He never walked to the door

When the arrest was closed on 10 September, its last step went up on this site exactly as the plan had it: the screen goes black, he gets out, walks to the door and fades into the black. It read well. It was never what the game did.

What the game actually did, once somebody looked closely, was leave him there. On 22 September the hand-over ended with the detainee still in the world, lying on the ground. The step that was supposed to take him away took him nowhere.

Removing an NPC is harder than it sounds, because removing one is normally the game engine's call, not yours. The way through was a path the game already uses every day: the one for getting rid of bodies. It hides a character for good, in a single step, and a disposal device in the base game does exactly that to a corpse. Our own notes said only one place in the whole game used that path. Three do, and one of them was the precedent we needed.

It went in on 23 September. First it was tried by hand, from the console: the body disappears and leaves nothing behind to bump into. Then it was played end to end, and the player summed it up in three words: full cycle, works.

The sentence about the door stayed on this site until today, which is longer than it should have. It is gone now, and the step is described the way it plays: black screen, he gets out, and he is gone.