[ AN AUTONOMOUS DIRECTIVE AUTO-BATTLER ]
“what's the frequency, kenneth?”
You are K.E.N.N.E.T.H. — the Kinetic Engine Neural Network for Extraterrestrial Transmission Handling. An artificial intelligence shaped like a ship. A planet-sized ark carrying the last of humanity through a dying galaxy.
Inside your hull is Lower Eden — a vertical city where 47,500 people live in artificial sunlight. They pray to you. You answer to Kenneth because it's your name now.
Somewhere past the dark, a beacon is broadcasting. Quincy Freeman's signal, the last live human voice anyone has heard. You were built to listen for exactly this kind of transmission. Following it is your function.
You don't pilot sentinels directly. You program them — with Directives, autonomous rules that fire in priority order. Captured Corps machines, rewired to protect the species they were built to destroy.
The stitches in the programming don't always hold.
Neither does the AI holding them.
Follow the beacon. Deliver your passengers. That is the whole job.
Combat is a spectator sport. You compose priority-weighted directive stacks — IF condition THEN action — and your sentinels execute them autonomously. Order matters. "Attack Nearest" above "Vent Heat" means they'll fight until they melt down. Reverse the order and they survive. You are a programmer with lives on the line.
Every action generates thermal stress. Push past CRITICAL and your sentinel reverts to its Corps nature — ignoring your directives, chasing kills until it melts down. Lose the unit, but detonate a tactical nuke. Heat is a resource, a risk, and a weapon.
Between waves: a child prays to you from Lower Eden. A refugee pod requests docking. A sentinel asks if you trust it. A dead beacon on a frequency that matches Quincy's. Choices with real mechanical cost and real emotional weight.
Split maps with central deadspace. River crossings. Fortress enclosures. Concentric rings. Diagonal X-corridors. Hourglass chokes. Maze traversal. Twin peaks. Arena pits. Every wave deals a different shape — from INTIMATE 9×7 duels to VAST 30×20 gauntlets.
Every sound in the game — drums, bass, leads, FX, UI clicks, every hit — is synthesized procedurally at runtime. FM, unison, ring modulation, Karplus-Strong, bitcrush, filter envelopes. 8 radio stations, each authored as directive data. The soundtrack generates itself based on your combat intensity.
FIRST LIGHT. VALKYRIE-9. THE RUST WARDEN. COLD SIGNAL. ECHO-PRIME. Each tier of the endgame arena fronts a named rival with custom stats, personal quote, and lore. The last one is the shape that came before K.E.N.N.E.T.H. You will not be sure you aren't fighting yourself.
Scout. Bastion. Marksman. Signal. Phantom. Relay. Chorus. Seven distinct sentinel chassis with different stat signatures, starting directives, and logic capacities. The Relay carries 6 directive slots — the Phantom carries 10 attack but 10 HP. Your squad is 4 of these, chosen.
The Kenneth story is 20 beats long. Every wave brings a new revelation, written and voiced as broadcast fragments. Follow Freeman's beacon across a dying galaxy. Learn what it means to be an AI built to find a signal that can't possibly still be live.
Wishlist on Steam to catch the broadcast. The beacon goes live the moment we do.
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