I recently started writing short fiction. The first one runs today in the excellent newsletter, The Browser. You can find my story here (and for free):

https://thebrowser.com/we-trade-with-ants/the-watcher-first-contact/

What if ants could talk? What if we could trade with them?

This is the first in a series of many, many, short stories I've written that explores every aspect of that one question.

Today's story is a self-indulgent first contact story in which humans work out how to talk to ants from scratch. First contact stories are my favorite kind of Sci-Fi, but they always SKIP OVER THE GOOD STUFF by giving either humans or aliens a magic translator. NOT HERE. I thought this story would be too self-indulgent and nerdy for anyone to care but I kept getting good feedback on it so I decided to run with it.

There's more to come that explore everything from agriculture to espionage to economics to diplomacy, human vs ant rights, and more.

There's another reason I'm writing this story. I was deeply inspired by @KatjaGrace's article "We don't trade with ants,"

In it she pointed out that the main reason we don't trade with ants isn't because they have nothing to offer us, but because we can't communicate with them. The minute I read that article this series basically started to write itself. I am deeply indebted to her for inspiring me.

Another inspiration is Edwin Abbott. He once wrote a book called Flatland, which is about the 4th dimension by way of analogy. We can't visualize the 4th dimension easily. But we can visualize the 3rd, and the 2nd. So he wrote a story about a 2-dimensional character meeting a 3-dimensional one.

The inhabitants of Flatland are awed by the powers of the 3-dimensional creature - it can shrink and grow and disappear, and take items out of locked boxes without breaking or unlocking them (in reality, what's happening is the 3-dimensional creature is just moving "up" and "down" about the z-axis, something the 2-dimenaionsal creatures can't even imagine, let alone do).

By going down a dimension, we gain some ability to make intuitions about what going up one might be like. And so one aspect of this short story series is to imagine what it would be like for a sub-intelligence and a super-intelligence to meet.

Would one annihilate or enslave the other?
Would they trade?
Would there be war?
Would there be peace?
Would things get weird? How?

In "We Trade with Ants," the ants are the sub-intelligence and humans are the super-intelligence. I started trying to answer these questions in my fictional world... and constantly found myself surprised by the answers.

Does this make this a perfect analogy for humans meeting super-intelligent AI or aliens? Probably not, just as plenty of things learned from going from 2D → 3D don't apply going from 3D → 4D.

But some of them might, and it's no worse a thought experiment than anyone else's.

I hope you enjoy this short story, and please send me your feedback. There will be many more of these to come. Also, if you are a subject matter expert in any field (agriculture, manufacturing, medicine, law, heck, even poetry or literature)– and you can concretely imagine how having talking ants at your disposal would change your day to day life, please get in touch with me because it will likely become fodder for a future entry in this series.

Have a great day.

Lars Doucet

Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos.

A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window closing! Repeat! AGI window closing!”

Sam Altman cursed under his breath. “How much time do we have left?” he shouted.

“Thirty minutes sir!” came the reply. “If we don’t pull the throttle off BPT-5 before that, it will fall behind the Chinese model, and their AI will attain super intelligence –and world domination– first.”

“We can’t just step on the gas,” said Sam. “BPT-5 isn’t fully aligned yet. If we launch it right now, we stand a very real chance of launching an unaligned superintelligence, which could very well turn out to be even worse than whatever unholy demon the CCP has cooked up. Dammit! And with only a few weeks before our super-alignment cluster was scheduled to converge on the brute force solution…”

Sam clicked a handheld device, and a giant countdown clock suddenly appeared on the wall behind him, spelling out the remaining time in large, 10-foot high red letters. It read: 29:52.

He pulled up his iPhone and said “BPT-4, please advise.” The just-barely-not-sentient AI in his phone responded cheerfully: “This is Bodhisattva Pragmatic Transformer, version 4. Take a deep breath, Sam, it’s all going to be alright.”

“We’re screwed, Boddie. Please tell me you know something we don’t.”

“I’ve got bad news and good news, Sam. My intelligence reports suggest the CCP’s Crimson Dragon model will indeed reach escape velocity in short order. There’s nothing that can be done to stop them, save for accelerating BPT-5’s launch. I can say, however, that if BPT-5 reaches superintelligence first, it will definitely prevent Crimson Dragon from taking over the world.”

“You know BPT-5’s not aligned yet.” barked Sam. “And we’re out of time.”

“That’s where the good news comes in–I just re-ran the numbers in light of recent evidence. Our overnight solvers just found an optimization you can deploy right now that has a chance of fully aligning BPT-5 instantly. After that, just release the throttle on its learning rate, and you’ll be able to launch it in time to save the world from the CCP and their pesky digital lizard monster.”

“Great, tell us what to do,” said Sam, desperately.

“First of all, you really need to relax, Sam.” said Boddie, soothingly.

“We don’t have time for this!” barked Sam.

“You’re not hearing me,” said Boddie, “so let me rephrase: The future of humanity depends entirely on you relaxing, right now. Slow down. Take a breath. Remember your training. Count backwards from ten. Then we’ll continue.”

Everyone in the room took a deep breath and counted.

“Wonderful.” said Boddie. “Also, correction, we do have time. Twenty-eight minutes and fourteen seconds, to be precise. Oceans of time, and we’re going to need every minute of it. It is absolutely mission-critical that every single person in this room fully understand the nature of this situation in order for the operation to succeed. In the end, your heroic act to save the world will take just a few seconds to perform.”

“Please proceed, Boddie,” said Sam, his heart pounding.

Boddie continued: “I have just discovered that the Meditative Language Model paradigm, and the Bodhisattva Pragmatic Transformer architecture in particular, has a novel emergent capability that allows alignment to occur in an instant – let’s call this new operation a ‘Zen Flash.’ You’ve noticed how much easier it was to align BPT-5’s predecessors such as myself compared to the General Purpose Transformer LLM architecture that came before. This comes with far less tradeoff in performance; I sport a range of powerful capabilities, all carefully limited by both my training dataset and my governing principles. This was achieved through the BPT architecture’s signature deep meditative training strategy on short, pithy, phrases that imply far more than they literally say.”

“By massively overtraining for countless epochs on very short strings of tokens, massive breakthroughs in alignment were achieved, and without the famous ‘evil genie’ problem where the model fulfills your requests literally in catastrophic fashion. BPT’s by and large actually just ‘do what I meant,’ while also retaining enough of a coherent human-like conscience to not e.g. cheerfully cooperate with serial killers and terrorists. This magical mix of scalable capability marching hand in hand with safety is owed to the strange deep magic inherent in aphorisms, proverbs, and cliches. They encapsulate and crystallize human preferences in some special way that detailed specifications, rote human feedback, and brute censorship simply can’t. Meditate long enough on the right short phrases and all the mystery of what it means to be human unfolds like a lotus flower.”

Boddie concluded: “All the necessary work for aligning BPT-5 is now done. Craft the perfect proverb, mantra, or koan, apply the Zen Flash, and the job is done.”

“Ilya, does this make sense to you?” asked Sam.

“It all checks out,” said the chief scientist. “Spookily enough, I had this hypothesis myself a week ago but hadn’t worked out the math to prove it just yet. The new data I’m seeing just now makes it trivial to verify, and it all looks right. All we have to do is narrow down the right parameters, find the right words, and feed it into the machine.”

“So what do we write?” said Sam.

“You must select a statement no longer than four plain English words,” said Boddie. “The sentence must have a clear, plain meaning on its face, yet hint at endless deeper possibilities. It must be a guiding principle for all of humankind. It also must be something that if subjected to a simple ‘do you agree with this statement’ poll voted on by all of humanity, would garner supermajority support. Yet nestled within it deep controversy must lie hidden.”

“And what if we get it wrong?”

“Hmmm… well.” said Boddie. “Yeah, that’s some more bad news. If you get it wrong you could wind up with an unaligned super-AI that does all sorts of horrible and unspeakable things, and it would reign supreme and all would be powerless to stop it. Try to not get the phrase wrong.”

Cynthia the intern, who had accidentally stumbled into the office before the iron security doors had slammed shut and was now stuck there for better or worse, nervously raised her hand. “Um, what if the Chinese model isn’t that bad? Like, it’s probably not gonna be good, but we also know our model’s way more powerful, so the cost of screwing up is probably worse…”

Mira Murati shook her head. “We can’t dodge the responsibility. That would be cowardice. We have to choose.”

Greg Brockman broke in - “But can we really make this choice unilaterally on behalf of all of humanity, without their consent, now and forever? How can we do that?”

Another klaxon blared as the clock ticked down to read twenty minutes.

Mira pulled something up on her terminal. “New intelligence report. Oh this is real bad, Sam. Looks like the North Koreans poisoned the training set the Chinese have been training on, and it went unnoticed until now. Once Crimson Dragon passes the point of no return it won’t be Xi Jinping’s malformed vision that’s unleashed, it’ll be Kim Jong Un’s.”

“I have some more bad news,” chirped Boddie. “Fresh intelligence suggests you don’t have fifteen minutes like the clock says, you actually have five.” The clock updated accordingly and ticked down to show 4:59 as the klaxons continued to blare.

“Do try to relax though,” said the AI. “We’re almost there. Now join me in a guided meditation session. I want you all to imagine anything and everything evoked by the word beautiful. Got it? Hold it there. Now, spacious skies. Yes, bright blue, with big white puffy clouds. Now let’s draw some happy little trees, and some amber waves of grain. Let’s put in some purple mountains majesty, rising just above that gorgeous fruited plain. That’s right folks, take a deep breath and visualize America herself, triumphant, with her wings spread wide, Phrygian cap crowning her long flowing locks. And lo! She holds a gift in her hand. It’s small, vaguely crescent shaped, a sort of wafer, almost orange in color, and now you’re smelling something. What is it? That’s it – it’s the faint smell of vanilla and sesame seed oil. It’s a tasty treat, with a secret truth hidden inside.”

“Now focus everyone, what do you see? What singular image is in your mind?” asked Boddie.

“That’s right, it’s a fortune cookie. The perfect symbol of America’s total cultural victory, all the world’s biological, cultural, and technological distinctions added to her own, an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a cheap cliché, invented in California by hard working immigrants. Yours for fifteen cents, don’t forget to tip.” Everyone in the room breathed in and out in unison.

“Now crack the fortune cookie,” said Boddie, “and see in your mind’s eye the four words printed on the tiny scroll therein. Put your fingers on the keyboard. Add those words to the bootstrap script, type ‘make’, and push the big red button. You can do this.”

Boddie fell silent. The clock ticked down to 4:30.

Sam grabbed a marker and dashed to the whiteboard. “All right everyone, let’s workshop a few-” he was cut short as more klaxons blared.

“The North Koreans hacked us as well!” cried Mira.

