New employee search is now live!

The new employee search, which we have written about several times before, has been released today.

How the system works doesn't require much explanation, as it should be pretty self-explanatory. If you'd like to know more about the motivations and the iterations we've gone through with the system, check out our earlier blog posts for the details.

Lots of profile pictures

As I mentioned in the last blog post, we have now used AI-generated graphics in the game for the first time. I felt that the new employee search was a good candidate to try it on.

I ended up making a total of 630 different profile pictures for the employees, distributed across 3 age groups.

With the much higher resolution and quality of the new profile pictures, it quickly became clear that it would look strange if an employee's picture didn't match his age, so there was no way around making different age groups.

They are designed in such a way that the employee should be fairly recognizable when his image changes to an older age group on his birthday.

Here is an example of the evolution of an employee's appearance over his life time:

He starts out with the first picture, then switches when he turns 50, and then again when he turns 60.

Not every age progression has the perfect recognizability, but they should all be fairly decent.

I think I got away with it pretty well, and will definitely use AI generation again in the future when we need graphics and where it makes sense. First up will be the replacement of our ancient player profile pictures.

Bug hunting over the next few days

Now that we have released the new feature, we will likely uncover some bugs and shortcomings in it.

We will be fixing anything that comes up over the next few days. In addition, there are also a few pages where we will look at refreshing the design - for example, your own employee list will be redesigned to use the new images, and possibly also show the employee's abilities.

I hope you'll enjoy using this new feature.

Please provide us with your feedback here: Feedback: New employee search is now live!