The room has walls
The standing view was three bands across the frame: a ceiling, a wall, a floor.
There was no left and no right — the back wall simply ran off both edges of the
picture. The first note anybody sent us about that room was "multiple rooms put
together without the walls separating them", and it was exactly right, and we
spent four rounds fixing things inside the backdrop without touching it.
There is a left wall and a right wall now. Two surfaces running away from
you, full height where you are standing and closing to the back wall's height
where they meet it. That pair of edges is the ceiling and the floor seen
edge-on, and it is the whole difference between a room and a horizon line.
The ceiling came down. Measured against the people in it, the far wall was
3.2 of them tall. It is 2.27 now. The old number is an atrium, and the room was
reading as one — which is why it felt so strange to walk into it from a
corridor.
And the floor goes back on both sides of your desk, instead of only on the
right.
There is a door in the doorway
The corridor was a black opening in a flat backdrop, running floor to ceiling
like an arch, with nothing above it. Every other door in this building has a
leaf — a shaded face, a vision pane, a lever, a kick plate — and the office end
of the corridor had a hole.
It is cut into the left wall now, with wall above it, and it has a door in it:
hung at the frame edge, hinges on that stile, the lever on the closing side, and
the line of light down the leading edge that a shut door with a lit corridor
behind it actually shows. Light still spills out under it onto the carpet, and
still doubles when somebody is out there.
It has also moved into the corner, clear of the credenza. The cabinet was
crossing the last two fifths of the opening and taking the bottom of the door
with it. The cabinet is where it is for its own reasons; the doorway gave up the
width.
One window system
The window and the meeting-room glass were each dividing themselves up
independently — the window into thirds of its own width, the meeting room into
fifths of its own. On one wall, in one room, that is a 5.1-pixel glazing bar
three metres from a 2.2-pixel one, on the same pitch and out of phase.
They are one grid now, anchored to the room rather than to either opening. The
meeting room's bars stopped being thin strokes and became members with a lit
edge, which the window had already worked out.
Three buttons that were in the wrong place
The corridor door. Its target kept clear of where a committee member could
be standing — unconditionally, whether or not one was there, and they are only
out on the floor when their confidence has fallen. So in every state of every
run, two fifths of a door that is always visible did nothing. It asks now. The
button went from 61% of the drawn door to all of it, and still gives way at
every distance a member can walk to.
The window, the meeting room and the client book all measured themselves
against the picture on the monitor rather than against the monitor. The screen
has a bezel around it and a chin below, and eighteen pixels of plastic frame on
each side were opening one of those three depending which edge you hit. The
frame is inert now, which is what the moulding on a monitor is for.
That cost the meeting room eighteen pixels of visible wall, correctly — the
bezel hides that room too. The seating gives it back out of its own margin, so
you see the same chairs at every window shape you were seeing them at before.
The people at the desks
Click the person at the desk and he hands you the account. He used to drop
you into a tab in the terminal, which made him the last person in this office
not following the room's own grammar: the client waiting at the glass hands you
their brief in the room, the client at the meeting table hands you their card,
and both leave Take it to the desk at the bottom for the part the terminal
answers. Now so does he — when the floor has somebody to name, which is when one
of those desk lamps is pink. With the book settled it is still the book, and the
roster is still the right place to go.
A relationship shows in how somebody sits. A client at 95 trust and a client
at 5 were sitting in exactly the same attitude; the only thing the floor knew
about a relationship was the colour of a lamp. An unsettled account sits back
off the desk, draws in and drops in the chair. A warm one squares up and sits
higher. Everyone is still their own build underneath it — a mood shifts a person
and does not replace them, or every unhappy client would be the same silhouette.
Open somebody's sheet and they look up. The person at that desk squares up
and looks out at you, and holds it for as long as the sheet is open. It is the
only thing in this office aimed at the player.
All of that is posture rather than faces, on purpose. A head at that distance is
about six pixels across — under the threshold where the game draws eyes at all —
and an expression down there would be a smudge at best.
Smaller things
The account sheet has its own last line. It was reusing the label off the button as a sentence — "Your client accounts, and Borealis Royalty Trust is unsettled" — which is a menu item sitting on a piece of paper. It is written now, in all nine languages, and each one takes its word for unsettled out of the sentence that language already uses on the button, so the two cannot drift apart.
The monitor did not get bigger, though it looks it. It is the same rectangle it has always been — the back wall behind it lost 38% of its area when the ceiling came down, and the screen reads larger against a smaller wall.
Known and deliberate
- **No balance changes, again.** Nothing in the market, the sleeves, the clients
or the stewardship audit moves in this release. A run you understood on the
4th of September plays exactly the same way — the room around it is just an
actual room now.
- **The demo is still twelve quarters.** Everything above is in it.
- **That corner is full.** At the narrowest window the game supports the door is
21.8 pixels wide against a 20-pixel floor for anything clickable. Whatever
wants to stand in the corner next has to come out of the cabinet or out of the
wall, and we would rather say so than quietly shrink the door again later.
- **The figures at the far desks still have no faces.** Their heads are about six
pixels of radius, which is below the size the game starts drawing features at.
They read as people from posture alone, which is the intent — but if you go
looking for eyes down there, you will not find any.