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We're bringing turn based strategy and roguelikes together to create a unique and endlessly replayable strategy experience!

Delve into the easy to learn hard to master Behavior System! Inspired by the idea of bringing the fun of programming to a video game, the Behavior System offers you a simplified way to program and automate your bot's behaviours by mixing and matching 3 types of commands. The Behavior System offers tons of unique complexity in an easy to use, simple package!

Build and upgrade your robot army with specialized bot upgrades, weapons, and items! By combining different bots with different kinds of gear, you can create powerful combinations! Want to use the Focus Beam, a weapon that deals more damage the further it is from it's target, to it's maximum potential? Give it to a Fast Bot with the Keep At Range command. Now you have a powerful bot who can quickly move far away to deal a bunch of damage!

Every playthrough is different, with random bots, equipment, and behavior unlocks! Discover AI Cores throughout your game and unlock powerful commands, bots, equipment, and items! If you're lucky, you may even find some ultra-rare 'Hax'!

Turn the tides of battle by gaining control of Stations; key locations that provide powerful bonuses and large scale effects! Make sure to capture all the Stations you can, as they provide a variety of effects like deadly Auto-Turrets, Teleporters, and 3D Printers for building more bots!

All of the aliens use the same Behavior and Squad System as you! Outsmart your enemies by learning and exploiting their behaviors!

Explore randomly generated ships with unique layouts and loot to find!

Discover legendary robots that bring powerful and unique abilities!

Play through the Campaign Mode, which has you progress through multiple stages to defeat the invaders!

Overcome a variety of 'Curve Balls' and 'Finales'; boss-like encounters that are a true test of your strategy skills!

Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics takes place part way into an interstellar war between the Human Worlds Alliance (HWA) and a shadowy conglomerate of alien species called The Galactic Legion (The Legion for short). The Legion has conquered many species and forced them to fight in their armies, so in the full game you will run into many kinds of aliens.

You play as an IT guy aboard a human spaceship that has been defeated by The Legion. The ship is dead in the water, alien soldiers have boarded and have killed everyone they could find. You are locked in your office with a few janitor bots and a 3d printer you can use to build stuff with. You can't fight, but you can program these robots to fight for you. So, you start 3d printing as many as you can, send them out into the ship to gather supplies, and fight to take the ship back. If you can get control of the ship’s generators and the bridge, you just might be able to warp jump to safety...

In a typical game, you will be building and outfitting a whole bunch of robots, programming their behaviors using Bot Net’s unique Behavior System, and sending them off to explore and recapture control of the ship.

The game is based in a grid of grids; the ship is divided into a grid of rooms and each room has its own grid of floor tiles. When programming your bots, you’re designing how they will behave within a room, and you move bots into rooms using squad waypoints. Essentially you are assigning a squad of bots a room waypoint and programming how they will behave against enemies once they’re in that room.

The room based gameplay also plays into how you progress throughout a game. Within each room, there can be points of interest called Stations. These Stations can provide a variety of benefits like Auto-Turrets or Teleporter nodes and also include the primary objectives of the game. In order to gain control of a Station, you need to gain control of the room it’s located in. Room control is gained by clearing out the room of enemies and having at least one of your units in the room. This is a two-way street though, as the aliens can retake rooms through the same rules.

Throughout a game, you will have a bar at the top of your screen representing the ship’s generator integrity. This bar will deplete each turn that the enemies control the ship’s generator objectives. But, if you retake a generator, your generator integrity will start to repair itself. If the generator integrity reaches zero, you lose the game. In order to win a game, you must gain control of all the generators and the control room.

On your way to achieving the main objectives, you'll run into what we call 'Curve Balls'. These are randomized events that mix up the gameplay by throwing tough challenges or secondary objectives at you. Curve Balls can take the form of a variety of things, such as a group of tougher and smarter elite enemies or a fire that's spreading throughout the ship that needs to be dealt with.

When you're nearing the end of a game, you'll encounter a 'Finale'. Finales are similar to the Curve Balls only much bigger and more challenging. These essentially act as a final boss for a game. Like the Curve Balls, they can also take the form of a variety of things, not necessarily a typical boss fight but not exclusive to that either. Finales will be the ultimate test of your skills, where only the best of the best will succeed!

In order to deal with all these challenges, you're going to need to master the Behavior System. The Behavior System is how you program your bot's actions in Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics. When creating your bots, or at anytime during your turn, you will be able to give your bots 3 types of commands.

The first command type is what we call a Movement Command. This describes how you would like to move in relation to a target. This could be as simple as our ‘Move To’ command, which means to move directly towards your target, or something as complex as our ‘Spread Out’ command, which will prioritize moving to the best spot within range of your target that has the least amount of friendly units nearby.

