The new shop walks (and I edited the game from my phone)

Hello. Last time I told you we had decided to stop repainting the show home and go and build the real house. Today I would like to tell you how the first week of driving the piles went — the short version is that it went a lot faster than we expected, because every lesson from the show home genuinely helped. This time we are not guessing any more. We know what we are building, and we know where we cannot afford to get it wrong.

🚶 There are people walking in the new shop

Within the first few days the new version of the shop had a floor, walls and a door. And two people walking around inside it at the same time, over the internet.

Everything is still capsule-shaped dummies and grey boxes, mind you. No cats yet, no coffee. But for us it is an enormous thing, because this time we decided up front that "playing with a friend" has to be the very first pile in the ground, not something added on later. That was the most expensive lesson the show home ever taught us.

📱 The day I edited the game from my phone

We built a small tool for the team to use among ourselves — a website you open on your phone and edit the game's data straight from it.

The first day I really tried it, I was lying about on the sofa. I opened my phone, changed the colour of a counter in the shop, hit save, and a moment later the game had changed to match. It is a strange, lovely feeling. Like being able to talk to the game from anywhere.

But what I really want to tell you about is how honest the thing is — the first time, I meant to change it to teal. What came out in the game was orange, because I had typed the colour number into the wrong box. The game did not do what I meant. It did exactly what I told it to. So the team rushed out a colour panel that shows you the real colour as you pick it, that very same day. These are the little things that make a tool trustworthy, one notch at a time.

🪑 Putting things down together

The newest system, finished only moments ago, is decorating the shop — open your bag, take out a counter, and a see-through ghost of it floats along whatever tile you are aiming at. Green means it goes there, red means it does not (and it tells you why). Rotate it, put it down, pick it back up, as you please. And most important of all — your friend in the shop sees the same piece at the same instant. Even someone who joins later walks in to a shop with every single piece already arranged.

There was a funny moment too. During a test, someone put a counter down on exactly the tile another player was standing on, so my friend simply floated up and ended up standing on top of the counter. Haha. Duly noted on the list. A game like this has a whole bundle of "who is standing where, what is sitting where" questions left to think about, and we will go and deal with the lot of them in one pass.

🎨 One counter, three worktops

Decorating is the heart of this game, so we are already laying the groundwork for "one object, many looks". The shop's first kitchen counter can now be given any colour, and its worktop comes in three materials — wood, stone and marble. (The picture above is straight out of the game itself, still in its grey-box era.)

Behind it is a system we are quietly proud of: every object in the game is born from "data" that can be edited from the website I told you about earlier. Add a new colour, add a new material — no need to tear the game open, just add the data and everything joins itself up. The real house has to be able to grow rooms without end, so we built in every door we might need from the first day.

So what next

Next in the queue is giving the shop a real "day" of its own — open up, have something to do, close up, and then a new morning arrives. There is still a long way to go before a cat comes and rubs against your legs, but every step now is far more solid than it was last time round, because we know what we are building.

The old promise still stands in full — I will tell it as it happens, the beautiful days and the broken ones alike. See you again in the next entry. 🐈☕