the-amiable
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Tetrapulse uses health as ammo, punishes players that go solo
Developer The Amiable is looking for $15,000 on Kickstarter to fund Tetrapulse, a cooperative PC, Mac and Linux game that uses players' health pools as ammo and requires everyone to work together, or else. Each team must protect the Hearthstone – the source of life and, therefore, ammo – and must move it around the map to win battles against persistent alien creatures. When players attach to the Hearthstone to regenerate health, they must move the pillar together, as one unit, or risk being an easy target for the enemy swarms. "Tetrapulse is meant to keep players working together the entire time they're playing," developer David Laskey tells Joystiq. "Oftentimes co-op games end up possessing loose cooperative mechanics that don't reinforce players necessarily working together. This causes the game to break down into a free-for-all and players going Rambo. "In Tetrapulse this can't really happen, and the moment a player tries to go out on their own there is clear immediate punishment in the form of the team collapsing and losing soon after. Players really need to be watching each others' backs, considering health is linked to your ammo when attacking enemies. When you lose, you lose hard." There's no single-player content planned for now, but Laskey says that's a possible stretch goal, if the Kickstarter takes off: "Tetrapulse is about bringing the people who are playing together so we want to focus on shaping that experience first and foremost." The Amiable has been working on Tetrapulse for 7 months, but it needs this push to fund online multiplayer and finish everything off. The game is due out, tentatively, in Q1 2014, provided enough people chip in on Kickstarter. This game is all about teamwork, after all.
