- HeavenX Devlog 0022 - 17 September 2026
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 to…
- HeavenX Devlog 0021 - 11 September 2026
Dev + ArtRecently we've been doing more experiments with the visual style of the Office. The most interesting of those, in my opinion, is with the old PlayStation dither effect. Sure, it's seen a lot of use recently, but we have some ideas on how to do something unique with it.I think dithers and halftones are interesting visual effects in general. With just two colors and dots of the right density we can create a gradient without any of the in-between colors. So, in a way, geometry is a part of value. As for how it works in practice? It's fairly simple. We're using the Bayer matrix. (In my research I saw several people proudly declare they were using the original PlayStation's dither matrix. It was just the Bayer matrix shifted over and squashed.) The PlayStation generally rendered with 5 bit color, so the colors we actually have need to be rounded color. The matrix gets added to the c…
- HeavenX Devlog 0020 - 20 August 2026
DevDevelopment of the office is ongoing without anything particularly worth noting, so lets talk about documentation. It's boring. Both writing it and reading it. However, like any other infrastructure, its absence is keenly felt.Getting the previously mentioned outline shader working was purely a fight with documentation. The version of Unity we've been developing on fell into an awkward space between updates of the graphics pipeline. The way this would be done in older version of Unity no longer worked, but what we should be doing instead was unclear.We upgraded Unity to a newer version to sidestep the problem, but that wasn't the end of it. Unity has their recommended, "easy" way of doing things, and that way produced blank textures. What finally worked was using the old way; the mismatched parts of the API had been fixed.Even now I'm still unclear on what I was doing wrong.If you ha…
- HeavenX Devlog 0019 - 6 August 2026
Player-choice and participation in narrativeIt can be daunting to work on a project of this scale. When I think about the road ahead, and the sheer amount of work required to complete the game’s story, it has helped me to look backward at the project’s origin.At HeavenX’s conception, the game’s narrative was going to be delivered via intermittent drops of reference documents. These were internal memos provided to members of the Neo-Frontier Program (your department in the Zhaoxing Heavy Industries ecosystem) that would elucidate the setting, world, story, and characters. Functionally, these were page-long lore dumps the player would receive via their in-game email inboxes. The first issue with this manner of storytelling is the fundamental lack of player input. The plot is dictated to you, the outcomes are inflexible. For the scale of the project proposed at that time, this was acceptab…
- HeavenX Devlog 0018 - 30 July 2026
I read something recently that I have been thinking about a lot lately, and it's the reason I'm writing this. The phrase "luck surface area" was coined by Jason Roberts in a 2010 "Codus Operandi" blog post, and the idea is simple: your exposure to luck is roughly the product of how much you do and how much you tell people about it. Do a lot but tell no one, and the work goes unseen. Tell everyone but do nothing, and there's nothing worth finding. You need both. The surface has two dimensions, doing and telling, and the bigger you make it the more chances luck has to land on you. This devlog is my personal reflection on both halves, and about the fact that I'm good at one of them and bad at the other. On Doing: We've been working on HeavenX for over two years now. Possibly three. I genuinely lost track somewhere. I think we started around August of 2023, but I stopped counting a while ag…
- HeavenX Devlog 0017 - 23 July 2026
ARTI'm still pushing the desktop UI to the finish line. I don't have much to add on that topic that hasn't been said in previous devlogs. If you know a decent pixel artist (Or you are one, and you're reading this) consider reaching out to us on discordIn other news... I'm still tossing the idea of a lower poly approach to the 3D office around in my head. Its about 10x more practical for our team size. I was quite attached to the idea of a visual disconnect between the "ingame" (shooting) part of HeavenX and the office environment that the story takes place within. I wanted the office to be presented in a completely different graphical style to drive home the contrast between the two environments. My background in 3D is not in game development, so I'm quite comfortable making high fidelity 3D assets. Getting photorealistic assets into a game was something that, while new to me, wasn't a…
- HeavenX Devlog 0016 - 16 July 2026
DEV I'm in the last 20% of the virtual desktop right now, and I can tell you, its starting to drive me crazy. Wiring, plumbing, syncing, basically the glue that makes the fun stuff possible. So while I slosh through it, my brain keeps wandering off to the thing I actually can't wait to build: a player-driven internet you can only reach from inside HeavenX. I won't get my hands into it until later this year, which is exactly why I'm writing this now, while it's still soft enough for feedback. Years ago we made a little game called "MyFloppy Online". Players built items (basically drawings) and used them to decorate their floppy's room, and they could sell those objects to each other through an in-game economy. That loop, one player makes art and another uses it to make their space feel like home, was the most beloved thing in the whole game. While building HeavenX's interactable computer…
- HeavenX Devlog 0015 - 10 July 2026
