"Demand for the eternal is, conservatively, total. There is no market we will not eventually serve, and no customer who can ultimately decline." - Shen Fang, ZHI Sales Director
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Most games hand you a computer as set dressing, a flat desktop with a couple of clickable icons and minimal interactivity behind them. When we set out to build a computer for HeavenX, we knew doing something similar wouldn't cut it. We want our players to feel true agency in the world we are building. The desktop at the heart of HeavenX has a truly working operating system, and the apps inside it are real: a file explorer, cli, scripting language with its own IDE, a paint program, an email client, a chat client, and so much more (we are up to 20 apps now, and counting).
The GIF above is to show the whole philosophy: the machine exists on its own, not just when you're around messing with it. You can re-theme the entire system with palettes, rearrange the desktop, set your own screensaver, create your own desktop background. It's a real desktop provided to you by ZHI, not a menu. What makes it feel alive, though, is that none of these programs are islands, they're wired together the way you would expect them to be. A script you run renders right inside the cli. Art you make becomes a file the other apps can open or better yet, a graphic you can use to design websites that other players can see in our homegrown version of the internet (more on this to come in a future post). And the system reaches past fiction entirely: it can surface files from your actual computer, your music, your images, etc. and places them in the games file system next to our authored content for the story, so the line between "your real computer" and "the computer ZHI gives you" gets pretty blurry. Its many small systems all aware of, and reacting, to each other.
Here's the part we have been working so hard on: the story runs through that machine instead of around it. When a character DMs you and asks you to type a specific command into the terminal, the plot genuinely doesn't move until you actually type it, no "press F to pay respects" here - that's just not our style. What you write, make, open, and run is what advances the world we are building. It's a narrative you can operate rather than watch, and over the next few devlogs we'll open up a few of these apps one at a time and show you how they talk to each other, and to you.
And now a word from the graphics department.....
As the programming team has been building out the story systems, a couple of the apps needed small functionality changes before they could be implemented. Small teams are agile and we made some decisions that required modifying the existing UI concepts before handoff. I went back into Shout! and Edict, our chat and email clients, and reworked the art on both to line up with how they actually behave after the changes. I also made some adjustments to try and front run any UI/UX confusion that will inevitably happen while developing with no player feedback (more on that topic in future devlogs ːsteamhappyː). 
Shout! and Edict are two of the apps the story moves through most directly so they need to be ironclad both functionally and visually. They are now broken out into pieces and ready to be wired up by the code monkeys (Programmers love working on UI... try asking one about it!) 
I've also been spending time bringing the 3D office into being. It is a bigger lift that will be displayed in the coming weeks. Ironically, I just quit a soul-crushing corporate job in real life. Escaping a real megacorp to spend all day building a fake one is much more fulfilling. The only cubicle I can stand is the one I'm rendering myself...
PS: If you see this.... Photorealism or 'PS1 Style' graphics for the 3D office? We're trying to decide internally right now. I have feelings about both options but I'm curious what the public thinks.