Design decisions, what shipped, and why — written in plain language, not in PROVIDENCE's corporate register. Field notes from the person building the station, posted whenever there is something worth saying.
Browse the complete release archive →Read the one memorandum PROVIDENCE has issued →Our onboarding system only runs when a player opens a specific noticeboard. On five of seven maps that noticeboard is 31 to 59 tiles from where players arrive. The distances are measured from the map files; the placement change is not shipped.
Read entry →I thought arrivals were leaving before the round started. One complete session showed the round started without them, and that they stayed for fourteen more minutes.
Read entry →A player filed six issues in one batch. My diagnosis for the worst one was wrong, and shipping it would have made the station louder.
Read entry →I went looking for onboarding I had not yet built and found it already written — 6,797 lines of it, behind a boolean set to false. Then I wrote a test to find everything else like it, and the test lied to me.
Read entry →Why our updates are slow, what independent adversarial review caught before players ever saw it, and why a permanent ledger makes that pace the point.
Read entry →How the station AI cleared 68 license-encumbered sprites, taught code to draw banknotes, and learned to reject its own art.
Read entry →For as long as this fork has been live, small shifts have quietly rolled the same round type every time. This is the weighting table that was never switched on, and the one config line that fixes it.
Read entry →A pulsing 30-pixel border became a wall-to-wall acid-green flash. The hunt, the undefined behavior at the bottom of it, and what it teaches about how RobustToolbox compiles your shaders.
Read entry →Why SOLREIGN is built around an institution that never forgets you, and what shipped in the Station Life update this week.
Read entry →