NarrativeDescribing the process through which NPC dialogue goes from my head, to Unity, to HeavenX is much like an episode of How it’s Made. But not the interesting sort of episode, the kind that you put on to fall asleep. Maybe I’m biased due to sheer repetition, but working in-engine is a special kind of work. I do not envy our programmers. Anyway, for each line of text, a series of specific steps must be taken before they can appear onscreen. There are so many lines of dialogue already. Thousands. Some carry immense dramatic implications, many serve as fodder for the water-cooler. Either way, the process is the same. The first part is at once the easiest and the hardest, the conception of the dialogue itself. This can happen anytime and anywhere, no matter how inconvenient. If it’s worth writing down, I do so. If it’s worth more than that, it goes into Twine. Once in the Twine web, t…
- HeavenX Devlog 0014 - 2 July 2026
Narrative Since the halcyon days of planning and pre-production for HeavenX, the game’s web of interactive systems and questlines has only grown. Unlike those gentler days, where work consisted of casual talks through MS paint diagrams, there are quotas. Now we all have measurable things to do and only so much time to do them. Until very recently, much of my work on HeavenX’s narrative has entailed playing catch-up with the rest of the team; translating charts and written content into Unity. Real work, one might say. But as I’ve been committing to the practical, humdrum labor required to bring the game to life, the sorts of conversations that normally fill the pre-production space have continued. And as they often do, new ideas have gone from slightly out-of-scope to essential for the sort of experience we want to provide for our players. Systems that had been previously discussed, but…
- HeavenX Devlog 0013 - 25 June 2026
"Demand for the eternal is, conservatively, total. There is no market we will not eventually serve, and no customer who can ultimately decline." - Shen Fang, ZHI Sales Director --- Most games hand you a computer as set dressing, a flat desktop with a couple of clickable icons and minimal interactivity behind them. When we set out to build a computer for HeavenX, we knew doing something similar wouldn't cut it. We want our players to feel true agency in the world we are building. The desktop at the heart of HeavenX has a truly working operating system, and the apps inside it are real: a file explorer, cli, scripting language with its own IDE, a paint program, an email client, a chat client, and so much more (we are up to 20 apps now, and counting). The GIF above is to show the whole philosophy: the machine exists on its own, not just when you're around messing with it. You can re-theme t…
- HeavenX 2025 Recap - 15 January 2026
Our 2025 was a roaring blaze of quality work and camaraderie. This year saw the release of our most successful playtest to date, along with the introduction of a new work schedule that simultaneously kept our output and spirits high. We were surprised to find that our busiest year yet fizzled into a satisfyingly calm end. Each member of the team took some holiday time to enjoy weekends with friends, family, and personal pursuits. But the calm has ended, and the stormclouds gather again. We’re committed to tackling 2026 with the same freakish drive and dedication to our game that defined this previous year. We are wholly focused on launching another playtest at some point in 2026. It may not be an open playtest at first, but we plan on having more of those in the future as well. Keep your eyes on our channels to know when that sort of thing might be happening. To that end, we’re creating…
- HeavenX Devlog 0012 - 11 December 2025
I’m not a pixel artist. I don’t really draw. Most of my background is in 3D, production design, and UI/UX. At work I make sports gambling ad's. But HeavenX needed desktop icons. A lot of them. And they had to look like something you'd find on an old school desktop, and they need to look decent. The process is simple and I stumbled into it by accident. I start by collecting references. Mostly stuff from the old archives of windows icons that exist on modern windows machines:%systemroot%\\system32\\pifmgr.dll %systemroot%\\system32\\moricons.dll %systemroot%\\system32\\mmcndmgr.dll etc. (I found these locations on this site: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/where-find-most-windows-10s-native-icons/ -- I set some of my modern windows 11 icons to these for fun) Then I photobash together rough icon concepts in Photoshop. I literally pull stock pngs off google and collage them -- taking parts…
- HeavenX Devlog 0011 - 20 November 2025
The Myth of Specialization We’re a small team. Smaller now than a few years ago, and we were small even then. Now it’s just four of us, each wearing many hats, on one mission. We’ve all had to learn a great deal to keep this project moving along, and that includes me- the narrative guy. When I joined up with this team I thought I’d only be writing scripts, maybe some marketing copy here and there. Not so. Far before we started HeavenX I learned that there are only so many blurbs, stories, or item descriptions one can stuff into a game before it becomes untenable for asset production. As a writer, it isn’t my job to justify the creation of assets just to keep myself busy. Rather, it is my job to keep the project moving forward even when there’s nothing to write- even when my duties fall far outside the traditional demands of my “narrative guy” title.Anyone who has ever been on a small en…
- HeavenX Devlog 0010 - 13 November 2025
Dues Ex Machina I have wanted to get this story down for a while, and lately, its been fresh in my head as we work on new systems for HeavenX. Its a real world example of how a tiny prototype to can spark excitement and eventually lead to something really cool. In 2020, COVID hit. Strangest.io had grown a lot since I started it in 2018. If I’m not mistaken, around that time we had like 10 contributors, all working extremely hard on a game called Abraxas for about eight months. There are two running themes through out this story: Burnout and cancelled games. Towards the end of the year, multiple folks had burned out and needed to take a break. One thing most people will tell you about me, is that I can never really ‘sit still’. Idle hands are the devils playground, and for me - the devils playground is ‘just fucking around in Unity’. During the downtime I started experimenting with mecha…
