If you like first-person shooter games and are looking for a challenge, then Protocore could be the game for you. This upcoming game is a co-op first-person game that allows one to four players to play together against an adaptive artificial intelligence. Developer IUMTEC is calling it "Doom Meets Machine Learning."
In terms of story, you as a player are going to fight your way against an AI inside a giant spaceship. Use big guns, explosives, and hacking in order to finish off brutal and daunting enemies. Making this difficult is that fact that the enemies learn and adapt to your playstyle.
Key features of the game include:
- Adaptive AI
- Be smart! The AI controls difficulty by changing the rules according to your actions! Die and retry - Face deadly adversity with specific patterns that will require more than one attempt to overcome!
- Speedrun
- Surpass yourself and others by scoring the highest while clock is ticking!
- Solo & Co-op
- Play with up to 3 friends if you can’t dig it alone!
- Moddable
- Create your own experience! Protocore has been developed with modding in mind.
Game Development
The game is being developed by IUMTEC, a studio founded by two friends spending all of their time to craft indie games on their own. In a post on their official site, the idea for Protocore started sometime in mid-2016 as the two buddies wanted to come up with a co-op-based FPS with dual weapons. They added that as they "were learning as the project was taking shape, and it was as difficult as it was rewarding."
About a year later, they wanted to add unique features to the project. This was brought on by the frustration of feeling as if they "owned" the game and being able to learn all the patterns. This they wanted to have an AI that "would manage the difficulty of the game, via events that depend on the player’s actions, or his overall ‘skill’."
By August 2018, Protocore had its first playable version. However this still didn't "reflect the entirety of the game nor everything that has been worked on until now." While they had managed to make the game "nice, pretty and not buggy," the AI was not satisfying enough and not implemented. By January 2019, the duo had managed to make the core of the game work at the expense of it not being visually appealing. With all of these kinks getting ironed out, the studio hopes to come out with the final version of the game soon.
