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The game got its own address
The game now lives at its own address, apart from this site, so a new version can go out without touching the page you are reading. Before a change goes out, the game is now played through automatically, whole nights, a saved career and the interview room included, so a breakage there shows up before you find it.
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The motor pool restocked
The motor pool has more on the shelf: a cooler light bar so the siren runs longer for free, a new frame that makes repairs cheaper, and a few extras that last a single night. Prices went up too, and a typical career can still afford its first upgrade on the first night.
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The tyres found a voice
The tyres used to make a soft shuffling noise that got lost under the engine. Now a hard turn screeches properly, and slamming on the brakes has a sound of its own. The pitch was tuned by ear, and the volume out on the road, until both sounded right.
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The city got traffic lights
Cars now stop at red lights on the city's main crossings. Run a red with the siren off and it costs you demerits; with the siren on, it costs you nothing. Now and then a driver runs every red light they meet, and if you see it happen, you can pull them over.
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Good cop, bad cop
The interview used to come down to pressing two buttons in turn. Now you play good cop and bad cop: lean on the suspect to build pressure, then switch to good cop to turn it into a confession. Push too hard without a pause and he asks for his lawyer, and the chance is gone.
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Saved careers stopped going missing
About half of all saved careers could not be loaded back, so the title screen offered a fresh start where Continue belonged, and one more tap wiped the old career. That is fixed, and the game now checks that every save can be read back before it keeps it.
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Trout gets her cap
Officer Trout is the one you play, and until this week she read as neither female nor police at a glance. The ruling was both, so she has a cap now, with the badge on it. It is the chief's cap cut to her -- his is oversized and wears its badge on the chest -- with framing hair under the brim, finer brows, a warmer lip tone and inked digits on the shoulder plates. The bun she used to wear, and the argument for no hat at all, are superseded, and the drawing says by whom. Read back at 92 pixels and again at 34, because a face that only works large is a face that does not work.
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The city got a station
Six seconds of the city now run before the menu, and until this week they had no ending. The city gained a police station -- one per city, on a corner with two streets, placed deliberately rather than dropped in from the road stream -- and the cold open ends at its kerb, with the first shift beginning by walking inside.
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One offence, one name
The same offence carried four different names on four different screens, and the roll call had been dropping charges off its own edge in silence for as long as anybody had looked at it. Every offence has one name now, printed the same wherever it appears, and the roll call's line budget is measured per screen profile instead of assumed.
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Damage costs speed
Bodywork used to be paint. It costs half the top speed now, and a garage on a corner sells the repair back for time off the shift. Four buildings and a wrench on the roof; the first two captures said the wrench read as a scratch, so it was reshaped rather than enlarged. Its forecourt is lit mint, because two sites two streets apart may not glow the same colour.
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Driving away became a crime
The city had been staging collisions between its own traffic and its pedestrians and treating them as scenery. A car that hits somebody and leaves is a crime now, with a ring, an arrow and a shout, and it never steals any of the three from a stop already in progress. Roughly half of all first nights witness one.
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The map got wider
The owner could not read the map, and the off-screen arrows were pointing at stops that had already ended. The map is half again as wide now and says what is on it, and the arrow points at one thing only: the job not yet started. Two full shifts on the fixed build, three thousand eight hundred and fifty-three rendered frames, and no stale arrow in any of them.
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One field took the audio down
A siren effect read a field that does not exist on a world with no camera attached, and threw. Twenty-two of the browser suite's forty tests failed on that one line, while all five gates a builder runs stayed green over it. Two more measurements were caught lying the same day, and one of them had been sizing a handset eight per cent too large.
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The readout came off the glass
Measured on a handset, the readout was taking twenty-nine per cent of the screen and stacking ten rows of reading matter into ninety-four pixels. The one big box is gone. What stands there instead is a shift line, three instruments and a chase row, each earning the space it takes, with the rest of the glass handed back to the street.
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The gate that ran nothing and passed
The browser test suite was being invoked through a quoted pattern that matched no files at all, so it reported success without running a single test. That is instrument number thirty in a tally this project keeps of measurements that lied. The count is kept in the open, and the standing rule is now that an exit code is not evidence. The counts are.
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Two tickets got new names
A standing ruling from the owner keeps this game clear of anything a ratings board reads for, and it covers ticket labels and internal identifiers, not only the plot. Two violator kinds had been printing exactly that on screen for weeks, because the ruling had been applied to the story and nowhere else. They read DISTRACTED and ERRATIC now, and the ruling moved to where every builder reads it.
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A chase nobody could finish
There had never been a criterion asking whether a pursuit converges, which is how a broken one survived five rounds of review. The cause turned out to be the siren, narrowing the very road it exists to clear. With that undone the chase was reachable all along, and half the nights in the game stopped being built on something that could not be completed.
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The game got a face of its own
Every letter in the game had been the host machine's own interface font, so the type had only ever been seen on one box. A face was drawn instead, glyph by glyph, as vector paths on a squared grid: heavy condensed capitals, sheared forward, with the outer corners of the leading stem and the trailing foot cut at forty-five degrees. It made the frame cheaper as well.
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Boot was 3.3 seconds
The first frame took three and three tenths of a second, and two rounds of profiling blamed the wrong file before anybody measured it properly. The real cost was the bake: forty tiles built to put fifteen on screen. An idea that the graphics card would absorb the work was measured and rejected, because the work was never on the graphics card.
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The wall came down
The difficulty curve had a wall in it. Simulated careers stopped dead at night three; the median career reaches night twenty now. A coast pedal arrived for touch at the same time, because a phone had no way to hold a slow speed behind a car that had pulled in. Quota met came back to eighty-one per cent, and the siren survived the rebalance unchanged.
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The criteria came before the code
Nothing was built on the first day. What landed was the specification, the decomposition into interfaces, and a table of pass-or-fail lines with a method of measurement written beside each one. The asset firewall landed with it: no binary file may enter this repository, ever, so every pixel and every sound has to be made in code. Nothing was estimated.