Shipped the first pass of per-minion memory. Every minion now carries a small, persistent behaviour state — grudges, loyalties, one or two specific things they are weirdly good at, one or two they are weirdly bad at.
It’s 240 bytes per minion. The entire roster’s memory fits in a rounding error of RAM. The effect on gameplay is not a rounding error.
What emerged in playtest
- A minion named M-041 (codename WRAITH) refused an assignment three times in a row because the target was a museum in Prague, which is, per their backstory, where their sister works. We didn’t write that behaviour. The system inferred it from a single “affinity:PRG” tag we had on the minion and a “location:PRG” tag on the mission. We kept the emergence.
- Another minion started leaving the cafeteria five minutes before shift change every day. Every day. We have no explanation. We are also keeping this.
- A third minion is, per the log files, slowly losing loyalty at a rate of exactly 0.3 per day and we can’t find why. The design team has named this “the slow bleed” and is building an entire counter-intel minigame around it.
Takeaway
Cheap, persistent, per-agent state creates gameplay that feels like it was written by a better designer than anyone on the team.
End of transmission.