The second command type is what we call an Action Command. This command type describes when, or if, you would like to use the bot’s equipment on your turn. Examples of this would be the ‘Run And Gun’ Action Command, which has your bot always perform it’s movement before using it’s equipment, or the ‘Assault’ Action Command, which has your bot only move if it couldn’t use it’s equipment from it’s current position.

The third command type is what we call a Target Command. This command type describes how to prioritize the available targets in a room. The Target Command ‘Pristine Enemies’ will prioritize enemies with the most current health, whereas the Target Command ‘Injured Enemies’ will prioritize in the opposite order; prioritizing enemies with the lowest current health.

When you combine one command from each of these categories, you get a full behaviour. A unit with the commands ‘Move To’, ‘Run And Gun’, ‘Pristine Enemies’, will first move towards the enemy in range with the highest current health and then attack with it’s equipment. In contrast, a unit with the commands ‘Spread Out’, ‘Assault’, ‘Injured Enemies’, will first try to attack from it’s current position, and if there are no valid targets, will move to a spot in the room in range of the enemy with the lowest current health that has the least number of friendly units nearby.

What kind of Behavior you decide to give your bot will usually depend on what kind of bot you've made. When making a bot, you get to decide it's bot type, equipment, and optionally an item.

A bot's type affects what the bot's base stats are. Which bot type you choose will depend on what kind of strategy you're going for. Need a tank bot that will soak up lots of damage? The Tough Bot will be great for that job! Need to get your bot somewhere quickly? The Fast Bot is an excellent choice for that job! In the full game, there will be a large variety of bots from a number of rarities to choose from for several kinds of situations, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Janitor Bot: Standard issue janitor robot. Moderate stats across the board.
• Maintenance Bot: Has a really nice and fancy wrench, recovers health each turn.
• Tough Bot: Outfitted with armor plating, has improved health.
• Fast Bot: Equipped with a rocket pack and roller skates, has improved movement.
• Handy Bot: Built with an additional arm, can hold a second item.
• Observant Bot: Has binoculars for eyes, has improved range with equipment.
• Careful Bot: Coated with a layer of bubble wrap, has a chance to save an item on use.
• Teleporter Bot: Has a teleporter beacon on it's back, can be used as an end node for your teleporters.

A bot's equipment is what they will be using to fight the aliens. You'll want to make sure you pair your bots with equipment that suits their abilities. Like bot types, there will be a large variety of equipment available, including the following:

• Welding Torch: Normally used for welding sheets of metal together, the Welding Torch is a simple but effective weapon.
• Rivet Gun: A nail gun type tool normally used in construction. It fires bolts of heated spikes, used to bind metal sheets. It's not built for combat, but certainly capable of it!
• Pulse Repeater: A powerful ranged weapon, the F-103 Pulse Repeater is the standard issue assault rifle for Marines of the Human Worlds Alliance.
• Scatter Array: An extremely deadly shotgun-like weapon. The X-12 Scatter Array is your best friend in a tight spot.
• Focus Beam: The L-42 Focus Beam is a devastating ranged weapon used by the HWA special forces. It fires an accelerating particle beam that inflicts large damage the further away the target is.
• Solar Flare: The RA-23 Antimaterial Cannon (nicknamed the 'Solar Flare') is a prototype weapon that fires a fusion blast, destroying everything in it's path. Requires SPF 5,000 sunscreen to use safely.
• Arc Conduit: Cobbled together from various electrical equipment, the Arc Conduit fires a laser that ionizes the air around it creating bolts of electricity that arc to everything nearby.
• Concussion Cannon: The Protocorp Crowd Dispersal Tool, less formally known as the Concussion Cannon, is a tool often used during civil unrest. It fires a large shockwave, knocking back anything in it's way.
• Containment Rifle: Developed by Protocorp's 'Civilian Friendly' weapons branch, the Containment Rifle fires a stream of thick foam that holds anything it touches in place.

Optionally, you can choose to equip your bot with an Item. Items provide single use effects that are generally activated manually by the player. These will often provide a rather powerful effect at a an efficient cost. Some examples of Items that will be available are as follows:

• Repair Kit: A simple bot repair kit, will heal your bot on use.
• Battery Pack: A portable battery pack, will recharge and overcharge your bot on use.
• Backup Core: A spare bot power core, is automatically consumed on bot death, preventing death and healing the bot.
• Portable Turret: A miniature auto-turret that can be placed on the ground to defend an area.
• Shield Generator: When used, creates a temporary, stationary, energy shield that can only be fired through from the inside.
• Landmine: A remotely activated landmine. Place it on the ground in a choke-point and activate it when the enemies are least expecting!
• Active Camouflage: Can be use to render the user completely invisible for a short duration
• Teleportation Grenade: A portable teleporter node that can be thrown at a target to instantly teleport it to a controlled teleporter.

