Add the Corporate Ladder pack, and two engine features it needed
Seventeen events across the mailroom: ordinary days, Marlene Hobb and Trevor Pike, a misrouted envelope that can be delivered or kept, and a hard-times branch that fires on negative money and always leaves an ungated way out. Writing real content turned up two things the engine could not express. Per-turn upkeep (`pack.upkeep`): the MVP spec wants recurring income and costs, but effects only run when a player chooses something, and baking wages into every option would be tedious and easy to get wrong. Upkeep entries carry their own conditions, which turned out to be enough for the loan service charge to be a three-step function that escalates with the size of the debt — no multiply operation, no engine change. Upkeep changes are recorded separately from choice changes so the UI can distinguish them. Per-character starting relationships: Trevor starts below the pack default on `likes_you` because he arrived two weeks earlier and has priced that in. Characterisation as data rather than as an opening cutscene. Nobody starts feared, either — `fears_you` defaults to 10, since a midpoint default would mean every new hire arrives already intimidating. The content suite plays 60 seeded runs and asserts every event fires and every option is taken at least once. That caught real dead content: Trevor's favour chain sat behind a gate no plausible player could reach, taking two events and a hard-times escape route with it, and debt could pass 5,500 while the service charge stayed flat, so the failure spiral flattened out instead of tightening. Both fixed in the data — the gate softened and given another route up, the loan capped and its charge tiered. The validator also gained a real fix: it counted an event with a cooldown as a stage's fallback, but a cooldown can exclude it, so a stage could still run dry. 86 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §11-13, including the seeding trap that makes a correlated chooser look exactly like a content bug. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
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Claude Opus 5
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// The mailroom, as staffed.
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//
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// `description` is pure colour — the engine never reads it. What the engine
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// does read is `startingRelationship`, where a character departs from the
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// pack's defaults: nobody fears a new hire, and Trevor started two weeks
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// earlier and has priced that in.
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export const characters = [
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{
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id: 'marlene',
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name: 'Marlene Hobb',
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title: 'Mailroom Supervisor',
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role_type: 'boss',
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description:
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'Has worked here nineteen years. Refers to the building as "the plant." ' +
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'Keeps a laminated card of the org chart, updated in pen.',
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},
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{
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id: 'trevor',
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name: 'Trevor Pike',
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title: 'Mail Associate II',
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role_type: 'rival',
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description:
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'Arrived two weeks before you and has never once let that go. ' +
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'Photographs his lunch.',
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startingRelationship: { likes_you: 35, wants_to_help_you: 25 },
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},
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];
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export default characters;
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