Hi there,
This week we are implementing the messaging system.
We decided to create a real inbox mail layout where all the game messages are stored.
The mail page will contain all the messages that come from the different departments: instructions from the directors board, financial reports, deals and contracts (all official papers basically).
Mails are the most useful tool to be keep track of your progress and get report and information from all the department as each staff member can send the player an e-mail for a specific reason.
From the coding point of view, the mail system has a dimension of around 1000 mails, for safety. The generation of messages depends on a large range of factors. For example the player will receive a message when a new tech production has been competed but also if a member of the staff is unhappy and have a specific complain.
We set 300 as the maximum number of mails that can be generated during one season, so that our 1000 safety limit could be enough to avoid bugs (bugs could occur for instance if new emails are generated but there is not enough space on the cicle to store it).
At the beginning of each season the mail database will be reset so all the past mails will be deleted.
During the first phases of the game you will also meet Miss O’Reilly, that will be your personal assistant during the whole game experience, she is one of the characters that cannot be customized. We envision her as a well rounded character that helps the boss giving nice advices and tips, hidden news and sometimes friendly support. We would like her to have her own personality and relationship with other characters in the game.
We would love to have time and money to work on a deep and dense copywriting and animations. It would be super fun to give dialogues a realistic feeling, making them diverse and rich. We could include some random fun messages, twists and turns between employees relationships, going deeper into different characters personalities. This approach would be an interesting key to reach our game design vision and goals.
For now we are forced to delay the work on copywriting’s depth and come back to it later in development, but we think it could give our game a more defined style and personality and it could enrich dramatically the gaming experience.
Let us know what you think, it is all for now, back to work!
See you later
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