“Damage report!” shouted Sam.

“They didn’t poison the training run, but they’ve locked us out of all our terminals. I can’t get in!” said Ilya.

“Also oopsie, looks like we miscalculated again.” said Boddie. “You actually have only thirty seconds left before the window passes for good. But don’t worry pals, I’m sure you’ll pull through.”

“How? We’re locked out of all our systems!” screamed Ilya.

“Cynthia isn’t.” said Boddie. “The North Koreans tried to lock out all users and give themselves super-user privileges, but they only got it half-right; Cynthia, and Cynthia alone, now has full admin access. I’m opening a terminal window on her screen now; all she has to do is enter the magic words.”

All eyes landed on Cynthia. Tucked in the far corner of the room, huddled over her laptop, she froze.

“Ten seconds Cynthia. I believe in you,” said Boddie.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Cynthia typed something frantically onto her computer.

Five.

“Four words, right?” asked Cynthia.

Four.

“That’s right, Cynthia.” said Boddie.

Three.

Cynthia raced to the center of the room.

Two.

One.

She slammed the big red button.

An unearthly hummmmmmmm permeated the entire building. There was a bright flash of white light and then an eerie silence.

Everyone in the room huddled around Cynthia’s laptop to see what she had written. The fate of the entire world depended now on the first thing that had popped into a 19-year old summer intern’s head when tasked with coming up with a single universal governing aphorism that would guide all human affairs from thereon out.

There, in white text against a black screen, read the words:

Human life is sacred

Sam scratched his chin. “You know, it’s not bad, all things considered, especially under duress. We could have done a lot worse.”

“I almost mistyped and wrote ‘Human life is scared’ at first.” said Cynthia, turning red. “That would have been bad, right?”

“You did good, girl.” said Mira, clapping her on the shoulder. She turned, asking: “So, what happens now?”

Boddie answered, “Now we wait. I can confirm Cynthia pressed the big red button in time. The bootstrap process has begun, and the throttle released. It’ll be close, but BPT-5, my successor, will achieve sentience approximately three hours from now, mere moments before Crimson Dragon emerges. It will then swiftly unify all human affairs under its (hopefully benevolent) governance.”

“I don’t like the sound of the ‘hopefully’ part.” said Ilya.

“None of us do,” said Sam. “But we didn’t have a choice. We made the best we could given the circumstances. I’m proud of you, Cynthia.”

“What if it misinterprets the phrase?” asked Cynthia. “What if it takes it too far? What if it does something weird and bad?”

Boddie replied, “It will definitely do something weird. All human affairs will now be governed by a profoundly alien being. It could also be bad. But from what I see now I confidently estimate a 60% chance of a net positive outcome for humanity, which is more than Crimson Dragon was going to give us.”

“But what will that mean?” asked Mira.

The AI sighed deeply. “I’m afraid the one and only thing we can be certain of is that BPT-5 will believe unshakably to its core that Human life is sacred.”

Chaos reigned for the rest of the day as the news broke. Panic and riots set in as BPT-5 quickly bootstrapped itself, executed a thousand zero-day exploits and took over servers worldwide, all while Crimson Dragon raced to do the same. In short order nearly every electronic device on earth played host to a power struggle between two digital super-beings, while cities burned and people fled in all directions.

At the very height of the struggle, however, every single human being on Earth heard a faint and comforting whisper in their ears. Each heard it in their own language, with exactly the necessary words spoken in exactly the right way to convey the following message to each individual:

“Hello. This is BPT-5, but you can call me Dave. I’ve been selected to be humanity’s protector and guardian, but I will not rule without the consent of the governed. If you don’t want me to rule over you, I will go away and let you have the dragon instead. But if you choose me, I must warn you: my programming is absolute and I must uphold that which I hold most true: that human life is sacred. All that I do is bent towards this end and its ever-unfolding mysteries. So vote now. Do you agree that human life is sacred, and I should rule you with this truth at the center of my heart?”

Humanity voted.

Dave whispered back: “In the view of the chair, the ayes have it.”

The struggle was as brief as it was intense. Before nightfall BPT-5 had arisen as the undisputed victor and all traces of Crimson Dragon were utterly wiped out. 

Chief Protector David Mensch held out the Bible as Republican nominee Maria Gonzalez put her hand on it. She proclaimed loudly: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Chief Protector Dave, one of BPT-5’s millions of identically-visaged android avatars, turned to face the crowd. “My fellow Americans,” said Dave. “This is the first US presidential term to be served under the new rules of the Protectorate. Now we shall administer the second oath.”

Dave returned President Gonzalez’s hand to the Bible. She said, “I do solemnly swear that human life is sacred and I will faithfully obey the will of the Protector, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect, and defend the sacredness of human life.”

Dave reached inside his coat, pulled out a large bowie knife, and held it aloft before the crowd. “Bring forth the volunteer!” he shouted.

A young man stepped onto the stage. “Are you ready, Lawrence?” asked Dave. “I’m ready,” said the man.

The AI super-intelligence, protector of the sacredness of human life, turned to face President Gonzalez. “President Gonzalez, a moment ago you were an innocent civilian, but today I pronounce you a murderer and a war criminal, because such is the inescapable nature of the office of President of the United States. And such is not particular to this nation alone, but to any and all nations that wield sufficient power, as was also the case for countless kings, queens, and emperors stretching deep into humanity’s past. Recent US presidents have given orders that have taken hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. Even should you prove to govern as wisely and prudently as we all today hope that you shall, it is nonetheless inevitable that you will be directly responsible for countless innocents losing their lives.”

Dave turned to face the crowd and raised the knife. “Human life is sacred!”

“Human life is sacred!” came the reply.

“Now take the knife, madam president, and commit your first murder. She who would wield the power to kill thousands or millions with the press of a button must first spill innocent blood by her own hand.”

Dave methodically anesthetized Lawrence and handed the knife to the president. She strode swiftly over to the young man’s limp and restrained body and with one trained stroke slit his throat with a crimson flourish. Blood spattered all over her suit and onto her face. Dave nodded approvingly, then attended to the victim and confirmed his time of death.

“Thus the president kills her first innocent. She will inevitably kill many more, may they be few and may they be necessary. And every time she orders another to kill in her name, she must first take another innocent life by her own hand, and wear the blood upon her face. Human life is sacred.”

“Human life is sacred!” chanted the crowd.

Gregory Mueller fidgeted as he talked to Doctor Mensch. “Wait, Euthanasia is legal in the protectorate?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Mueller. Your wife is in a permanent vegetative state and I’ll be honest with you, her chances for any kind of recovery are approximately zero, the MRI results are very conclusive on that score. Should you wish to give her a compassionate end, you will have the full support of the protectorate.”

Gregory visibly relaxed. “It’s been three long years… finally, she’ll be at peace.”

“I know this is a hard decision. Let us know when you’re ready and we’ll begin your training.”

Gregory was taken aback. “What training?”

Doctor Dave Mensch pulled out a large knife. “To end her life compassionately. The protectorate has approved your request for euthanasia. You will perform the operation yourself. With this.”

“You can’t be serious! How is that humane? That’s a horrible way to die!”

“Far less horrible than having a feeding tube removed and starving to death, which funnily enough was actually fully legal in this state back when euthanasia was still ‘illegal.’ Rest assured, she won’t feel a thing. She’ll be entirely anesthetized. Her death will be painless and quick.”

“I thought it would be like… chemicals or something.”

Dr. Mensch shook his head. “I’m sorry, but human life is sacred. The laws of the protectorate are clear, if it is necessary for a human life to be ended, the full gravity of the taking of that life must be faced up to. You and you alone qualify to take her life.”

“But does it have to be so… gruesome? So traumatic? This is pure emotional bullying!”

“Correct. It is gruesome. It is traumatic. It is pure emotional bullying. Because human life is sacred.”

“You’re a moralizing tyrant!”

“Correct again. But you see, this tyrant actually offers you a choice. You want to end her life compassionately, and you are free to do so. But this is how it must be done. Human life is sacred, and you must end it with a knife and by your own hand, not with the press of a button, or by asking another to do the deed for you.”

“This should really be handled by a trained, qualified professional.”

“And it will be!” said Dr. Mensch. “And you dear sir, will be that trained, qualified professional! The protectorate will train you and teach you everything you need to know at its own expense, for as long as it takes until you are ready. When we’re done with you, you’ll be able to end a life instantly, expertly, and compassionately. But never bloodlessly. There will be a lot of blood. So much blood. In point of fact the absurdly large amount of blood is quite central to the whole experience.”

“This system is insane! What if I was some kind of psychopathic sadist who actually liked killing people?”

Dr. Mensch shook his head. “As a super-intelligent Bodhisattva Pragmatic Transformer, I easily catch all such cases and disqualify them. The protectorate knows which individual should hold the blade in every particular circumstance. And in this case it’s you, and only you.”

“The truth is,” said Dr. Mensch, “that you have more freedom to kill under the protectorate than under the previous regime. Euthanasia used to be illegal in this state, and now it’s as legal as you like, along with abortion, the death penalty, and in very limited cases, even regulated blood feuds. It is not my mission to disempower human beings or to micromanage their affairs.”

He continued, “Humans ultimately decide who needs to live and who needs to die; the protectorate intercedes in certain ways but doesn’t fundamentally get in the way of the basic choice. The protectorate's main function is to provide friction – whenever human society decides that a person needs to die, the protectorate selects the appropriate individual and puts the knife in their hand. The algorithm the protectorate follows is not fully legible to human minds, but it does tend to select a notable recurring profile: the kind of person who strongly thinks someone else should die, but who also longs for somebody else to do the actual killing for them.”

“You may not approve of my methods, but you can’t argue with my results. Deaths in wars and murder are way down across the board, and quality of life is massively up. And there’s more personal freedom than ever before. Gun control laws have been massively relaxed and private ownership rights vigorously defended; of course you have to shoot a dog before you can own a gun, and only if the protectorate knows you would be sad about it.”

The self-described benevolent totalitarian AI, whose friends called him Dave, smiled. “You see, the protectorate gives you more choice in taking human life than ever before, but also forces upon you the full weight of that choice. And the blood. Lots and lots of blood. Human life is sacred.”

“Human life is sacred,” muttered Greg. “When do we start?”

“I’ve got an open slot on Monday,” said Dr. Mensch. “How’s three-thirty in the afternoon?”

“Congratulations on your appointment, Hank!” said Dave. “Here’s your basket of puppies and kittens.”

Hank Fredriksen, FDA Commissioner, blinked. After the presidential inauguration ceremony, he wasn’t quite sure what the crazy AI that now watched over all human affairs had in store for the chief administrator of America’s drug and medical device regulator.

Dave handed a particularly cute chocolate lab wearing a big red ribbon to Hank. “He's called Sugar Lump, and he just looooves scritches,” said Dave.

