The World Cup: A Project, Not Another Region
Special projects add goals that are not just "more of the same". The first is hosting a ski World Cup race. Also: why the staff menu was removed, guests in every icon, and the long fight with a T-bar lift.
Six regions give the game breadth, but after a while every region feels similar: buy, hire, expand. I wanted goals with a different flavour. The answer is special projects: big events your resort group takes on, the first one being a ski World Cup race.
How projects work
Technically, a project is a small region of its own: a few unique businesses (a start house, TV coverage, a grandstand, a winners' podium), its own phases and its own rating. That meant the existing business cards, staff, construction and celebrations all worked without new code.
What makes it different is the frame around it:
- Reputation unlocks projects. Completed regions and resort stars give reputation, and reputation levels open projects. The old "reputation reset" idea found its real home here: reputation is now progress you keep, not a reset currency.
- Only one project at a time. That makes starting one a decision.
- Completion needs every goal: the last phase and all rating stars. No partial completion.
- The reward is permanent, but never more production. Completing the World Cup raises the offline limit by two hours. The first idea was "one extra bonus event per day", but that reward is invisible – you would never notice it. A higher offline limit you feel the next morning.
After completion the project stays. Its staff take over every business, it keeps producing, and you can visit it, but it is frozen: no more purchases. A finished project is a trophy, not a chore.
Removing the staff menu
To make room for the trophy button in the header, something had to go. The candidate was the staff menu: a list of every person you had hired. It looked nice, but it contained no decisions. You could only read it. Everything it showed was already available by tapping the face on a business card. So it was removed, and its slot went to the projects.
Guests in the icons
The icons were technically clean but a bit lifeless. A lift without people is a machine; a lift with two skiers on it is a holiday. So many icons were repainted with guests: skiers on the chairs, a guest with a suitcase at the albergo's lit entrance, a waiter at the hut. Rules for the guests: few people, no crowds, adults only, and in the same painted style as the rest.
The T-bar that would not work
The T-bar deserves its own paragraph. A T-bar pulls two skiers up the slope by a bar behind their backs, hanging from a cable. The image model did not understand that at all. In order, it:
- painted skiers going downhill;
- crossed their skis;
- turned the bar into a bench;
- attached a vertical pole that was not connected to the cross bar;
- left a ghost of the old pole after an edit.
A real photo as reference helped, and so did a simpler idea: the overhead cable does not need to be visible. Only the extended line from the bar and the skiers being pulled. After many attempts and some manual editing, it worked.
The same day the single chairlift was dropped. It was as wide as the double chair in the icon, so they looked the same. The lineup now goes double chair, quad chair, gondola, and a fun park filled the free slot (its staff quote: "The first jump takes courage. The second one gets addictive."). Old saves move their units to the new slots automatically.
World Cup icons that move
The World Cup businesses got their own animations: the clock hands on the start house turn, a start light switches from red to green while the racer bobs in rhythm and pushes off at green, the camera operator's recording light blinks, and confetti falls on the podium. The grandstand needed several rounds: more spectators for a sold-out race, some just heads in the back rows, someone standing and cheering in front, and a fictional flag instead of a real country's.