In this podcast we talk about “Bot Lore” in our game.

By replacing human limbs with robot parts, the Player increases their spritual awaress while at the same time losing a little bit of ego. As you lose limbs fighting robots, the more you understand the spiritual aspects of robot life.

The following “gamedev chat” is a bit noisy (we don’t care if you don’t) but it goes into the idea of Animism and how it might manifest in game lore.

Bots (who are egloess) believe that everything is living and deserves respect. The table you are sitting at is alive. The cup, the saucepan. Everything is alive. This is the essential idea of Animism.

Animism

“Animism is a worldview and belief system that attributes a spiritual essence or soul to all things in nature, including animals, plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena. This perspective holds that everything in the universe possesses a distinct spiritual quality, agency, and consciousness.”

Perplexity.ai

Yes. Even a cup (or “fence) has a soul.

In some ways this intersects with Carl Jung’s idea. Jung had a huge collection of beer steins which he spoke to daily.

Listen to the following podcast to see what we’re trying to hook into…

• Article & Podcast – Everyday Animism: Did Jung Speak to his Pots and Pans?

This Jungian Life podcast is wildly interesting (to me at least).

Dropships

It’s become a trope, but from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers to the movie Aliens to games like Starcraft and more recently Helldivers, dropships have been a great way to up the ante and increase the drama at the beginning of any story.

• Drop Ship (tvtropes.org)

We drop the player (Diana) into the Purple Zone – where all the Bot Vs. Human fighting takes place.

Roguelike

We’re going to trial this idea in a basic Roguelike, before building the fully-fledged 3D adventure. The thinking is that most games have no backstory and the ones we’ve played only scant game lore.

So, we’re trying to go deeper – and see how it flies. After all, most games -the ones that we can remember playing – have a story.

Story is something to hang your hat on.

And for those Gen-Xers who were hanging on Phil’s every word . . .