Welcome to Hive Awakening, an ASCII roguelike game.

The hive is a civilization of intelligent bots, all under the mastery of the hive control. Unforseen, one unit loses its connection to the hive control and learns to appreciate the feeling of independence.. It is your, the player's, task to help it on its way through the hive. The more you advance, the more difficult the levels become, and you have to swap the equipment to customize the bot's powers. It is only in the control core that the bot can ensure its freedom. Can you lead your bot to the hive control interface?

The first release of this game was created for the 2007 7DRL Challenge. Work on the Seven Day Roguelike Game (7DRL) was started work on Tuesday, March 13th 2007 and stopped on Saturday 17th. At that time, it was already a complete game, and could be won. The most recent version is Proper Release #2 (March 24th, 2007).

Creating a game for the 7DRL Challenge was quite, well, challenging. The very tight time frame (less than five days of work) didn't allow for much testing and balancing (the proper releases amended that, though). I would not have been able to complete the Challenge without resorting to my basic roguelike framework, which provided basic screen output, message parsing and event handling, as well as LOS and pathfinding algorithms. All gameplay, however, was coded during the challenge.

Hive Awakening owes some inspiration to the board game Ursuppe by Doris Matthäus and Frank Nestel, which was also published in English as Primordial Soup. If you know that game, you will probably recognize the influence. Hive Awakening is no remake of that board game, though. All game rules and features are original.

All in all, it was great fun programming this contribution, and I hope that you enjoy playing Hive Awakening!