Yep, you guessed it, still unemployed. This month had a bunch of different things happening. Mostly being able to start hosting the server for real, and reworking the backend.

I had this elevator in the map during the entity system:But since that got ripped out, I remade it with components.

It now uses a state machine and some action graph for universal buttons. Turned out quite nice.
I'm gonna have to get some nicer button models in the future.

New players now get a cool introduction with a simple skin and clothes picker. It also forces you to accept the EULA for the multiplayer portion to work.

This was broken for a very long time and didn't actually use your settings. It should now do that, hopefully.

To not completely overwhelm the player with notifications, there are now cooldowns visible in the corners for common activities.

I don't care about cable management IRL, but the ceiling lights look like a disaster.

You can now reroute cables, and they will save with the object.

It's now much easier to move things around in your apartment, and place it next to other things with precision.
You can only use this mode in your own apartment!

The classics are back! There are now 12 apartments to live in as a starting point, almost fully implemented with windows, doors, and power outlets.

As a bonus, you can now add your friends as owners and sublets (this really isn't a bonus i just forgot to add this back from the old system).


Bonus useless fact - the name "cozy" for these apartments come from their first version back in gmod in 2014, when they were way more cramped:

Ok so this was a really cool feature back in the Garry's Mod version of the game, but now in 2025 it's not really as cool anymore. It would be really great to have it work like in The Sims where you just draw walls on the floor, but I have no idea how even the black magic of mesh builders works. So I'll think of that some other time.

These are just simple walls, and one variant with a door in it. When the scene mesh tools are more finalized and we know more about how that's gonna work, they will be paintable with wallpapers.

I want players to have some freedom with what they earn money from. One of the ways for legal money making is to gather natural resources, process them, and sell them.

At the moment, there's just cutting wood and putting them through a table saw to get planks. But I want to do some kind of ore gathering too like all the popular survival games, and implement all this into the crafting system in the future.

I don't want it to become a woodcutting simulator, instead it should just be one way to earn money. It should also fuel the ecosystem of perhaps a business needing planks to make things, so they buy wood from another player.

From all the way back in 2021 until now, the backend has been using TypeScript and Prisma. I like prisma, it makes database querying easy.

What wasn't easy was keeping track of URL query parameters and body JSON data in Express, and it seems that nobody has really solved that problem outside of just going with a full on JS framework.

With some help from my Discord server community, I started moving over to ASP.NET and EF. It was rough, and it still is pretty rough, but it helps so much that I can just import the types and DTOs from s&box so they're always just synced.

The entire thing being fully typed now is also nice. I like a lot of parts of it, but I've definitely gotten spoiled by the hotloading in s&box, the one in ASP.NET is far from that good.

I had to rework all the data structures and web requests, so this took most of the development time this month.

With the backend rewrite, i completely overhauled the stocks system to work on a global basis than per server. Now it's shared, and you can trade stocks in the Discord server too!

Mail system got a complete overhaul. Previously it worked like email, you opened your mailbox and had a list of all letters, you could see the outbox and compose from your mailbox. That didn't make much sense.

Now you have to buy an empty letter, compose it, then post it in a postbox, and have the postman NPC come deliver it in real time (in the future, players will be able to have this job too).

No, you can't kill the postman.

I redesigned it again a bit, I like the buttons on the side since you can fit more of them, but I'm unsure of whether to always show the labels or not. I tried to choose icons that made the most sense.

Had some very successful playtests this month, got a ton of useful bug info that needed fixing. I really hope the nasty inventory player desync is solved now. I HOPE!!!

I entered the game into the play fund, and it seems to do quite well so far. Now we need players!

Networking has been real broken for a while, but Conna fixed it this month (stuck sync vars). This solved a lot of the issues with longer play sessions, and I can finally start having the server online more often than just play tests.

There are lots of bug fixes to do, and I'll have to start adding police and businesses soon. Probably drug making too.
The main gameplay loop needs to set in, rules need to be added, tutorials and intuitive design need to be implemented.

A lot of people won't know what this game is about or what you can do in it, that is a very difficult problem to solve.