Now that you know how to make your bots, you'll need to know a bit about the enemies you're going up against! All of the enemies in Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics use the same Behavior System that you do.  Understanding your enemy's tactics is critical to your success. We have a good variety of enemies planned for the game, including the following:

The Swarm is a insect race that is too dangerous to be controlled, even by the Galactic Legion. The Galactic Legion will keep Larval Matriarchs (The infant form of a Swarm Queen) frozen on ice, only to be deployed as a biological weapon of mass destruction in emergency situations. Once released The Swarm will consume everything in it's wake. In order to contain the inevitable chaos that unleashing The Swarm causes, The Galactic Legion has genetically modified the DNA of The Swarm in a way that will cause all of it's members to expire after a certain period of time.

Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics will be available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux on Steam. We also have plans to broaden our list of platforms in the future!

To start, Bot Net; Ramshackle Robotics will be available in English. We plan to bring it to as many languages as possible before and after release though! We'll be prioritizing each language based on the demand we have for that translation, so please let us know what languages you'd like us to translate to!

CaffeineWare is owned and run by both Brea Parker and Nic Gardner. So far this project has been funded entirely through investment from our friends and family, as well as personal investments. We plan to complete Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics whether this crowdfunding campaign succeeds or not, with the difference being how long it will take for us to complete the game. This is the reason behind us choosing a flexible goal for the campaign. Because of this, every pledge to the campaign helps us bring the game to you sooner than later!

Our crowdfunding goal for Bot Net: Ramshackle Robotics is $42500 CAD. This goal was chosen as the minimum amount of funding we would need to be able to work full time on the game so we can deliver it by this fall. The breakdown of what this money will be going towards is as follows:

Indiegogo Fees: $2125 CAD. This is for Indiegogo's cut of the campaign.

Art and Sound Assets: $15000 CAD. This budget will allow us to continue paying our freelance artist and composer for the fantastic quality assets they've created so far. What's available in the demo is only a small taste of what's to come!

Supplementing Cost of Living: $10000 CAD. This budget is what's needed to be able to work full time on the game from now until launch. For two people, we live on a pretty small budget of $2500 CAD per month.  Overall it will cost us around $25000 CAD from now until launch in living expenses. We have the rest of this budget already figured out, but will need the additional funds from the campaign to cover this cost.

Equipment and Software: $2000 CAD. This budget will be going toward any software fees, along with equipment needed to develop and bring the game to other platforms.

Localization: $2500 CAD. This will be our initial budget for localizing the game to a second language.

Marketing: $10875 CAD. The remainder of the budget will be going towards marketing costs. This includes payments to our marketing team and an advertisement budget.

In the case that our crowdfunding goes even better than hoped for, we've planned out some exciting stretch goals for you!

$60000 CAD:  Additional Content and Localization

If we make it to $60000 CAD, we'll use that extra budget to design and develop more of the regular content (Enemies, Bots, Weapons, etc.) along with some of our secondary feature ideas and additional localization to requested languages. Some examples of extra features we'd be interested in are:

• Challenge Mode: The challenge mode would be a special kind of game where a pre-existing board state would already be setup for you and your goal would be to figure out how to win the game in a limited amount of time. This could come paired with it's own achievements and unlocks.
• Theater: The theater would be a feature where you could playback game replays and share them with your friends. We plan on building this feature to be quite robust and have it allow you to stop the replay at any moment, move the camera around, and click on things in the game to check additional info.
• Level Editor: Pretty straight forward, this would be a tool for making your own levels for the game. We would ideally pair this with the ability to share your levels with your friends.
• Multiplayer: We've played around with the idea of multiplayer games. This could work in the way of each player building bots to fight each other or, another idea being, one player gets to act as the aliens and on the bots. We think there's some interesting potential for multiplayer so we'll think a lot more about this idea should we reach this goal.

This list could also include possible ideas the community has and is interested in as well. If we reach this goal, we'll evaluate how many and which features we could work on and let the community decide which option is the favorite.

$100000 CAD: Free DLC for All Backers

This would be phenomenal if we were able to raise this much! In the event that this somehow happens, we plan to develop an expansion for the game which would include any extra features we weren't able to get into the base game, along with a bunch of additional regular content, and a new campaign mode. We'll also make this expansion free for everyone who helped us reach this goal! We'd also take this opportunity to bring additional localization and work on bringing the game to consoles.

This campaign is promoted by IndieBros - "Helping Indie developers do what they do best!"