Game development is expensive. And slow. Especially if your team is small and consists of volunteers. It’s taken us over a year to produce our first public prototype of Gears of Eden. We don’t want our next Alpha update to take another year. So, we’ve been exploring the idea of crowdfunding to help with the cost and speed up production for quite some time now. Before we pursued this, we wanted to make sure we were offering you content that has value now. With the release of Alpha 1, the Reaching Eden podcast (episode 6 releasing this weekend!), and our new short stories series – we think we’re starting to meet that threshold. We’re excited (and a little nervous) to announce, we are finally launching our Patreon site! As part of this launch, we are given away for free our very first Gears of Eden Short Story!
This story, titled “Robots Don’t Use Forks,” is about a small maintenance bot that, through a clerical error, finds itself alone on an asteroid and tasked with putting together a mining operation. It’s entirely unequipped to handle the task, but its protests fall on deaf ears. This story highlights some important elements of social hierarchy in the Gears of Eden universe, and includes elements from the game’s world that we’ve been very secretive about since development first began. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and consider joining us as a Patreon supporter! Here is an excerpt to get you started, and you can read the rest of the story, in full, free on our Patreon site.
“Sir? Hello? Is this working?” L3-2M peered up at the monitor. On it, a static image of the system’s mining administrator looked back at the fidgeting little machine.
“One moment.” The image flickered into motion as the administrator settled into frame. “Ah, there. L3-2M, is it?”
“Yes, sir! Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”
The administrator’s head shimmered in a reply lost on L3-2M’s very literal mind. L3-2M hesitated, and when the administrator realized that it—he, L3-2M reminded itself—wasn’t being understood, he returned to vocal communication. “Of course,” he finally said, “how can I help you?”
“Well, this is awfully embarrassing, but it seems somebody has made a mistake.”
“Is that so? Please explain the mistake while I pull up your file.” L3-2M heard tapping on a mechanical keyboard.
“Well, sir, I shouldn’t be here! I’m just a maintenance bot, and in no way designed for this task.”
