Watching a playtest session when the Director decided to send a rival crew across the map mid-operation. They crossed into player territory, found one of the gang members running a corner, and opened fire. As the player there was nothing to do - no button, no order, no way to respond in real time. You just watched.
Started building the Green Light system. The idea: a Threats panel in the HUD shows which rival factions are currently active in your territory, and a Green Light button tells your entire crew to go after them. When the order is given, gang members drop whatever they're doing - dealing, moving product, running errands - and start hunting. They close on the nearest enemy from that faction and when they're in range, the fight starts. Call It Off and they stand down immediately.Also fixed two bugs in the Operations panel. Goals were displaying in alphabetical order no matter what order they were set up in - the panel was silently sorting them on every render. Removed the sort so the panel respects the order as defined. That same sort was sitting in a second place in the code: the change-detection path that decides whether to rebuild the list. Because the displayed order and the comparison order never matched, the panel was doing a full rebuild every single frame instead of updating values in place - which caused the scroll position to jump back to the top constantly. Removing it from both places fixed both issues.Shipped the full Green Light system. The game is now symmetrical: the Director can escalate against you, and you can escalate back. When you give the order, your crew goes looking - they track down living members of that faction, close the distance, and fight when they're close enough. The order is dormant until you activate it, and it stops the moment you pull it back.Also fixed a bug where the priority system wasn't correctly reading conditions on certain AI goals - some goals that should have been waiting for a signal were running anyway at a flat priority level, ignoring the gate entirely. Narrow fix, but it was silently affecting how the crew decided what to do.All existing test suites passed - arrest, prison, combat, multi-cop arrest, and green light. No regressions.
- Thresher from ENGN Game Studio