After creating games like Bring to Light and Cube Samurai: Run! the Red Meat Games team got stuck into the development of Sentience, a unique cooperative hide and seek experience.
To learn more about their latest project, we talked to Emily Van Lingen (Game Designer and Programmer), Curtis Collier (Game Designer) and Mert Ozyonum (Programmer).
F2P Campus (F): How did the idea of the game come up?
Emily Van Lingen came up with the idea after seeing many games where players are required to be stealthy and outsmart the AI. These games always require the player to be smarter than the AI while our game requires the player to blend in and act like the AI instead.Β
F: What’s the game about? What makes it special?
Follow the rules as a Sentinel or break them as a Rogue in Sentience, a free-to-play AI-mimicking, hide and seek, multiplayer online game. Set in a sci-fi dystopian future, players begin by choosing a side: Sentinel (hunters) or Rogue (prey) with each role offering unique abilities and play styles. The newly sentient worker-bots, known as Rogues, must halt the factory production and escape.Β
Sentience is a unique cooperative hide and seek experience. Charged with keeping the factory running as normal, the Sentinels must carefully observe the worker-bots to detect and eliminate any Rogues. In order to avoid the detection of the patrolling Sentinels, Rogues must blend in with the other AI worker-bots and act as they do.
F: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned at the F2P Campus?
The most valuable thing we have learned at the F2P Campus is the importance of the pre-production phase with market research, finding a USP, prototyping concepts and killing ideas that are not working before you get too far along. This stage is crucial to the success and future development of a game.
F: Why did you choose free-to-play as a business model?
We chose to free-to-play model for Sentience because we want to have as many players as possible playing the game. As a multiplayer game, it requires a large player base.
If you don’t want to miss any news about Read Meat Games and Sentience, take a look at their website.