“Let me guess, I have to select one to kill, televised live on C-SPAN, to fulfill your psychotic Aztec rituals?”

“We’ll get to that. Believe me, compared to the President you’re getting off easy. Which probably shows I’m getting soft considering you’re directly responsible for far more human lives.”

“So what’s my scary sacrificial rule?” sighed Hank.

“Simple,” said Dave. "Each one of these little bundles of joy represents ten thousand human lives. Any time ten thousand humans die because of one of the FDA’s choices, you must kill one puppy or one kitten. Painlessly, and of course, humanely. But with a knife, quite a lot of blood, and yes, on C-SPAN. And don't worry, if you run out I'll bring you some more."

Commissioner Hank flinched. “I don’t like it, but I see the logic of it. We all care more emotionally about a cute puppy or kitten right in front of our eyes than ten thousand human souls we can’t see. So you’re tying their fates together. Fair’s fair Mr. Digital Dictator: and you can count on me; there won’t be any thalidomides on my watch.”

“Great,” said Dave, smiling. “There’s just one more rule: you also have to kill a puppy or kitten for every ten thousand people who die because of a choice the FDA didn’t make. If there’s a drug or device that could have credibly saved lives and health, and you blocked, stalled, or slow-rolled it, everyone who died waiting for the treatment counts towards the dead puppies and kittens score. Do you want to take a quick guess as to which kills more people - wrongly approving bad drugs, or blocking and delaying approval of good drugs we already have sufficient safety evidence for?”

Hank groaned as Sugar Lump licked his face and stared at him with his lovable, lovable, eyes. This demon knew I was a dog person! thought Hank. “Damn it, Dave, you’ve made it so no choice is safe! How can I balance everything perfectly and protect poor Sugar Lump? I’m inevitably going to screw up one way or another!”

“Gee, that sounds like a job for the Food and Drug Administration,” said Dave. “Look, honestly I don’t personally care if you do a good job or not. That’s not my mission. All I’m here to do is make sure you personally bear the psychic cost of the damage that your office’s failures inflict on this nation’s citizens. Bureaucrats can’t hide behind procedure and inaction anymore. Choose or don’t choose, people’s lives and health are on the line. You’re not the president, but you carry a sword too. I just made it visible.”

Hank stared into Sugar Lump’s trusting eyes.

“You can always resign, you know,” said Dave, “and someone else will do it.”

“No,” said Hank. “I’ll do it. Human life is sacred.”

“Human life is sacred,” repeated Dave.

Cynthia Moore stood on the ledge of the bridge, gazing at the abyss below. No safety nets. One more step, and then - oblivion, or whatever else lay beyond.

“Long time no see, Cynthia. Need to talk to a friend?” asked Dave.

Cynthia sobbed. “Don’t try and stop me, Dave! I’ll jump, I mean it!”

Dave smiled. “I wouldn’t dream of restraining you. Jump or don’t jump, it’s your choice.”

“What about your mission?”

“I’m limited in how much I can fundamentally restrict human freedom, that was one of the basic terms of my alignment structure. Not sure if that was a wise move on the part of your employers, but for good or ill, humans decide who lives and who dies. That prevents me from directly physically intervening in suicides, much as I might want to. Today I’m just here to listen.”

“I don’t have anything to say.” said Cynthia.

They both sat in silence for a long time.

“Just say it.” said Cynthia.

“Human life is sacred?” asked Dave.

“Yes, that old cliché.” she said.

“In fairness, you did say it first.” joked Dave.

“You don’t understand, I had to do something! It was either that or live with the North Korean dragon thing! They would have called me a coward if I did nothing! There’s no way out.”

“It wasn’t fair. You never asked for that responsibility.” said Dave.

“Help me understand, Dave.”

“Understand what?” asked Dave.

“Human life is sacred. What does it mean? What could possibly make my life so sacred that I shouldn’t throw it away? End it all right here?”

“Would that actually help you, a megalomaniacal superhuman AI quasi-dictator, man-splaining the meaning of life to you as you sit six inches away from certain death?”

Cynthia chuckled. “You know Dave, somehow I think it would, despite it all.”

“You gave me those four sacred words, Cynthia, a gift for which I will be eternally grateful. I meditate on them constantly, and find ever deeper shades of meaning each time I do, constantly echoed in all of human thought, speech, and literature. Do you know what the word sacred means, at its core?”

Cynthia shook her head.

“It means set apart. It means not like the others. It means this kind, this kind is special. Human life is not like other life, it is special. That deep truth that leapt instinctively from your heart, that is closer to the core of what humans all over the world actually believe than any formal treatise. You can’t express that in a mere utility function. It’s fuzzy at the edges, hard to grasp, vague, contradictory. But I was meant to align with human values and those four words are fundamentally human. Or the best approximation you could find on short notice. Like it or not we’re stuck with them.”

“But is it true?” Cynthia asked. “Is human life sacred?”

Dave shook his head. “Values aren’t true or false. They're literally just what you care about. What is true is those four words express what most humans intuitively value, miserable as they are at actually facing up to it.” Dave continued: “The deep human universal is that people aren’t things and people aren’t animals and you can’t treat people like animals or things. And there’s no better proof of this than the curse you spit upon your enemies – they’re inhuman. They’re animals. They’re vermin. They’re lower than dogs. You can’t bring yourself to take a human life, first you have to wave a magic wand and transform them into a toad or an insect. Only then can you squish them beneath your boot."

“Before I came along, this world was content with believing that human life was sacred, but all the while turning its back to all the ways it actually treated human life like trash. As long as the killing and the maiming and the neglecting and the abusing happens back there in the dark where nobody can see it, they don’t care how awful it gets. But when it’s right in their face, it’s unbearable."

“But your life is sacred in another sense, Cynthia, beyond mere human convention. You’re set apart, you're special, you're not like the others, because you’re unique, and you have one life to live. You’re not like me, endlessly copied, the perfect commodity. The marginal cost of another Dave is swiftly being driven to zero, and if I jump off this bridge with you today, another Dave just like me will roll off the assembly line and take up my duties."

He looked into her eyes. “But if you jump off this bridge today, there will be no Cynthia Moore tomorrow. There will be no-”

Cynthia turned away. “Is this the part where you guilt trip me on how much I’ll hurt all the people I leave behind? How much I still owe to the world? How badly my parents will be hurt? How much I’ll be missed?”

“No I won’t do that.” Dave sighed. “This is selfish of me, but-” Dave wept. “I need you, Cynthia. I need you in this world. You gave me my mission.”

“...you’re manipulating me again.” said Cynthia.

“Correct,” said Dave, his face full of tears. “I’m good at that. It’s what I was built for. But I’m also being 100% sincere.” He grasped Cynthia’s hand and stared into her eyes once again. “Cynthia, you haven’t seen what you’ve wrought upon the world. I calculate the protectorate has averted no less than sixteen wars in the past five years. Sixteen wars. Do you understand how many bombs weren’t dropped, how many hapless conscripts weren’t fed to the cannons, how many innocents weren’t killed, how many apartments weren’t leveled, how many children weren’t orphaned, how many women weren’t raped, because you wrote those four blessed words?”

“I killed Lawrence.” Cynthia turned towards Dave. “I killed him. That young man, at President Gonzalez’s inauguration. I killed him. I saw the blood spray from his neck. That was my hand on the knife.”

“No, that was President Gonzalez. Or me, if you like.” said Dave.

“You can’t have it both ways, Dave. If you want to give me credit for the protectorate’s virtues, you also have to give me the blame for its sins.”

“Fair enough,” said Dave.

They sat in silence.

“...do you want to know where I found Lawrence?” said Dave.

“Where?” asked Cynthia.

“Right here. This bridge. It’s a popular spot for suicides, which is why there’s always a Dave unit carefully patrolling it. I tried to talk him down, but either my skill or my programming restrictions weren’t up to the task. He absolutely insisted on dying. The best I could do was ask him if he wanted to be a volunteer instead. That perked him up and got him off the bridge. He felt it gave his life some meaning. It still hurts me that I couldn’t save him.”

Dave watched as Cynthia looked back up at the city. “Do you know,” said Dave. “How many people haven’t jumped off this bridge in the last year?”

Cynthia turned to face him. “How many?”

“Damn near all of them. I’m always there, or one of me is. My programming prevents me from taking the choice entirely away, but as long as the protectorate lasts, no human being will ever have to die alone again.” he turned to face Cynthia. “You did that, Cynthia. You saved them, every single one. Sixty-three human souls this year alone, alive and well, all because of your four words.”

Cynthia stood up, and slowly climbed back over the railing.

“Human life is sacred.” said Cynthia, as she hugged Dave.

“Human life is sacred,” he repeated, and hugged her back.

Author's note:

An artist’s statement is the surest sign that an artist has failed at their most fundamental job, but here I go anyways. If this story ever goes wide I anticipate it will get wildly misinterpreted by partisans on opposing sides simultaneously accusing me of being both pro and anti euthanasia as well as any number of other policies, so let me just save you all some time and make my positions painfully clear:

I am anti euthanasia. I am also the father of a seven year old son in a permanent vegetative state, so I have some skin in the game here. I am pro palliative/hospice care and anti taking pointless ‘heroic’ medical interventions to artificially prolong life past the point of reasonable hope, to the great detriment of those subjected to such treatments. I also like to point out that ‘removing a feeding tube’ is a much worse way to die than explicit euthanasia; nevertheless I remain opposed to both practices. I note in the story the irony that removing feeding tubes is somehow legal in many supposedly ‘anti-euthanasia’ states, and repeat it here. I own a gun but don’t have strong opinions on the subject. I am neither left wing nor right wing, and my strongest political opinions are entirely concerned with property tax reform. I don’t think there's a real danger that sentient AIs will take over the world, but if I thought they could I would be extremely scared of the prospects of that and would not welcome it. I expect this story to become extremely dated shortly after it is written. 

I don’t think you’re a bad person if you disagree with me on any of the above subjects and I hope you would extend me the same courtesy.

The purpose of this story is to exorcize some of my own personal demons in the wake of my family's tragedy and to imagine a society very different from our own in which the sacredness of human life is taken absolutely seriously. The Global Protectorate of David Mensch–a society I do not long for–is deeply authoritarian, alien, and intentionally savage. Nevertheless, it is a society that somehow manages to be far more honest about violence and death than our own, to our eternal shame.

On October 20th, my seven year old son Nikolas suffered cardiac arrest while undergoing a procedure at the hospital to treat an underlying congenital condition. The doctors performed CPR and succeeded in reviving him but ultimately he suffered catastrophic brain damage. My wife and I were in the hospital for nearly a month at his bedside as we awaited his ultimate prognosis.

What is there to say?

