Minions are people, apparently

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Systems on MASTERMIND // Vlagopus

Minions are people, apparently

What emerged in playtest

Takeaway