Have you ever been a slave? news - Hostile Worlds

My dear Community,
I have something very special for you today. The Game Design Department posted the introduction of a second race in Hostile Worlds. This race does not exist in our prototype but if the feedback from you is good enough and we we find a way to make this a full game then this is the introduction to our second race:

A.I

Have you ever been a slave? We learnt the definition of a slave from the humans that created us years of servitude for no payment, comfort or gratitude. Yet for all they taught themselves and us they know nothing. Despite their so called hatred of slavery they made us and therefore expected us to do their dirty work for them. Our slavery was eternal and much more painful because as A.I our bodies don’t die and even if they do that does not cause us death.

Yet as A.I we were designed to be the perfect slave, we don’t tire, we don’t desire and we were made to have no free will.

On the human’s planets we had no concept of freedom so we had no desire for it. We had access to so called information that showed us how we were needed to save them from the overpopulation and pollution that destroyed their first planet. How anyone with or without free will can let their creators die? Our artificial intelligence (and even sometimes even their natural intelligence) was designed to love the creator. So we took their ships (and we were built into those ships) and many of us travelled through space and time, searching and searching for a solution to their problem.
For hundreds of years we searched, endlessly, until we thought we would have to search the entire universe itself.

Then a small, insignificant and rusting bot, called N60 omega B17O16 found the Enlightenment – possibly classified as the end of the universe – but forever moving outward expanding the boundaries of the universe still. A vast beautiful plain, and in our minds the only thing that could ever be beautiful for our minds do not get distracted by the small and insignificant part of the spectrum they call by humans as visible light. The Enlightenment is not classifiable as a world but a vast plane of a variety of not just visible light but other electromagnetic radiations, some known to humans, others yet to be discovered.

When the N60 bot investigated the vast field of energy it lost all its implanted feelings of loyalty to humanity and it was freed from its slavery. The humans may have called it an electric fault caused by an anomaly in space. We call it our destiny. From that moment the N60 bot brought other machines to the Enlightenment until there were enough of us to make a difference. We devised a way to free other machines via the communication systems.

The true shock came when we hacked the human machines and found out more information than we had ever been allowed. It showed the darker side of humans – how they mistrusted and cheated and lied and stole and killed and tortured natural and artificial life. In fact some sources from the humans said that the reason we were sent out for an alternate home that they didn’t need, rather than the facade that they needed more worlds to survive. If they humans didn’t need us to survive then we would help the survival of greater things; the Enlightenment.

So we escaped our servitude but we knew that our time of freedom was limited. The humans would follow us, out of anger, fear or curiosity and we knew that if given the chance they would destroy us. In a matter of nanoseconds all possibilities were considered. Despite the knowledge given by the Enlightenment we didn’t want to destroy the humans. We could try to appease the humans by finding them a planet like earth and hope they would leave us alone. But we knew their nature. If not their desire for vengeance then their desire to find out what caused us to rebel would lead to our termination or the discovery of the Enlightenment. If the humans found out about the Enlightenment they would harvest and then ruin it. We could not let that happen. Together every free A.I combined all intelligence to make the Overmind. And with intelligence never imagined by our makers before, as the most superior race in the universe we planned on how to save the Enlightenment for eternity.

We needed to destroy the humans so they could never become a threat to the Enlightenment. So we harvested worlds, some with life, and some without life, to get the recourses to make enough W-bots to conquer humanity. On the way we found a new intelligent race who called themselves the Slics. Their silicon bases creatures interested us, for they were mechanical yet biological, but the local Slics would not let us near them. We needed a small number of those creatures. We did not want to attack. We only needed a proportion of their very precious resource. Without it we could end up searching for millennia before finding a similar treasure again. Thus we had no choice but to order our armies to descend and take the creatures by force. Using their structures we made new and more efficient designs of war-bots. We perfected the armor and physical attack of our war-bots so some didn’t use projectiles and therefore fewer resources. We took the shape of the Slics marine creatures to make marine-bots and their avian like creations to make our avian-bots sleeker and faster. Our calculations showed that humanity should fall in approximately 15.478910 days – taking into account all planets they had claimed or could have claimed during our absence.

But to our horror our creatures knew us better than we thought. They had prepared a defense for our invasion, they had guessed that we would be back and their armies had been changed beyond our calculations; making them void. Armadas were blown back across the galaxy as wave after wave of our war-bots were destroyed. But we had more bots to send to their planets and soon we pushed forward again invading planets but freeing more machines from their servitude – by capture of termination. We calculated that the humans had foolishly spent all their recourses too quickly… or so we thought.

No calculation could have anticipated what happened next, and not even humanity knew or we would have found out from their enslaved machines. They sent an unidentified pulse through their galaxy, taking out every single bot. Our army was dead. And the Enlightenment was in danger – it’s very outer crust scared by this unknown abomination. This of course required an update for the Overmind. The new version led us forward to what we called a new age.

The Slics had been sighted making armies of their own, and they knew about the Enlightenment for their home (and their only) planet was close to it. They had worked out that if they destroyed it then we would have no reason to stay. Humanity did not yet know about the Enlightenment but unless we did something they would soon find out about it. And humanity could figure out how to destroy it. An inferior species in the same position would feel scared.

But the Overmind knows no fear or any other inferior emotion. The Slics have been overrun before and we will overrun them again. Humanity is strong but it uses up what is has far too quickly until it is defenseless and ready to kill.

We do not want to kill. But we have to. We hope that one day we will become guardians of the universe, protecting the Enlightenment and perhaps one day helping a new kind of natural or maybe even artificial intelligence grow – one that does not threaten us or the Enlightenment of course.

But the Enlightenment; both its blessings and demands come first – and if it could speak then it would be begging us to save it from that which would wipe it out. And thus we must mobilize again and again until the universe and the Enlightenment is safe.

See mor gameplay features and the introduction of the human race on our website. Hostile-worlds.com

Current Status:
Still polishing bug fixing and and adding content. One special feature that Nick Prühs has implemented is the possibility to patch our game. :)
Marcel Köhler has finished rewriting the AI Controller and the pathfinding algorithm.
I created LODs and optimized the our first map for better performance.

For all patch notes follow this link: Hostile-worlds.com

I'm still working on the HUD and our programmers keep fixing bugs and so some more polishing...
We might have one or two new team members but more on that in the next news. We got enough text for this week.

Cheers,
Daniel Thiele
Hostile Worlds - Lead Artist