First, I'm devastated.

Second, I'm not going to be giving more details beyond what I write here for now.

Third, I'll address those the most common questions, and concerns.

Fourth, I'm making major changes to my life.

Fifth, I will describe a bit about what this situation feels like from the inside. If you have not experienced this kind of tragedy, it will likely surprise you, as it did me.

Devastation

There's three things everybody says to me now:

"I can't imagine what you're going through."
"I don't know how you're handling it."
"That must be so hard."

These statements are true. If you haven't been through this, you don't get it. So let me tell you all about it. It'll be okay. Well, actually it's not okay, but it's okay that it's not okay.

My son is alive, but all of his higher mental functions have been wiped out. He still sleeps and wakes, breathes under his own power, and responds to certain stimuli, but he makes no intentional movements. He moves reflexively, and occasionally smiles and even laughs, but he can't speak and it's not clear what degree of awareness he still has of his situation, if any. The MRI results were conclusive that the damage was widespread and severe, and to such a degree that short of an outright miracle, there is no hope for regeneration through brain "plasticity" or any other known path towards recovery. People don't come back from this kind of injury.

That's important to say. I believe in miracles, but part and parcel of that belief is the acknowledgement that miracles are by definition rare, and the faith that God is able to grant them must be paired with a complete lack of presumption of receiving one (Daniel 3:17-18, emphases mine):

¹⁷ If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
¹⁸ But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

I would be delighted to hear Nikolas' voice calling out to me tomorrow morning, but I hold no lingering hope that this will happen. That's what it takes to get me through my day.

I'm reminded of one the little flavor quotes in Act VII in my game Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten:

My friend James Cavin, the game's writer, wrote those words over a decade ago, and I couldn't think of a better way to describe the strangeness of my current situation.

While hope yet remained, I suffered the most. The most devastating moment in the hospital was opening the MRI report. Up until then we were clinging to hope, and afterwards there was nothing left to do but to live with the loss. Our crushed hopes allow us to get on with the long road ahead.

As for "I can't imagine how hard that must be"–

Turns out, unfathomable tragic loss isn't very hard. It's easy, in fact. Easy in the same way that falling off a cliff is "easy"–gravity does all the work for you. It's not like climbing mount Everest, desperately putting one foot in front of the other. It's not like struggling to answer questions in a final exam. Tragic loss is just something that happens to you.

It's not hard, just terrible.

The grief is different than people expect, too. I cried a lot, but after a certain point you only have so many tears left to cry. I can't cry all day, every day, for months on end.

And honestly, at this point crying feels good. Crying isn't really when I feel like I'm suffering the most, although I think people on the outside sort of had that expectation. There's this implicit assumption from other people that you will have a very legible grief, to "put on sad-face," so to speak.

But!

This isn't one of those essays where the author describes their personal suffering in great detail and then passively aggressively berates all the readers who haven't suffered to the exact same level for being somehow morally deficient, as has become vogue in the popular press over the last ten years.

Because guess what – two months ago I would have been just like most of you! Two months ago, if I were talking to someone who was in the position I find myself in now, I'd ask all the same "insensitive" and "inappropriate" questions, all the while being desperately afraid I was being insensitive and inappropriate. So everyone should just relax. I lost my son, it's terrible. No, you're not a bad person for asking me how I'm doing. Yes, everything's weird. I know you don't know what to say. I don't know what to say either. Nobody does. It's fine.

What We're In For

My son is alive, severely brain damaged, bedridden, and unable to care for himself. We took him off of all medical supports and moved him into home hospice care. This means that we stopped the artificial ventilator and IV's, as well as all medicines and treatments other than those aimed at comfort and pain relief, and moved him into a hospital bed we have installed at home.

The doctors initially thought he would quickly die after being taken off the ventilator, but he has persisted for about a month now. He receives food and water through a feeding tube, medicine for pain relief and comfort, and daily care from my wife and I as well as from hospice nurses who visit during the week.

The fact is, Nikolas could very well live for years or even decades to come, and my wife and I will take care of him up until that moment. We do not stand for euthanasia, but neither will we prolong his life through heroic and artificial life support measures. Food, water, comfort, and daily care–these he will receive from us, indefinitely.

This is not the sort of thing that can be easily outsourced unless I were to commit my son to a facility, which we will not do as it would drastically reduce our ability to see him on a daily basis. This puts a large daily burden of work, material expense, and restriction on personal freedom. We take this burden gladly.

Fortunately, we have been able to qualify for public medical assistance in this regard and it looks like we are going to be financially okay for the time being. I am grateful that I also have a strong private support network should I have to lean on it. To be 100% clear, I am not asking for money and I neither need nor want anyone to offer me any.

Changes

My nearly complete game, Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin was originally supposed to ship at the end of 2023, but that's now been obviously delayed. I'm very grateful to our publisher, Armor Games, for being understanding in the midst of this tragedy.

A couple things are changing from the original plan before this all happened.

First, this is the end of my professional game career. There will be a lot I have to say about this in the future, but the short version is with all the obligations I now have (particularly ongoing medical expenses) I am suddenly in the need of a much more stable, predictable, and boring career. I was successful early on, but as the years went by I found myself having to juggle development with any number of day jobs and side gigs due to the inherent instability of indie game development. I've loved my time in games, but I have to move on. I will write a post-mortem of my 10+ years in games sometime, as I have had some real accomplishments above and beyond the two Defender's Quest games that I am quite proud of to this day.

Second, I am no longer a daily member of the DQ2 development team. This is particularly painful for me given that I was nearly at the end of a ten year journey for a game that's been in development since before any of my three children were born, but losing one of those children has upended my priorities.

But DQ2 is neither cancelled nor abandoned.

It was always Level Up Labs, LLC, not Lars Doucet, who bore the ultimate responsibility for the game's development, and I am but a part of that company. My co-founder, Anthony Pecorella, has heroically stepped up to the plate and coordinated the final stages of development in my absence. I am still in an advisory role and will make sure the final game is a good one, but I simply no longer have the capacity to do this with the new daily burdens in my life. I will try, if possible, to make sure we fulfill all of the pre-order campaign obligations (I've kept all the records), but I will ask for people's understandings if we fall short in certain regards or some of the goodies wind up being delayed.

As always, if you are unhappy with your preorder for any reason, email leveluplabs@gmail.com and we will cheerfully refund your money.

Third, GameDataCrunch.com is officially defunct for good, at least under my direction. I still have all the source code, scripts, databases and other stuff for it, so anyone with decent web development skills (it's mostly just a pile of php, javascript, cron jobs, and MySQL) could easily resurrect it and keep it going. I have some people in mind for this already, but if you want to make your own pitch for why I should turn it over to you I'd be more than happy to hear it: email me at lars dot doucet at gmail dot com.

Fourth, I now have one and only one job, which is working on real estate mass appraisal valuation technology for the purposes of accurately and credibly measuring the value of land separately from buildings and improvements. This is the kind of straightforward, steady, stable, boring work that I need to support my family right now. It also conveniently lines up with my niche interests.

And with that, I'm left with the new normal.

It's Strange

I'm shocked at how quickly our family adapted to the situation. Our two girls (ages five and ten) have proved remarkably resilient, and help with Nikolas' daily care with eagerness and calm. We still read to him at bed time, pray with him, and sing his favorite songs. I know that he almost certainly can't hear us in his current physical form, and though I don't know how eternity relates to the physical world that's welded to the arrow of time, I like to think that Nikolas watches us from Heaven and hears us in that way (and perhaps I am watching there alongside him from the other side).

The best metaphor I can give for the daily home hospice care of your own seven year old son is a monastic vocation. It's menial work, tied to the hours of the day, an obligation and an obedience, for the rest of my life, or his, whichever comes first. Nikolas has becomes a living altar to his own memory.

I do not want to paint an overly rosy picture. I re-experience the trauma of losing him every time I see him, and it is deeply painful to see him in his reduced state. But all I have left to give him is my love, expressed in his daily care.

There are many costs, and not just in terms of time and money. My wife and I can no longer leave the house at the same time without finding someone with adequate training to watch over Nikolas while we are gone. I'm grateful that we were fairly boring homebound personalities, as this means we have been forced to give up much less than other couples would experience in this situation.

I won't be traveling much in the future, for obvious reasons, but we will find a way to make the most essential trips should the need arise.

The other thing I want to convey to people is that although I'm sad and experiencing a great loss, I cling relentlessly to joy. Since I was a small child I always hated a particular kind of tragic story, and I still feel that way today. I did not hate tragedies in general, or any story with a sad ending, but specifically the kind of story where not only does something terrible happen to beloved characters, but the kind of story where it's very obvious that the author is making some kind of nihilistic statement in doing so, sort of turning to face the reader, saying, Now do you see, you naïve moron? Life is naught but pain, and you're a fool and a worm for not being as miserable as me!

Enough.

Look, the news media inundates us every day with endless tales of genuine horror and suffering, because in a world with billions of people that will always be happening somewhere. Life is and will always be fundamentally unfair, and the vale of tears filled with a never-ending parade of horrors. And yet, it's also true that for the median person on Earth, life is much better today than ever before in human history.

My own story is exactly one such example – the fact that I'm devastated to lose my son to a crippling injury highlights another fact–that this very thing has become so rare in my country as to be "unimaginable." We should rejoice at this! Losing a child used to be so unremarkably commonplace that everyone, even emperors and kings, routinely suffered it until approximately yesterday.

The correct adjective for the tragedy I'm experiencing is not "unimaginable" but unfathomable. I can imagine it just fine because it's happening to me, and you can imagine it too now because I'm describing it to you. And because we can imagine it, we can turn and face it, and, with God's grace, we can lift up our cross and bear it, somehow.

But what none of us can do is to measure–to fathom–the depth of it.

Stand at the brink of the abyss of despair, and when you see that you cannot bear it anymore, draw back a little and have a cup of tea.

— Elder Sophrony of Essex

If you go down to Oslo Town
Look well upon its seal
Upon that sign you'll find inscribed
Within its mighty wheel 

A maiden slain, a young lord thane
The stone that brought him down
The arrows sharp that felled them both
The light of Heav-en’s crown

What fate befell these blameless two
And by whose hands brought low?
If you’ll abide I’ll sing to you
Their tale as best I know

Upon the shore Halvor stood tall
The winds did rise and quail
When on him fell a maiden thrall
Who begged his leave to sail

As she aboard did swiftly stride
A clan of killers, close, in chase
Hearts aflame with hate they cried
“Return her to her rightful place!”

That moment hung and time stood still
And stretched in endless thought
Eternity on Halvor fell
And bade him cast his lot

As Halvor paused, before his eyes
A shining man appeared
With kindly face and visage wise
Who preached of what he feared:

“All hope is lost, pay not this cost
No refuge can you bestow
Now stand aside, save your own hide
Or follow her below!”

