Dastardly Diabolical DronesThe primary enemies in our game that
Patchman faces are robotic
Drones, programmed to protect and guard the
Sheeple. Why are they gaurding them? The Sheeple are their energy source, obviously!
Seeing as how this is a stealth game, you should probably avoid those drones whenever possible. Stay out of sight, one wrong move could spell death, unless you can run and hide and find cover before they rout you out. Seriously, their AI is no joke. Don't tease them.
Designing and Debugging the DronesWhile there are a number of high-level psychological tactics that are used to keep the Sheeple in line, without resorting to force, we won't be discussing them here.
The Drones were programmed over five major iterations, each of which successively added more abstraction and overall robustness. For example, in the first iteration, the Drones were only able to target Patchman, and alert other Drones. After a round of abstraction, the Drones are able to target any object, such as a decoy blow-up doll of Patchman, and alert other Drones to that blow-up doll's presence, and shoot at it violently until it is successfully eliminated. Drones REALLY don't like blow-up dolls, but if they see a moving Patchman they'll figure out what's what and go after the moving target instead.
This is all predicated on the ye-old basic desires system. Desires increase in rank depending on various factors, and the top desire becomes the dominant goal. Whereas the Sheeple have three levels of goal planning, the Drones have only two levels: goal and action. The reason being is that the Drones really aren't that complex compared to the Sheeple, even though the Sheeple *seem* to be doing less-complex behaviors. Hunting, pursuit, patrolling, investigating, and offensive things of that nature are not rocket science. It's hard work but easy plans. Vice versa for the Sheeple, who have easy work but hard plans, deciding whether to watching the Repeater in order to get Symbols for the Vending machine and ultimately solve their hunger problem.
Share Our PassionThere are like four or five days left on Kickstarter...
You want to get your crafty hands around this game, right? If so, we need more people on board. This isn't about getting money, and never was. It's about getting as many people as possible to see and play this game! Going into this we had no idea how tough it would be to reach out to a wide audience. Kickstarter was the promised land to jump into the pool of ideas and make a large splash, but it feels more like a bloop. Mathematically, something like 1/20 people are going to be receptive to this game (or whatever the number is) so we need to get the inverse amount of views to find those people (20 times, for example). So far our trailer on Kickstarter has under 2000 views. That's not enough. I believe there is an audience for this game, we just have to reach them!
Please consider a pledge before this ship sails!
http://kickstarter.dontbepatchman.com
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