7DRL contest 2007.

Hive Awakening

Ever watched Star Trek? If so, you might know the, mostly evil, cyborg species Borg (»Sounds swedish.«). By default, they know no individualism. Instead they live as collective on gigantic cubic or spherical space ships and want to assimilate everything and everybody into their collective. The collective is controlled by a queen, who does the same as the queen in a bee hive. Therefore the shared consciousness of the Borg drones is called hive mind.¹

In certain episodes of Star Trek, single members of the collective get seperated and have to survive on their own. Usually they just have to wait for rescue or, if rescue is unlikely, they have to destroy themselves. However sometimes, these drones get aware of their individuality – and like it. Reason enough for the queen to eliminate these broken parts of the collective.

So, now read the last two paragraphs again, but replace Borg with Bot and Queen with Hive Control. Then you know what the background story of the Gero Kunter’s 7DRL Hive Awakening is all about.

Resistance Is NOT Futile

In Hive Awakening, you take control of one of the bots with self consciousness. In order to ensure your survival, you have to find an hive interface and use it to reprogram the hive control.

After the game has told you about your quest, it asks you to enter a handle, i.e. a name for your avatar. By default it suggests 5DRL which is not only a sideblow on the needed development time of Hive Control, but reminds also of famous robots like R2D2 or C3PO. After entering the handle, you are presented the dungeon view.

This view looks very clear. The @ is highlighted by the cursor. Walls look turquoise. The lines at the bottom present some status values, and the advice to press ? to get a list of available keys should be taken serious. In general, the player is not overburdened by too many things at a time and his eyes and mind can adopt to the atmosphere of the game without stress.

To the atmosphere just mentioned count the names of the status values, too. Instead of HP, you have to care about the structure of your avatar. Other values are weight, engine and speed. Although it seems natural to have such denotations in a game where your avatar is a robot, it’s worth to notice.

Having a look at the key commands shows us that movement is controlled either by the number pad or by vi keys. Cursor keys don’t work. Instead you get an invalid key message. Laptop users who aren’t familiar with vi movement are forced to learn it (which, of course, wouldn’t be bad at all), because even using laptop’s virtual numberpad (activated by pressing the Fn key together with a letter key) doesn’t work. The only alternative to vi keys is using NumLock, but then 15 of the letter keys (i.e. the i key which is for example necessary to enter portals to the next level) are not usable. Although the game is just a 7DRL, these issues are rather annoying.

Configure Yourself

Anyway, once basic movement works for everybody, the game will soon show its qualities. One of these is the equipment system. Your avatar is provided with several sockets which can hold different modules. Now some modules need more than one socket to be equipped. In such a case, you need to connect the sockets with a socket link. While you start with only two sockets available, you will find modules that add more sockets to the bot. However, the more equipment you have installed, the more energy is needed. More energy is produced by better engine cores.

In many roguelikes, your health regenerates over time. This is possible in Hive Awakening, too – but only with the right modules equipped. Although restorators, reconstructors and regenerators are available, you have to decide if you want to use one of these or if a weapon would do a better job for you. You can also equip different shells. These tools increase the maximum structure and therefore help to stay alive.

The described system reminds me of several battlemech inspired games (anybody here to write a »Front Mission RL«?) and once you have understood the concept, it works very well. It contains a strong tactical component and much of the game’s fun is created by that.

The First Minutes

You start with two sockets, a drill, a restorator and a protium core. At the moment, you can’t equip all three items at one time, so you have to decide which is less important. In principle, this is the decision between an active and defensive gaming strategy. If you enable the restorator instead of the drill, you will survive much easier, but can’t do harm to the enemies. The other way around you do harm, but will be destroyed rather soon. The third alternative is to deactivate the core, but this only works as long as you don’t need power for additional equipment. As items are richly available (too richly, i.e. repetitive sometimes), the power core will be needed soon.

Once you have discovered the first level, you surely want to go further. For doing so, you need to find the security interface of the level and deactivate it. Otherwise, the portal to the next area will be protected by a force field and can’t be entered.

After some time you will have collected lots of items and parts that can be used to enhance your bot. As stated before, this can only be done with modules that add new sockets, and finding these socket forks requires some patience. Once you have one or two of them, the equipment system finally becomes useful.

Summary

Hive Awakening could become a great game if the author spent some time on it. The equipment system allows very deep tactical gameplay and the atmosphere is quite dense, thanks to the terms, the colors and the dungeon layout – all three aspects fit the background story well. Though the story itself is not new, Hive Awakening is (as far as I know) the first computer game to put you in the role of an artifical life form that just wants to survive.

Mario Donick

 

¹ Of course, Star Trek hasn’t invented the concept of group mind. See the english Wikipedia article for a rather complete list of shared consciousness in science fiction.