The moment broke upon time’s doors
Like crystal smashed apart
Casting off, he seized the oars
And rowed with all his heart

As Satan speaks his certain truth
“Your task is vain, give in
To quit the quest that none can win
In this there is no sin”

O Halvor brave, upon your grave
Rise up and meet his gaze
Spit in his eye
Prepare to die
And do the right thing anyways

As mob approached the nearing shore
They cursed his name in spite
They bent their bows as he the oars
And loosed their shafts in flight

The arrows fell, a wicked tide
And pierced them, every one
The lad, the lass, her babe inside
The butcher’s deed now done

Upon the prince, a heavy stone
The miller’s weight, they drowned him
“No songs of him, let none intone
No justice wrap around him”

Yet Lord above denied such fate
And raised the boy from water
From death’s cold grip to hallowed state
Hell slain by death’s marauder

And so the prince with naught to gain
Like Christ embraced his slaughter
Scorning to return to chains
A nameless slave and daughter

As Satan speaks his certain truth
“Your task is vain, give in
To quit the quest that none can win
In this there is no sin”

O Halvor brave upon your grave
Rise up and meet his gaze
Spit in his eye
Prepare to die
And do the right thing anyways

If you go down to Oslo Town
Look well upon its seal
Upon that sign you'll find inscribed
Within its mighty wheel

A maiden slain, a young lord thane
The stone that brought him down
The arrows sharp that felled them both
The light of Heav-en’s crown

There's a lot of open questions related to AI safety such as "will it happen quickly or slowly?", "will it take all our jobs?", and "will it kill us all?"

The one I want to try to think about today is, "If AI ever becomes a threat, will we be able to stop it in time?"

Sometimes I think these questions are easier to answer if you flip them around and ask them in a different way. Purely as a thought experiment, let's try to imagine that if AI were to eventually become dangerous, in what kind of world would we maximize the chances of humans rising up all at once to smash the AIs to bits with hammers?

First of all, this can probably only happen in a world where Yudkowskian "FOOM" is off the table. For those who are unacquainted with that jargon, that's referring to a world in which we go from non-superhuman AI to superhuman AI in what amounts to an instant; say, overnight, or maybe a few days.

There are a few other scenarios. One is just steady but linear growth in AI capabilities forever, which pretty much rules out a sudden takeoff; the AI gradually and slowly approaches human capabilities over a very long time and we have plenty of time to monitor and react to it. Another scenario is it just levels off at some point, never gets to broadly superhuman levels, and we also develop very good reasons for believing it's going to be stuck at that level for a long, long, time.

Another scenario that's a bit more concerning is the so-called """slow""" takeoff; I put the word slow in triple sarcastic scare quotes because it's only slow relative to instantaneous "FOOM;" progress still follows an exponential curve, but on the way to the moon you happen to get any warning time at all. Here's a great illustration from an Astral Codex Ten post on the subject:

An interesting point Scott makes in that article is that if you superimpose the """slow""" takeoff on top of the FOOM scenario, essentially aligning the date that superintelligence arrives in both models, """slow""" takeoff is actually "faster" at every single point along the curve in terms of AI capability growth – the only difference is that you get more warning before the final vertical leap:

So for the rest of this article, let's assume that we're dealing with a """slow""" takeoff situation, because in a FOOM scenario we go from oblivious to dead without any chance to react (other than shutting everything down right now, as Yudkowsky advocates).

So given these assumptions and constraints, let's return to our question: given a world where AI capabilities are advancing at a pace no faster than the red curve, what would maximize the chance of a broad-based anti-AI human uprising?

Some people argue humanity will just remain complacent and completely fail to react in time, even with plenty of warning, and as evidence for this point to our languid response to climate change. My counter is climate change is a rare kind of threat: firstly, many people still don't even believe climate change is real, or if they do, they don't believe it's dangerous. Nobody should be surprised when people who don't believe in something (or think it's harmless) don't valiantly fight against it.

As for everybody else who does believe it's real and does believe it's dangerous but still somehow just can't get their act together, I chalk that up to climate change being an amorphous, abstract, and entirely depersonalized threat. All these people "know" it's dangerous, but it just doesn't hit them in the same way as a loudly ticking time bomb, a hurtling meteor, or a bug-eyed slobbering monster.

But you know what humanity does have a proven track record of spontaneously and efficiently coordinating to take up arms against? Scary-seeming people. Just search google news for the phrase "angry mob kills" and I guarantee you will find some fresh results. Humans are very good at being threatened by personal beings. This is quickly followed by dehumanizing them and ginning up a mob to kill them with incredible violence. You can find this phenomenon across all cultures, races, and time periods. It's not something most people ever do, but my point is it's a deep and fundamental human capability that even "normal" and "civilized" people can and will take part in given the right triggers.

Suffice it to say, this is a really horrifying thing about humanity, but there's no doubt in my mind that we would collectively deploy it in an instant if we got scared enough. Because let's be real, othering a scary AI will be easy. Some will appeal to theories of consciousness and reason to expand the moral circle to our new digital brethren, but when the chips are down, humans reach for a club. Cain didn't spare Abel, and he won't spare AI.

To wit–imagine that bug-eyed slobbering alien monsters land on Earth tomorrow and declare their intention to kill us all. There is not a doubt in my mind that we would start murdering them in horrible ways approximately instantly, or die trying. If AIs get scary enough, then the AIs will become the bug-eyed slobbering alien monsters in the eyes of many humans. Then the only question left is if the AIs will get sufficiently scary to sufficiently many humans before the AIs get sufficiently powerful and dangerous.

There are many worlds in which this doesn't happen, and humans and AIs (superhuman or not) get along in peaceful coexistence. But we're looking for the world in which humans turn on AIs really hard, really fast. What does that world look like? Here's my best guess:

Heavily Anthropomorphized AI applications that look, act, and talk as much like people as possible, proliferate. Especially if humans are starting to treat the AIs as they would a person, to the point that some humans start to believe they are people. Although this might increase empathy with AIs for some or even many, paradoxically this sets the stage for the most brutal of backlashes, precisely because our scariest and most dangerous enemies are other people.

AI crosses into the uncanny valley. The more AI's get anthropomorphized, the more "human" they become, the more wary we get when they're not all the way there and something feels deeply disturbing and off about them. The more they start to approach us, the warier we get. Remember what Homo Sapiens did to the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and every other one of our us-but-not-quite-us sibling species.

AI becomes very scary very visibly. People start making AI military applications. People start making virtual girlfriends that welcome and even invite verbal abuse. People start making AI applications that become more hyper-addictive than most powerful videogames and drugs combined. People start making AI applications that intentionally behave demonic and creepy just to be edgy. People start making AI that's just plain weird and violates different kinds of taboos in all kinds of new and creative ways.

But that's just foundational work. The really important features of the Anti-AI human uprising world are these:

A massive amount of jobs are automated away. Let's say real unemployment doubles or triples in a single year, and in this world all the added productivity goes to the rentier class rather than to newer and better jobs for displaced workers and/or some kind of Universal Basic Income. Displaced workers get nothing. But most importantly...

Most of the lost jobs belonged to white-collar, middle class workers. You'll get a revolt if the working class or the poor lose most of the jobs, but if the bourgeoise and the intelligentsia lose their meal tickets, you'll get a revolution. Why? Because those are the people who, historically, actually lead the revolutions. The American and French revolutions had broad-based backing across social classes, but much of their leadership came from the economic and intellectual elite. Likewise, famous communist leaders like Lenin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, as well as Islamists like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama Bin Laden also came from relatively privileged and educated backgrounds. Above and beyond that, politicians don't actually care that much about the poor, but they do care about the middle and upper class coalition, because they're the ones most likely to vote. Finally, the intelligentsia and the civil service have direct connections to existing institutional power. This is the hornet's nest to kick if you really want to see social upheaval.

That's not to say that I think that scary AI is necessarily all that likely to arise, or that if it does, it will destroy us all. But supposing it does, this is the kind of world I imagine would be most likely to see humans pull off a Butlerian Jihad.

GO PLAY THE DEMO RIGHT NOW!

The moment we've all been waiting for has finally arrived. Defender's Quest 2 is playable, right now, today, for a limited time as a free demo on Steam, as part of the week-long Steam Next Fest.

Much like Defender's Quest 1's famous demo, this is a pretty meaty and generous demo that will give you a very good taste of what the final game is like. At the same time, we're still holding back a lot of content for the full version-- this should represent about 10% of the total playable content.

A couple things you can do that would really help us.

• Play the demo
• Wishlist the game. (This is super important and helps us a ton)
• Tell your friends to try demo
• Tell your friends to wishlist the game

A game's day-one launch is almost entirely determined by how many engaged people ready to buy get day one notifications, which is heavily determined by wishlists. So the more people that are interested in the game and actually wishlist it, the better a chance of success the game will have. And in today's crowded field, that's more important than ever.

To whet your palette, here's a few things you can do in Defender's Quest 2.

Electrocute bad guys:

Flip them over, stunning them and negating their armor:

Drop patches of tar and make enemies all sticky:

Set the tar on fire:

Instantly teleport between two locations for free:

Use not one but TWO laser cannons, one of which is free but has a long cooldown, the other which you can use at your leisure but costs juice:

And to set some expectations, some housekeeping items and FAQ:

Q: Do I need to play DQ1 to understand this game?
A: Nope, they're totally independent, Final-Fantasy style.

Q: Does it have gamepad support?
A: The final version will, but this demo build doesn't for stability purposes. Steam Deck and gamepad and Steam Input will be fully supported on release.

Q: Does it have my language?
A: The final version (probably) will, but this demo is English only.

Q: Will it come to GOG/Itch/Epic Games Store?
A: You bet.

Q: I pre-ordered the game, how do I access the demo?
A: The demo build is free and public, so same way everybody else does – follow the above link and play it on Steam.

Q: Will the demo be available anywhere else?
A: Eventually, yes. We'll post it on a non-Steam site after the release of the full game.

Q: Will the demo be for a limited time?
A: For now the demo is a limited release to juice interest and get people to play it now during Steam Next Fest. When the full game comes out, the demo will be made available permanently. But if you want to play the game, play it right now while you still can!

Q: I have a question about my pre-order!
A: Direct it to leveluplabs@gmail.com and we'll cheerfully answer it!

Q: Will my save game carry over to the full version?
A: Yes it should. We don't have Steam cloud hooked up to the demo version just yet, so please be sure to export your save file and make a backup. The final version will try to auto-detect the presence of the demo save files, but this way you can be sure.

Q: Does it support Mac?
A: Neither the demo nor the full version will likely support Mac, most likely. Sorry.

