The shop gets a sky (and every ceiling lamp is one you hung yourself)

Last episode the shop learned to grow. This episode it got a place to be — a road, a parking lot, a door. And most of all: light.

🚐 You arrive in your own van

The game used to begin with you already standing in the shop. Not anymore — now you arrive.

There's a road, a crossing, a parking lot, and a van sitting in it in your player colour. When a friend joins, their van pulls into the next bay, nose-in, the way people actually park. (The sliding door opens onto the empty side, not into the neighbour's van — a small thing the owner called out himself.)

From the lot you walk to the shop door, and that door is no longer a rectangular hole in a wall. It's a real sliding glass door with a frame, a transom above it and sidelights beside it, and it opens as you approach.

🌆 Look out through the glass, and something is actually there

This is the change that altered how the shop feels more than any other.

Look out of the window before and you found emptiness. Now there's a horizon — town, trees, sky, built in four layers at four distances, with clouds drifting slowly across.

It took a lot of tries. Including one we built completely, showed the owner, and threw away — there was an idea to recess the doorway into an alcove; it got built, photographed, and honestly judged as not good-looking, so we reverted to flush. We think that's the right way to work: make the real thing and look at it, rather than argue about it in words.

💡 Inside is dark until you light it yourself

This is our favourite part of this log.

The shop is now dark by default. The only light that gets in comes through the glass and the windows — soft pools laid across the floor, changing through the day. Bright in the morning, warm in the evening, dark at night.

If you want a bright shop, you hang the lights. Ceiling lamps are placeable, like furniture: aim at the ceiling, click, install. The room brightens according to how many you actually installed — it isn't an on/off switch, it's a room that got brighter because you made it brighter. Take them down and it dims again.

Floor lamps are real too. Put one down and it actually casts light.

🧱 Every wall piece is a thing somebody modelled

A behind-the-scenes note we wanted to share: the shop's walls used to be boxes drawn by code. Now every piece is a real model, built in Blender and brought into the game — walls, corner posts, the door, window frames.

It's slower that way. But it forces the problems to surface now, instead of surfacing the day we hire a real artist and discover the game can't accept what they made.

🔍 And the hardest bug turned out to be the smallest thing

A friend joining your shop saw the grass washed out pure white, while the owner's screen looked fine. It stayed open for three whole logs. We could not find it.

The real cause: a joining friend was being handed two copies of the world. Two suns instead of one, so the ground took double the light, so the grass went white.

The reason it hid from us for so long is that a comment in the code said "this doesn't need syncing" — and the comment was right about the design, but nobody had ever actually set the setting to match it. The lesson we wrote down: a comment is not a setting.

🌏 Next time

The shop has a place, light, and a horizon. What it's still missing is residents 🐱

See you next log 🐾☕