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 called it a day - but flags only answer the question you thought to ask when you wrote them, and something always invents a new question later. When I needed the story system to tell "the player never reported this phishing email" apart from "the story force-closed it before the player responded," I wrote a new query over an event that was already being captured instead of going with the shitty flag-based approach. I just needed to wire the data up correctly.
Still chasing bugs out of the email reply picker in the quest editor before giving this to Jack. Up next is the Edict 'phishing' system and search functionality. - Hunter
Narrative
About 10% of HeavenX’s lore existed before I joined this team. Few know that this project is a prequel to a game our lead programmer finished a few years before I entered the picture. The game had a small, passionate following, and that’s all I can really say about it. I don’t want to step on any toes or make any premature reveals.
That said, people have probably figured it out by now. Prequelizing an established story almost feels like writing fanfiction, or at least how I’d imagine that would feel… Anyway, the visual language of HX, when compared to its predecessor, is considerably more conservative. That said, the depth of the gameplay has been scaled up to the extreme. The story is also a bit more grounded due to its time and place. Still, they rhyme with each other. Stanzas, like George Lucas said that one time. The choices one makes in this early era of Zhaoxing Heavy Industries lead directly to the conflict of the original title. If you already know what I’m talking about you’re a real one. If not, then you will.
Design
I've made games with this team for over five years now and have come to learn that the last 10% can take as long or longer than the first 90. Last week I said I was done with the polish related to the desktop but we added another app and... well... there is more polish.
Those of you reading these blogs might know that there is an in-game scripting language called Petal that allows players to use an IDE to develop their own games and programs. We wanted a way to let players share these amongst each other -- so we made an app to facilitate that. The petal hub will allow players to upload and download user created apps, vote on their favorites, and generally just explore what the dorks out there decided to spend time programing. 
Its loosely styled to match early torrent clients -- but you wont need any trackers to find new petals. Search functionality is built right into the app.
We're currently running the final_final_REAL FINAL_v2 audit on the desktop... On track to wrap this system by EOY -- and hopefully be moved fully into work on the 3D office.