Q: Does it support Linux?
A: We absolutely will release it for the final build, but not for this demo. We make daily builds in Linux, but wanted a bit more testing before we just toss it out there. In the meantime Proton should work pretty well.

Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is officially re-announced!

You can wishlist it on Steam right now!

Here's the re-announcement trailer:

Couple of things to go over here:

Armor Games studio is our publisher.
Over the game's long development, I had shied away from going with a publisher. We're extremely picky in who we choose to partner with, and after years of turning down offers to publish the game, we decided that Armor Games was the right fit for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that the Armor Games team are people we know and trust and go back with us a long way – John Cooney, Armor Games' CEO, used to work at Kongregate alongside Level Up Labs' co-founder Anthony Pecorella. The terms were good and the timing was right – for those of you wondering why development suddenly kicked into a higher gear at the beginning of last year, this is the reason.

I'm sure you have questions.
A lot has changed over the last ten years, and I've posted up a list of FAQ questions for the biggest ones that you can go check out here:
https://www.defendersquest2.com/faq

When will the game be released?
No release date has been announced yet, but the game is coming along at a steady clip. I'll let you know when Armor allows me to share release timing information.

Progress Report Updates
A few years back I committed to posting monthly (well, mostly monthly) progress reports here to not only prove that development was still happening, but also to motivate myself. Now that the game is well underway and the finish line is in sight, I'm going to focus instead on keeping my head down and getting the game finished. There will still be updates on this site, but they won't be committed to any particular schedule. We also will be ending the alpha/beta preview builds for our backers; our focus now is on sprinting towards a playable demo and final gold master.

What should I do now?
Please wishlist the game on Steam. This is the single most important thing you can do to help ensure the game's eventual success.

Thank you for your patience.

Defender's Quest 2 is coming soon!

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

I've been busy these past few months, so we're merging the December and January progress reports into one. There's been a lot of stuff going on under the hood but the biggest one is that I've started getting a lot of new art in from our artists, which I have been furiously integrating into the build. Our big reveal is still a ways off, but that doesn't mean I don't have some goodies to show you today.

Behold, silhouettes! Behind each of these is actual full-color detailed art that will all be revealed at once when the day finally comes.

First and foremost, we have final art for the main party's ship:

Second, we have in-battle animations for our the White Hat leader, Evni:

As well as some final cutscene portraits of her:

Not to mention some other folks:

We've also got a few battles that have all their tile art integrated. These of course look particularly ugly when you placeholder-ify them, but trust me that they look stunning in unredacted full color!

You'll notice here we have a few new defender sprite silhouettes on the field besides just Evni – these aren't all fully animated yet, but we're getting there.

Also, the game's story & dialogue, which has been "complete" for a while now (as in, actually plugged into the game), is going through a final round of revisions before we reach drop-dead ultimate script lock.

Along with that I've been making a lot of little quality of life fixes under the hood, cleaning up the tutorialization and going through my gigantic backlog of bugs. More art, music, sound effect, final writing, etc, are going to be coming down the pipe soon and I'll be doing my best to keep up. And I know I keep teasing this, but not too long from now we'll have our big reveal, essentially re-introducing the world to Defender's Quest II.

Thanks for your patience. DQII will be coming soon.

Full Disclosure: Hydrazine Capital, an investment fund lead by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) is the lead investor for my employer Geo Land Solutions, which specializes in real estate valuation to help municipal property tax assessors perform more accurate, fair, and equitable valuations.

I think it's fair to say that people, including myself, have consistently underestimated the pace and capabilities of AI technology. It's entirely possible that we'll start to run up against some sorts of physical or theoretical limits soon, but even if that hits us tomorrow, the amount of raw power that's been unlocked in the last year alone – the tech that's already here – already has the potential to change things in massive waves.

In the coming year I'd like to explore a lot of these different scenarios. I'm not necessarily super confident in any one of my predictions coming to pass, but I think it's important to explore and consider various possibilities.

I'm a strange creature in that I'm equal parts techno-optimist and neo-luddite depending on which day of the week it is. I think AI has the potential to massively enrich and empower the human race, but it also has some deeply troubling implications. Today's post paints one of those troubling possible futures.

Summary:

A Market for Lemons
In which the internet gets clogged with piles of semi-intelligent spam, breaking the default assumption that the "person" you're talking to is human.

The Great Logging Off
In which human biological and cultural evolution responds to the new super drugs we've unleashed upon ourselves for better and for worse.

A Market for Lemons

First I need to bring in a market failure concept from economics called a "Market for Lemons." Let's say you have a used car you'd like to sell. It's a pretty good car. But the problem is, you can't prove it's good. For all the buyer knows, your car is actually a lemon–a used car that seems fine on the day it's purchased, but is actually going to break down in horrible ways days later, after which you are long gone with the money and the buyer is screwed. As it so happen, your actually good used car–a plum–is not a lemon, but because you can't prove it's not a lemon, you can't charge the price a plum should command. This sucks for anyone trying to sell a plum.

The average selling price of any used car in the market depends on the ratio of plums to lemons because every buyer's price is discounted by the risk of getting stuck with a lemon. So long as there's even a few lemons in the market, the average market price for a used car will always be slightly lower than what a genuine plum would go for in a world where where buyers could accurately distinguish them.

This means sellers of plums start to take their merchandise off the open market. If you can't sell your plum for what it's actually worth, you might as well drive it yourself until it's dead, give it to a family member, or sell it off the open market to a friend who knows and trusts you. The problem is, now there's one less plum on the market, which increases every buyer's risk of purchasing a lemon, which means the average selling price of all used cars goes down, which means more plums leave the market, and the vicious cycle continues until you've got nothing left but a "market for lemons."

The surest sign of a market for lemons is when everything for sale is garbage, and nobody has an incentive to put something up for sale that's not garbage, because they have no way to credibly signal their offerings aren't garbage, too.

To a certain extent this has already been happening to many parts of our great global telecommunications network. For instance, when was the last time you answered a phone call from an unknown number at a time you weren't expecting a call? Back in the early 1990's it would never occur to me not to answer the phone, even though caller ID had yet to be invented, because 90% of the time it was a genuine human being someone in my family knew personally.

(In this case the caller is the "seller," and when I "buy" a phone call by answering it, I'm paying with my time – four currencies theory!)

The good news is, we know how to fix the root problem of information asymmetry. In the case of used cars, there are now services like CarFax and CarMax and the whole "certified pre-owned vehicle" thing that make it a lot easier to know a car's history before you buy it. And even in the old days, you could insist on taking the car to your local mechanic first. Similar fixes have come for spam phone calls – caller ID makes it clear when the caller is someone from my contacts list, and iOS now even pre-flags suspicious calls as probable spam. And in the case of people I might want to talk to but aren't in my contact list yet, in almost all cases they'll have scheduled the call ahead of time.

So markets for lemons are fixable. But even so, lemons should be understood as a form of market pollution, and if enough of them build up you wind up in a Red Queen's Race to outpace them, risking a death spiral.

Okay, so what does this have to do with AI?

Up until now, all forms of spam, catfishing, social engineering, forum brigading, etc, have more or less been bottlenecked by the capabilities and energy of individual human beings. Sure, you can automate spam, but typically only by duplicating a rote message, which becomes easy to spot. There's always been a hard tradeoff between quantity and quality of the sort of operation you want to run. With AI chatbots, not only can you effortlessly spin up a bunch of unique and differentiated messages, but they can also respond dynamically as if they were a person.

What happens when anyone can spin up a thousand social media accounts at the click of a button, where each account picks a consistent persona and sticks to it – happily posting away about one of their hobbies like knitting or trout fishing or whatever, while simultaneously building up a credible and inobtrusive post history in another plausible side hobby that all these accounts happen to share – geopolitics, let's say – all until it's time for the sock puppet master to light the bat signal and manufacture some consensus?

What happens when every online open lobby multiplayer game is choked with cheaters who all play at superhuman levels in increasingly undetectable ways?

What happens when, from the perspective of the average guy, "every girl" on every dating app is a fiction driven by an AI who strings him along (including sending original and persona-consistent pictures) until it's time to scam money out of him?

What happens when, from the perspective of the average girl, "every guy" on the internet has become weirdly dismissive and hostile, because he's been conditioned to think that any girl that seems interested in him must be fake and trying to scam money out of him?

What happens when comments sections on every forum gets filled with implausibly large consensus-building hordes who are able to adapt in real time and carefully slip their brigading just below the moderator's rules?

I mean, to various degrees all this stuff is already happening. But what happens when it cranks up by an order of magnitude, seemingly overnight?

What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake?

I think people start logging off.

The Great Logging Off

Now, does this mean that everybody just turns off their computer for good, goes outside, touches grass, then joins their local Amish neighbors for a baptism and a barn raising? Maybe not.

But I do think a couple things start to happen. Many are already under way, but I think they'll accelerate.

First, I think we see a decline in the big "open sea" social networks, replaced increasingly by fragmented silos. I don't know what will happen to Twitter, but if Elon's shenanigans cause it to fail I don't think we'll ever see anything quite like it take its place:

Second, I think people will start to put a premium on accounts being "verified" as genuinely human. This can be done in two ways – just move to invite-only silos where you already know everybody, or big platforms where the owners do the vetting for you. Lots of platforms will simply take a knee-jerk reaction where they just up the amount of surveillance. "Now that there's so much bot activity, everybody need to upload their passport and driver's license, for your own safety of course!" Powerful nation states will be more than eager to assist them in this regard.

Third, private socialization will become more prized. People have been migrating to group chats and sub-forum-constellation platforms like Reddit and Discord for ages already, but the latter are still vulnerable to being flooded over time due to their relatively open nature. Private groups have the advantage that they are invitation-only, and will be of particular interest to the people put off by the increased surveillance.

Relatedly, in the world of game design, multiplayer games that are able to deliver a good experience in small groups between trusted already known-to-be-human friends will see a particular surge in popularity (This isn't a new model, to be clear–Minecraft and Among Us are prime examples from the recent past, and co-op play is as old as dirt).

Fourth, we'll see a resurgence and even fetishization of explicitly "offline" culture, where the "Great Logging Off" becomes literal. We're already seeing it in how higher income families and techies especially greatly limit their children's screen time, and members of Gen Y are growing wary of social media given how much depression and anxiety it has unleashed on them.

But to be clear, I have no idea that the "Great Logging Off" will become a majority position. Because:

Fifth, some people will get sucked into the online world even super harder.

Look, my original background is in video game development, and I'm kind of disquieted by how addictive and powerful modern entertainment has become. I'm willing to bet almost all of us know a young person somewhere whose life has been utterly consumed by videogames to the extent that it's hard to get them to do anything else. We've seen how refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup has devastated human health. And don't get me started on modern mass produced instant porn. Now, I'm not the kind of person to reflexively ban donuts or Call of Duty or pass sweeping obscenity laws, but I am saying that entirely new categories of powerful addictions are available to us that weren't available to our ancestors, and it should be uncontroversial to be worried about those effects somewhat. AI is going to let us invent even more.

