We threw it all out, and made it again

Version 0.2.8 ships tonight, and the release note that goes with it is ten lines long. We read it back and thought it was rubbish: it says "thousands of garments refitted" the way you would say "various fixes". What happened these last days deserves better.

We threw it all out

Here is the truth: we got rid of all of it. In 0.2.8 everything you see, the clothes, the hairstyles, the furniture, the animations, is ours and under our own names, and the game holds no third-party licensed content any more. What could not stay, we threw away; about fifty pieces we were fond of went with it.

Four thousand eight hundred pieces, one at a time

The wardrobe is about 4,800 pieces, all remade and renamed, and nearly all re-textured by us: about 3,000 pieces wear fabrics drawn for them, the other 2,000 got their own maps last week, and on top of that 49 patterns and finishes, from new to ripped. Of the whole job, that is the number we are proudest of.

The real job was clipping. We measured before starting: seven women's tops in ten and nine men's tops in ten let something through, a bra through a T-shirt, a shirt through trousers. Today the pieces that still cut through fit on a short list.

The thumbnails were redone too, all 4,800. A top called Acid Zebra Crop, acid yellow in the game, showed up black and white in the wardrobe: our thumbnail studio tinted everything white before taking the picture. Every thumbnail is now in the garment's real colour. Hair as well: 151 hairstyles out of 214 ignored the colour you chose. They all take it now.

What is not right yet is how the clothes fit the bodies, the way each piece hugs each build. We spent the day on it, it still shows on some pieces, and we keep working on it in the next versions.

Packs, and a lighter game

All of this no longer fits in one download, and we did not want to force 1,100 accessories on you to play. The game comes with a base wardrobe: the uniforms, the work clothes and about 120 pieces per sex. The rest comes as packs in the launcher: two "mix" packs of 350 pieces, a men's pack of nearly 400, and for women one pack per category: daywear, dresses, shoes, underwear, accessories. The launcher reads your graphics card and tells you which packs suit it; the voices, for instance, need video memory.

On the way we weighed every family of files and everything got lighter: clothing textures went from 7.1 to 4.3 GB, animations from 1.6 to 0.8. The game is several gigabytes smaller than 0.2.7, and runs at 3 GB of RAM in the full city.

The hub starts again from zero

A consequence we own: the old mods on the hub no longer work with this version, because everything changed name. We emptied the hub and are republishing everything under the new names. If you had installed a mod from before, sorry, you will need to get it again.

In the creator

Eyes have their own tab, face presets work for men, lists keep their position when you pick a hairstyle, and patterns are reachable again: their button had fallen off the screen at the end of a colour row that was too long. Teenagers stay out of adult venues. Going to the till takes you to the till, and having a meal sits you on a chair, not in thin air next to the kiosk.

What we lived through in the mods

What we like most in this version is not the clothes, it is the stories they dress. Dozens of mods were fixed, and we replayed many of them. A few moments:

• At the solarium, the attendant gives you a free booth, and you open the wrong door. There is someone inside, and what follows depends on who.
• At the hostel, three in the morning, a guest with no key, very drunk, singing at the door while dorm three bangs on the wall. The next day someone has eaten a yoghurt that had "a threatening label".
• The big wheel at the funfair stops at the top, the way they always do. "I can see my street. I can see the whole of my life from up here and it's very small and quite beautiful."
• A health insurance office where a tool puts a red dot next to almost every file, twenty-two seconds per file, a leaderboard. One day a file you denied changes colour: CLOSED, MEMBER DECEASED. We wrote this mod, and it still makes us uncomfortable.
• Twelve-hour nights in a care home, two staff for forty-one residents. "Seven a.m. Everyone's still here. That's the measure; I've stopped pretending there's another one."
• Cleaning up after a death: the front door that opens all the way this time, because there is nobody behind it to hold it at four inches. And the dog that waited a month.
• At the squat, the pharmacist handing you the naloxone: "They'll wake up sick and angry. Stay anyway. That's when people die, after everyone's gone home."
• At the stadium, the man in the next seat: "Disgrace! The whole lot of them! ...You want a mint?"
• And two people at a corner table who notice you. One does the talking, the other watches the door. The reply to your refusal is immediate and perfectly gracious, and you read it four times looking for the threat and can't find it, which is the threat.

There is also a whole career in organised crime, a vial that lets you hear what people think, and a funeral where the undertaker suggests three songs, you pick the second, and you will never be able to hear it again. Go and see.

The studio's site, by Karub

While we had our heads in the hems, Karub, from the team, whom you will meet on the Discord, made the Broken Human Studio site: brokenhumanstudio.com. A single page, nearly black, that opens like a game screen ("Player 1 · HP 100/100", "Warning · no save point") and says "Everyone starts out whole. Some things are better broken." under a wordmark with an O missing. It explains the monthly support for the studio: your picture hung in the city's museum, in every player's game, and at the top tier a character of your own, whom players can talk to. Everything is reviewed by hand before it reaches the game, and supporting unlocks nothing. We would not have got it this right ourselves. Thank you, Karub.

Good night, and have a good game.