include it in this game.I've revised an existing task to use EXIF data, and created an entirely new task partially based around EXIF data. Thanks to exifdata.com for letting me modify the EXIF data of images so that I could "fake" the photo metadata!New Job Application FlowThe New Game flow has always been a little bit... off. Jumping straight from the main...
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• Announcements·28 Jul 2026Official

  Dev Diary: Demo Reviews & Fake Commercial

  Demo ReviewsIf you've played the demo (and liked it), please post a review on the demo's Steam store page.Why it wasn't reviewable beforeSteam allows demos to either be attached to the game, or to have their own separate store page. Demos are only reviewable if they have their own store page. At the time I originally released the demo, I was a combination of a little lazy and worried that unexpected bugs or people not "getting" the game would lead to negative reviews.So far the feedback has been uniformly positive, and while it's wonderful to get that positive feedback directly, it'd be even better if everybody could see that positivity! So if you played the demo, please add a review to show the people that haven't played it that it's a good game.Fake CommercialThe end resultWhat makes a corporate commercialI've been playing with the idea of making a fake commercial for HAE Technologies for a looooooong time. Corporate commercials are so weird. I ended up watching a lot of examples to "study" for making my own, and came up with a 10 point list of things that epitomize the form:A vague, almost poetic script.Lots of cuts between stock footage/images.Most cuts are jump cuts, but occasionally there's a fade.Most cuts come in clusters of similar subject/footage/topic from different angles.Lots of pauses in the voiceover that don't follow normal sentence or punctuation conventions.Occasional hyper-fast cuts of like 3-10 different scenes in a second.Inspirational backing music track.Even static shots have some movement, usually slow zoom in/out.Ends with corporate logo, either overlaid on footage or on own screen.They're selling the idea of the company, not a specific product. The commercial is for investors, not the general population.And here are some stats from an analysis of a few different commercials:LengthClipsAvg ClipWord CountWords per Second60 seconds850.7 sec1141.990 seconds800.88 sec1371.5264 seconds242.66 sec941.4675 seconds681.1 sec1421.8960 seconds471.2 sec9...
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• Announcements·26 Jun 2026Official

  Dev Diary - Maps and Ancient Artifacts

  Ancient ArtifactsOne of the first things I did on this project was to make the map data files. Without the map, you can't test or build any of the core functionality of HAE-Eye that defines the majority of HAE Stack's gameplay. Map files are kind of weird. There's a lot of different formats for maps that are used for a bunch of different things. Often you can convert from one format to another (but not always), and different libraries and tools are only compatible with certain formats.For my situation I ended up using a .pmtiles file for the map's visuals, and a .geojson file for place information and search. I ended up with these files by downloading an extract of Open Street Maps data, and then running it through a bunch of tools to generate the files necessary to render them in game. There were some issues, but for a prototype they worked fine:* Note how the water just abruptly cuts off at a weird angleSo there we go! I had my files, they rendered in game, and I could display detailed place information in search: time to start building the game! And for over a year I just used these same files, with the knowledge that eventually I would need to update them. But eventually comes eventually, and as the game quality increased, the janky-ness of the map became an obvious issue.How the $%#& Did I Make Those Files??More than a year removed from the initial file creation, I realized that I had almost no memory of how I'd made the .pmtiles file I was using in the game. I knew I'd installed some tools on my Macbook (I usually develop on my Windows PC, but some of the tools only ran on Mac/Linux). Did I use tippecanoe or tilemaker or something else? Did I export from Geofabrik, BBBike, Planet.osm? Was the original file a pbf, osm, xml, geojson? I'm using pmtiles, but did I convert to an mbtiles file first or go directly to pmtiles? During the original file generation I'd experimented with pretty much all of those tools and technologies, but the exact sequence of steps I us...
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• Community & Events·22 Jun 2026Official

  Dev Diary - Steam Next Fest

  The GameAs far as I can tell, there were no major issues with the game over the course of Next Fest. I had essentially "locked" the build 2 weeks before Next Fest started to make sure I didn't accidentally break anything, and I'm very happy with how it held up.I only noticed a couple of relatively minor bugs while watching streams and reading feedback, and managed to fix those & publish new builds without any issues. Most of these bugs weren't things anyone else would notice, but here's the list:BUG: The "Continue" button was enabled on the first slide of the New Hire Orientation training before you finished watching the video.BUG: The date text shown on the computer on day 1 was timezone dependent (so showed June 15 instead of 16 for European players).BUG: Clicking on a person would remove the maximum zoom restrictions in HAE-Eye.BUG: If you copy the text from a Place Association search box exactly (e.g. "Madame Estelle (AB12345667)"), you would get no search results.MINOR: Changed the way Search Box text is shown so if there's no name/nickname it only shows the ID once instead of "ID (ID)".MINOR: Reduced the volume of the Corporate Pop music tracks to better match the PogoChamp BGM volume.MINOR: Reduced the time between HAE-gent automatic associations from 2s -> 1.5s.MINOR: Change time slider multiplier from 200x -> 240x.The only somewhat major issue that I noticed people run into is that Chromium-based applications can't use Game Capture in OBS, which meant that a lot of streamers spent the first 30 seconds of their stream going "Oh this is one of those games where Game Capture doesn't work, guess I need to use Window Capture." That's not a big deal, but is a little annoying. Unfortunately according to OBS and Electron, this is effectively unsolvable, so there's nothing I can really do about it.The ReceptionIn terms of player sentiment about the game, I really couldn't be happier. I got a bunch of positive and encouraging messages, and the core idea really seemed...
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• Announcements·15 Jun 2026Official

  Dev Diary - Development History

  To celebrate being part of Steam Next Fest, I figured I'd do a little write-up of the development history of the game and the inspiration behind it.The inspirationIn 2019, the New York Times released a series of articles about the commercial surveillance industry. The reporters had been given file from a location-based advertising firm that included over 50 billion GPS location pings from more than 12 million devices over 2016-2017. I strongly recommend you take a look at those articles yourself, as in addition to their content, the visuals they employ are excellent.Throughout the articles, the reporters demonstrate how use of this data can reveal intimate details about a person's life: where they live and work, who they know, who they interact with, marital infidelities, etc. While the articles outlined the numerous personal privacy and national security problems that datasets like this and the technology used to generate them represent, one thought occurred to me: "This could make a pretty cool video game".The five year waitMy initial idea was to have a realistic city population, and use randomization & proc-gen to decide where people lived and worked. I thought a relatively "small" city of ~50,000 people would be a good target. So I cracked open Unity, made a spawner for 50,000 circular sprites, and the FPS was... garbage. Unity had recently announced their ECS & DOTS architectures, which were supposed to be super-high performance for large numbers of elements, so I figured "Okay, I'll just wait for that to be ready before I try again."I tried again two years later, this time with ECS, and the performance was... good! Then I tried to make the sprites move and the FPS went back to being terrible. "Eh, they say the architecture still isn't finished, maybe it'll get better by next year." It didn't.After waiting 4 years for Unity to finish their ECS/DOTS implementation, in 2023 my interest in Entity/Component architectures, the Rust programming language, and my disco...
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