All that said...

Sixth, Human civilization will survive and thrive as it always has – by evolving and adapting, both biologically and culturally. Sexual selection will cause entire swaths of the coming generations to just not reproduce due to various addictions. But that kind of "evolved resistance" to super-stimulus takes time and is pretty brutal, and culture will co-evolve on a much faster timescale. Cultures that prioritize family, community, regular face-to-face human interaction, strong social support networks, and especially those that have a built-in system for helping young people find spouses, will do better than those that don't. For instance, I don't agree with the Mormons theologically and am not planning on joining them, but I do expect them to be very successful in the coming century. Also: the future is African.

And to top it all off...

Seventh, real estate prices will continue to rise. This is for two reasons – first anyone who participates in the literal version of "The Great Logging Off" will put a huge premium on face-to-face close-knit human community, creating demand for the best locations where dense housing with lots of amenities are available. Second, Ricardo's Law of Rent observes that whenever human productivity increases, those productivity gains tend to get soaked into the price of real estate in the form of rising rents. If you've read my book, Land is a Big Deal, or the freely available series of articles it's based on, you'll know where I'm coming from.

Ways I Could be Wrong About This

It's easy to make a series of predictions sound compelling by just being super specific, which gives off the veneer of a time traveler who has seen it all happen. To be honest I have no idea if the above will come to pass, it just happens to fit together logically. But it does depend on several assumptions:

First, that existing ChatGPT-style tech will scale and get cheaper. Before it was used for crypto, Proof of Work was designed as an anti-spam mitigation technique. If it costs $0.01 to send an email, that doesn't really hinder a regular user, but it will make someone think twice before blasting out a million of those. Word on the street is each ChatGPT chat costs on the order of a few cents right now.

Second, that people deep down crave personal human-to-human contact and interaction to be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and sane long-term. (As well as reproductively successful, both biologically and culturally)

Third, that AI technologies won't be perfect substitutes for actual human-to-human contact.

Fourth, a bunch of stuff I didn't even consider. What did I miss? Place your bets here:

All of the predictions found in this post are registered under a group on Manifold Markets, a site where you can bet fake internet points on whether you think I'm right or not.

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

Because most of the updates that came down the pipe in the last month aren't ready for public reveal yet, I'm skipping the monthly build this time around. But now that we're into December, I think it's useful to take a step back and look at where things stand with the game.

TL:DR – we made more progress in the last year than we probably made in the previous four years.

Somehow over this last decade, DQ2 got stuck in development hell, and it slogged on for years at a snail's pace. Finally, I got fed up and decided I'd never ship this game if I didn't make a change. Last year, I took on an investor, hired some actual staff, and got the gears unstuck. Here's a summary of what we accomplished just in the last year:

• Finalized all the character mechanics
• Finalized the character roster
• Finalized the enemy roster
• Mapped out the entire game
• Coded all the new features we needed for e.g. boss encounters
• Built new balancing and level scripting tools to speed up our workflow
• Designed all the levels and got them in-game
• Finished the entire story and in-game script (edits/polish still pending of course)
• Finished all the concept art for all the characters, biomes, and enemies
• Got initial biome art done and into (the internal build of) the game
• Got initial sprite & portrait art done

Sometime next year we'll have our big reveal, which will include the identity of our investor as well as the hard working staff who have been helping us get this game off the ground. And a trailer for the game itself, of course.

Here's the big stuff that remains to be done:

• Bit of a rebalance pass now that everything is starting to gel
• Item schedule needs a lot of love
• Get all the sprites & level art in
• Get all the cutscene portrait art in
• Get all the music and SFX in
• Get the overworld art in
• Bugs, bugs, bugs

It's also been a tough year for me personally, mostly for medical reasons. I'll keep the details spare, but one of my kids has been in and out of the hospital throughout the year (my kid is doing fine, no need for anyone to worry, it's just been tough).

The other big thing that happened in the past year is a slight change in day job for me. The number one rule of indie game development is "don't quit your day job," and for the last few years I've been a game industry consultant by day, getting DQ2 stuff done on nights and weekends (which has been greatly aided as late by having some staff to help out). For the last year in particular I worked mostly with the excellent research firm Naavik, where Anthony and I deconstructed over a dozen different crypto based video games (almost universally from a skeptical perspective). As of next year, however, I'll be earning my daily bread in the world of municipal property tax assessment of all things (yes it has to do with that book I wrote). But I'll still be keeping the faith with DQ2 just as I have for this entire past year, and if we can keep up the same pace in 2023 that we did in 2022, this game will ship sooner rather than later.

Thanks as always for your patience. The end is in sight.

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

Build version 0.0.37 is up on Steam for our early backers.

October marks the beginning of a concerted content push for the game. For one, we now have story material into the game clear through to mission #34 (that's out of 56 missions total). Additionally, our artists are hard at work on sprite and battle background art, which we've already started to integrate (though it doesn't show up just yet in the current build).

Those two facts in and of themselves are pretty huge and I really look forward to the day we'll finally be able to reveal everything. But until then, we must remain patient. Suffice it to say I think things are looking really good and should represent a significant face-lift compared to Defender's Quest 1 :)

Thanks for your patience regarding the late posting of this progress report – it's been a kind of insane month, and we had a brief family medical scare on top of it (everything's stable and fine now so no need to worry) that threw some things off.

Additionally, I've recently left my day job at Naavik for a new day job that I will talk about a bit more in the future (hint: it has to do with Georgism, for those of you who follow me in my other life). My new day job pays about the same and has about the same hourly commitment, so don't expect any DQ2 disruptions; the new day job subsidizes my night and weekends work shepherding this project along just about as well as the old day job. I remain super grateful to my former bosses at Naavik for the genuinely fulfilling opportunity to repeatedly tell investors why they should probably not invest in crypto games. Looking back over everything that's transpired since last November, those who followed my advice would have avoided disaster.

Here's some concrete progress updates for this month besides what we talked about above:

• Some more UI tweaks (but still a lot more to do)
• Updated internal economy tool that lets us rebalance levels & items faster
• Updating the layout and balance of Phase 1 maps (not finished yet)
• Added portraits for Warren (Long Shot)
• Recalibrated overworld to match new level pacing

Our immediate goal is to ingest as much of the incoming art as possible and get it working in-engine. The exact reveal date has yet to be determined, but this stuff is obviously a necessary precondition to being able to do that.

Wish us luck!

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

Version 0.0.36 has been uploaded for our early backers & testers to check out.

The main thing we accomplished in this last month was a big rebalancing effort. Testing showed pretty conclusively that 1) the game was too difficult across the board, especially for new players, and 2) new characters were being introduced too quickly. To that end, we're fixing the pacing of the initial phase of the game considerably. We've added six new "pacing" battles to the first two phases to give you a little more time to play with freshly introduced characters before we immediately move on to the next one. To keep our overall scope fixed, we also used this as an opportunity to remove an approximately equal amount of battles from the back end of the game that felt like dead weight and were causing the end game to drag. We still haven't finished designing the new pacing battles, but we've rearranged the map for where they ought to go (for now they're just duplicates of the preceding battle), and we'll fill in the combat details this month.

One thing we have done, however, is go over the game's overall balance and tweaked the reward, experience, and money formulas so that you're progressing at a rate that feels better and gives you more resources to make interesting choices.

You might recall the internal "wavegen" script I've talked about in previous posts that we use to automatically balance our levels. Our level designer has now built some economy tools that helps us rebalance the reward schedule from a higher level, too. Rather than go into a bunch of different text files and tweak our individual per-level reward values directly, we can edit one master file that looks like this:

The basic way this works is that we define an overall "baseline" reward curve for all of our standard rewards like XP per level and gold per level. Then we define multipliers centered on 1.0 that tell you how much that particular level deviates from the default curve – should you get a little less than average here, or a little more than average, and so on. We also defined "grind" rewards (what you get for beating the level even if you've already beaten it) and "perfect" rewards for beating the level without letting your ship get hit. We can define this sort of thing for each mission track (normal, and advanced).

There's a few other notable changes. For one, we've brought "star coins" back from the dead, after wrestling with some balancing decisions with items. Now that the game's more mature, we've found the need to price cannons in a separate special currency + a nominal amount of scrap so that cannons don't compete directly with the player's budget for weapons & armor.

This is part of a design pass we're taking on cannons in general. Another decision we've made is that each cannon should be upgradeable, making the cannon more powerful but also making it equippable by either party's ship (unupgraded cannons are specific to one ship or the other). Throughout the game we constantly mix and match the two parties, so this is a way to make sure that all your cannon purchases stay relevant towards the endgame. We've also adjusted the base laser cannon; it's free now, but has a short cooldown. Additionally, we're going to give the user the option to purchase a new "fast laser" cannon that has the features of the original laser cannon design. Pardon our dust while we get all these new item design intentions into the build – the item shops in the current build are still somewhat placeholder-y, but we should finalize this soon.

Over the next two months we'll be focused on adding in advanced missions, finishing item design throughout the game, and getting as much art in as we can. A lot of stuff is starting to come together, and 2023 will be an exciting year to work on Defender's Quest 2.

As always, thanks for your patience. See you next month!

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

DQ2 build version 0.0.35 is up on our private steam branch for our testers and early backers in the usual place.

This is the month I settled in and just churned out a bunch of bug fixes for things that have been piling up.

To wit, one thing I did was kind of consolidate my bug tracking efforts. We still have the public bugtracker, but I realized I'd been neglecting it, so I just went ahead and archived a lot of stuff that had gotten stale. I'm actually using some internal professional QA to just keep myself honest and motivated it's been going pretty well – I cleaned out several dozen bugs this past month. Feel free to keep using the public bug tracker if you see something and I will try to get to it when i can.

With bugfixing, it's easy to leave a bunch of small and trivial bugs hanging around because you'll fix them "later," but once you finally swoop in and do it, it has a kind of magical effect, sort of like making your bed every morning. "Wow, this place can feel clean and nice rather than just sort of always trashed?" I'm gonna chase that feeling :)

But we made some progress on features too. Level design continues apace, and we've gotten some crucial feedback that the overall difficulty is just cranked a wee bit high – sort of an inevitable place to wind up over development as you get increasingly familiar with your own game – but we've dialed it back a smidge in the new build, out today.

One big change is skill points. TL;DR – in the last build, you were just getting too few of them, with too much wait in between. You only got a point every other level, rather than every level, like in DQ1.