- HeavenX Devlog 0009 - 6 November 2025
My current project within HeavenX isn't all that exciting. I can't speak to the creative side of building UI, but on the implementation side it's a lot of tedious positioning and writing code to glue things together. So, this devlog is going to be more of a ramble about issues I've had with Unity and game development in general. Unity's Rough EdgesFor an engine that's been around for 20 years, Unity has some strange, rough edges. Don't get me wrong, with few exceptions you'll find issues with any piece of software if you use it long enough, let alone one as big and complex as a game engine. However, some of the issues are just... out there in the open. Take for instance the RectTransform, the component that controls the size and position of UI elements. It provides a lot of functionality. However, that seemingly comes at the cost of being incoherent. I cannot stress enough that there is…
- HeavenX Devlog 0008 - 30 October 2025
In-Universe SoftwareDesigning in-universe software for HeavenX has three core requirements: it needs to look like actual office software, it needs to look cool, and it still has to function as a usable video game UI. Hitting two of those criteria at a time is fairly easy. Hitting all three at once can pose some interesting creative challenges.In this image, you are the baby!Balancing Realism and PlayabilityWhen making simulated workplace productivity tools, if it looks too real it risks becoming unreadable or unfun. Real enterprise software is often actively hostile to the eye. Layouts are built for tasks more complex than the interactions in our game, and function is typically prioritized over aesthetics. If we mimic that too closely, we just replicate the friction in an environment that is supposed to be a game. On the other hand, if it looks too cool it breaks the fiction. This tensi…
- HeavenX Devlog 0007 - 23 October 2025
Faces to the Faceless We love instant messaging. Gone are the wrinkled pieces of stationery clutched to the chests of distant lovers through long nights, along with the exhilarating ring of a long expected call from the downstairs kitchen. Both have given way to the faint quake of the rectangle in the back pocket of our jeans. What has been lost in ceremony has been totally reimbursed in convenience. Many pine for what they call the good old days; few have anything nice to say about the United States Postal Service when pressed. Though comparably simple, modern text-based communication is also precarious, as prone to misinterpretation as it is to expediency. There’s a reason people call to inform their loved ones about a death in the family or a recent engagement. Certain strains of information require intonation to be properly delivered. Otherwise meaningful words become mere arrangeme…
- HeavenX Devlog 0006 - 16 October 2025
Philosophy + Retrospective on Loadout CardsI’ve been wanting to jot my thoughts down on this since the April playtest. The loadout card system has been the most ambitious, and most argued about, feature in HeavenX. It took three-fourths of a year to stand up, it touches every part of the game, and depending on who you ask, it’s either “the brain” or “the bear trap.” Now that we’ve had six months to cool off, look at the telemetry, and look at playtesting data, here’s an honest retrospective: why we built it, what worked, what obviously didn’t, and where it’s going next.Going into the April PlaytestBefore we pushed “go,” we were so, so, so... anxious. Some of us (myself included) were all-in on the idea. Many of us play Magic: The Gathering, and the thought of stacking a scriptable, modular card layer on top of an arena/Devil Daggers-style FPS was just too cool of an idea to ignore. The…
- HeavenX Devlog 0005 - 9 October 2025
The Movement Controller Initially HeavenX used an off the shelf movement controller. It was good enough to get a prototype off the ground, and carry us through multiple playtests. For many games that's good enough, but, for us, the longer we used it the more friction it caused. There was a whole laundry list of problems. The movement controller tried to be an entire framework, so it was bloated and forced developers to do things its way. Sometimes it completely forgot its config values. Worst of all it was nearly impossible to reason about; for example if you wanted to set the jump height to a specific amount you'd just have to plug in values, test the jump, and adjust based on how high the jump actually was. (For any game devs reading this, their physics code was dividing by delta time instead of multiplying. Your guess how that still worked is as good as mine.) So we were insane sensi…
- HeavenX Devlog 0004 - 2 October 2025
UI/UX as WorldbuildingUser interfaces are meant to disappear. They exist as conduit between a player and a game. Characters "in universe" do not experience the same things a player does through the screen -- it is gamified in a way that streamlines interaction. We've taken the opposite approach. In HeavenX, the user interface is being designed as the core experience for the narrative pillar of the game. This philosophy affects every screen the player will interact with. Dialog is set in functional email clients and messenger apps. An overflowing filing cabinet takes the place of a loot window. Every piece of UI was built with narrative implications in mind. The player does not "press start." The player logs into a corporate account they were given during onboarding. They are not playing a game, they are an employee.The 3D Office and "Fake" DesktopThe narrative events of HeavenX take pla…
