People at last

Until this week everyone in Groundwork was a plain beige capsule. You could follow a capsule to work and back, but you could not tell a father from his daughter, or one family from the next. So the people got bodies.

There are six of them now: a man and a woman, a boy and a girl, and a grandpa and a grandma. The man wears a flat cap and braces, the woman a long dress with an apron, the boy a little cap, the girl a pinafore with a red bow. The grandpa has a white beard and a walking stick, the grandma white hair and a shawl. They walk properly too: legs and arms swing and the body bobs a little with every step.

Before settling on this look I tried quite a few others: a round bean with stubby feet, a wooden peg doll that waddles, taller and slimmer folk, a softer Ghibli-like style, everything at double the detail, and even mouse people. In the end the first one fit the game best, so it stayed.

Each household wears its own colours. The clothes are painted in grey in the model, and one small shader tints that grey with the family’s colour, so the folds and seams keep their shading and nothing else changes. A family walking down the street now reads as one. My first try put almost the whole town in the same pink, because the way I picked colours gave nearly the same answer for household one, two and three. That is fixed.

Then the bigger change: in Groundwork a day is now a year. Kids are too young to work and play near home. At 16 they start working, between 20 and 25 they move out to an empty home of their own, and at 65 they retire and walk about town a little slower. Somewhere around 80 they die, and the family stays home from work the next day. A couple with room at home has a baby now and then, a little less likely with every kid, and none once their kids start leaving. When a home stands empty, a new family walks in from the edge of the map.

This changes the start too. The eight settlers are now two couples, a grandma with her grandson and a mother with her daughter, so the first days have fewer hands than before. Graves are next: every death will need one, and a grave is kept for twenty years before it is cleared and the name goes onto a memorial wall, so the graveyard never fills up the whole valley.

A few smaller things on the way. The start camp now stands in a clearing, so nobody begins the game inside a tree. The campfire’s flames are see-through and cast no shadow, because fire is light, not a block. And closing the window with the X now saves the game first, like Quit in the menu.