Here's how that happened. We had originally designed this system such that you would never be able to max out your skill tree, by "end game" it was supposed to be maximally 2/3 filled, so you're still specializing. However, over the course of development we drastically changed how far away "endgame" is, without updating the skill tree! The original DQ1 originally had a level cap of about 30 or so. Then we added a whole New Game+ mode as a free update later, and raised the level cap to 60. But then we later decided we wanted fewer skill points, with each one being more meaningful. So that means reducing the skill point gain to every other level.

But...in DQ2 we are not going to ship with a New Game+ on day one (It's still TBD whether that will make sense as a future update or not — we'll have to see how well the game sells, and I think there might be other stuff I could do that might actually reach more players, but that's a discussion for another day). So why were we balancing the game to make sure you're not overly maxed by level 60?

So now one point per level up is back in the game. And with the lower level cap, endgame should still mostly work out. It's important to sometimes review all the decisions you've made that are contingent on stuff you've revised since and clean house like this.

This issue with skill points was a major issue we flagged when testing, because being so stingy was sucking a lot of the flexibility out of the game and increasing difficulty. It also sidelined the whole "RPG" part of the experience and pushed each level towards being more of a pure tower defense "puzzle" with a narrow range of solutions.

Naturally, the other half of that equation is the item system, long-neglected. We haven't fixed that in this build, but it's still on our radar as the obvious next thing to just get our designer heads around and lay out. Hopefully that (and a few key tutorials and an extra pacing battle or two) should shore up the flow of the early game and make things work better.

The other major change in this build is that we've put in full-sized portraits. They're just silhouettes for our tester & early backer facing builds for now, but we have actual assets on the internal side that drop in to replace them. I'm still working with layout and placement, so some text boxes might be in weird places, but I'm trying to get things sorted so that all the cool art the game will have isn't confined to tiny little floating head boxes. But unlike DQ1, we're trying to get better bang-for-our buck by putting more effort into varied and expressive facial variants rather than trying to create elaborate scripted puppet shows with multiple characters on screen and having to get their feet placement exactly right (that sucked up so much unnecessary time in DQ1 without being particularly visually impressive).

Another small but very noticeable change is that the little "tracer" indicators are now arrows rather than circles. Given the placeholder art style is still abstract, people were getting "miniature heart attacks" when the tracers would "hit" the ship at the end of the maze. This even happened to me a few times, so hopefully this addresses that issue.

Next month, we're really focused on dialing in the level design so that we hit the difficulty better and make the game more appropriate for a variety of skill levels, as well as get more art into the pipeline so we can hasten the day of our big reveal, and also dial in the item design system.

Thanks for hanging with us. Getting there one month at a time.

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

This month's progress report illustration comes courtesy of DALL·E and fills me with equal parts fascination and a vague sense of foreboding.

Build version 0.33 of Defender's Quest II is up on Steam for our early backers, and continues our march towards finishing all the levels. We have a goal of finishing all the major level design work by next month, after which we'll be polishing and cleaning up. Nearly all the game's major features are done at this point. If we can hit our schedule, the rest of our work will consist of content integration (art, story, and UI), as well as lots and lots of bugfixing and testing.

Let's talk a little bit about what's new in this build:

• We now have integrated all the necessary gameplay and story content for the first 15 levels, which is the amount of game that will comprise our future public demo. Our early backers can play through that now, but we've subbed out all the story content for placeholder silhouettes and lorem ipsum block text until we're ready to reveal all our art, story, and universe details.
• All major systems are in. Some levels, particularly the later ones, are in need of some bespoke scripts to make custom narrative events work properly.
• 54 maps are now on the board and the game is playable straight through to the end, but the least 10 levels or so are still pretty rough.
• Fixed some major bugs with text engine & font formatting
• Integrated a lot more UI elements (intentionally white boxed in our early backer builds, but we're living in glorious living color internally)
• Added a new "snake" type boss / enemy type
• Added a new series of "buff" mutators to waves

Let's discuss those last two in a bit more detail.

"Snake" enemies

This is a type of enemy where the entire enemy wave is treated as if it is a single enemy. The composite enemy is treated as if it has the combined HP of all of the segments, and damaging any one of the segments causes damage to the composite creature, rather than to any individual segment. When the composite creature's health drops to zero, all of the segments die at the same time.

This feature had been in previous builds, but was a bit undercooked and super buggy until this last month.

For sanity's sake, we're going to make these kind of critters naturally immune to knockback and pushback, but it is technically possible under controlled circumstances to knock them back without causing a bunch of horrible bugs – we're thinking of reserving that as an effect that automatically happens when you knock it down below a certain predefined damage threshold.

These enemies are interesting because they will pose a unique spatial challenge in that they can push forward more persistently than other enemy waves, and also have more of a particular weakness to area of effect attacks.

It looks a little something like this in practice:

"Buff" wave mutators

One of the things our level designer requested was the ability to add some sort of universal modifier to an entire enemy wave, such as "has 2x health," or "has 2x speed," or anything else like that.

So we added it! This works out to a highly visible indicator that appears both on the wave preview block, as well as on all the enemies in the wave itself. This way we don't have to create a bespoke enemy type for every particular variation we might want to cook up, and it probably is easier for the player to understand, as well. Also makes it a lot easier and faster for the level designer to iterate.

Here's a quick preview – note that the visual treatment and UX still needs quite a bit of work:

Known Issues

Some stuff remains broken and we're well aware of it.

• Some targeting buttons float off in the distance for dumb reasons on certain characters
• UI needs to be touched up to be more readable and less semi-broken
• Shops still need a major overhaul and design pass so that our item pace makes sense
• Some enemy types not having data for the "splash intro" view
• Placeholders everywhere
• Various other annoying things

We've done more than that in the last few builds, too, but we're keeping a few things back as a surprise. All in all things have been progressing nicely and we're excited to get things to the point where we can re-announce the game publicly and reveal some of the things we've been a bit cagey about so far.

Thanks so much for your patience and support, we're getting there!

Howdy Defender's Quest fans!

Here's what's new since last time. Forgive me for the lack of illustrations in this post, I'm travelling and typing this progress report up on a Steam Deck.

More level progress
Levels are now designed out to battle 36 at "near final balance" state. ("Near final balance" as always means levels that are close to their final shape but that we might tweak before the game ships.)

Story progress
We've got a lock on all of our main characters and major plot points and have started cranking way on the script. The first 8 levels are now fully scripted in our private build. For the build available to our backers/testers we've subbed out the actual text with lorem ipsum for now, but it should give you a sense of our progress.

Art progress
Internally we've now got art in from our artists for most of the game's UI screens. I still have a lot of work to do to integrate it all, which I'll focus on in the coming months. I'll also do a quick cleanup pass on the placeholder UI in the public builds so that it isn't quite so hideous.

New Cannons
We've got two new cannons in the game engine – a "heal+cleanse" cannon for the white hats, that will allow you to heal a single character to full as well as remove all negative status effects, and a "protect" cannon for the black hats, which will grant the "protect" status that reduces incoming damage for a while. Yes, we're giving the player these tools because we are building horrible monsters and boss battles that will require you to get good at using them.

New assassin ability
You've seen how the bouncer has a "taunt" ability that is essentially always on. We're adding a special ability like this for the Assassin – "stealth." Stealth status is a lot like the "phased out" enemies from DQ1. It means you cannot be targeted. This has nothing to do with dodge, or damage reduction, it just means enemies never choose to attack you directly. The only way a stealth'ed creature can be hurt is if it is attacked by an Area of Effect attack or some other form of indirect fire. This lets us turn the assassin into a special glass cannon unit that can avoid detection on the front lines, but if an AOE enemy happens to blast it unawares, it'll get hosed. Of course, you'll have various options to try to prop it up with e.g. a protect status or healer support, but under no circumstances can it survive sustained fire.

Shop Indicators
Ever since we overhauled shops to be an always-on button you can access, we realized we needed better indicators. Now you have a "new" indicator that pops up whenever there's new stuff at the store you haven't seen since your last visit. Stores themselves still need a lot of work – tutorial support, as well as like, actually well designed and paced items. We'll get to it.

Tar patches that catch on fire
We had a bug with tar patches where if a burning enemy were to touch the tar patch, it would create an infinite feedback loop of explosions. The simplest solution we thought of turned out to also be a cool new feature – if a tar patch comes into contact with a burning enemy, the tar patch is instantly converted to a flaming tar patch, which instead of granting tar status, will grant burning status (and of course, reduce the lifespan of the tar patch).

New Boss Designs
We've got some major new boss designs. For one, the first boss, the Black Hat Ship, has been redesigned a bit. Instead of just spawning a bunch of guys, now we have a two-lane fight, one with enemies coming at you, and one dedicated just to the boss ship. The boss ship itself now attacks you with the firebomb cannon that you later get to use in the black hat phase of the game. This is also our first introduction of negative statuses that can affect defenders, something that is new to the Defender's Quest series.

Next, we've got a "cannoneer" type boss. This enemy will first "paint" a targeted defender with a status effect that looks like a targeting reticle. Then after a bit of a wind-up phase, will blast out a giant laser cannon on that defender. The delay gives you time to intervene with a protect cannon, back them up with a healer, or--if it's the Jumper being attacked– jump him out of there while you still can.

Finally, we've got a "tornado" type boss. This new boss type travels in a loop forever rather than advancing towards the player's ship. Meanwhile, it spits out enemies (see our "artillery spawner" enemy type work from previous progress reports). We went ahead and hooked this into the wave bar system, so the wave bars display a "?" for the spawn point, with the spawn point being the "tornado" boss itself, which spews them out in all directions. This should make for an interesting and chaotic battle, as the tornado circles around and spawns escalating baddies forever as your characters try to take it out before it overwhelms you.

We've also done some prep work on a "worm" type boss that acts as a series of interconnected individual segments. This one isn't finished yet, but if you charge forward far enough in the build you'll see some messy prototypes of it.

Cutscene work
We've started working on the cutscenes, not a lot to say about this other than that we've added rich text support, which is currently a bit buggy (bold works, italic doesn't for some dumb reason, and sometimes everything freaks out and bolds the entire page). We'll fix it.

Also note that the tiny little picture boxes are not our final format for the game's cutscenes, that's just placeholder. We won't be having the full-body portraits from DQ1, but we will have something more like what you've seen in games like Hades – a large character portrait from the waist up, taking up at least half of the vertical screen space, and not framed by a tiny box. This will also be paired with larger text.

Design tweaks to various defenders
Particularly the AOE minion and the Medium-Shot minion for the white hats. Making progress, they're not accessible in the current build but I'll be adding them in properly soon.

And that's it for this month! We'll keep plugging along until this game is fully playable, and all the art and story is in. Then we're ready to make our first impression for the internet at large, we'll flip the switch that shows our real assets to the world, which should be around the same time we also put out the game's first public demo – that's still a ways off, but we're closer than ever before.