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Kestrel, a city of blocks to sneak through

This one was made on the other machine, the TV machine, so there is no transcript of it here. Asked today what should go up, the answer was:

we did a ton of stuff on the TV machine... see assassin.patrickreinbold.com its a block based minimal assassins creed prototype

Everything below comes from the build that is online, which went up in the early hours of 12 November.

The title screen: a blocky landscape of sand, grass and grey rock seen from above, with KESTREL in large white pixel letters across a black band. Below it in yellow: WALK UNSEEN. STRIKE FROM ABOVE. VANISH. A menu reads START, CONTROLS, SOUND: ON, TIMING: OFF, NEW WORLD. In the corners: a health bar with a HEAT meter, the word ANONYMOUS, a minimap and a tag KORCREST 251.
The title sits over the world itself: you start outside the gate of the capital, 251 tiles away.

A world from one number

The whole map, 4,096 tiles on a side, is generated from a seed. It holds 103 places: one capital, four cities, ten towns, 26 villages, fourteen forts and 48 watchtowers, with roads and rivers between them and names put together from syllables (Korcrest, Calora, Brenwick, Ormwatch). New world on the title screen rolls a different one.

The capital is the exception. Its street plan is laid out after Rome: the comments in the code name the road from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, the road to St Peter's, Viale di Trastevere, Via del Teatro di Marcello and the slopes of the Palatine and the Celio, and there is a colosseum of its own. In the game its quarters are called The Stalls, Palace Hill, the Old Citadel, the Quays, the Dyers' Quarter and the Noble Quarter, and the HUD tells you which one you are in.

The white-hooded figure standing on a flat terracotta roof in The Stalls, seen from above at an angle. Around it, ochre and brick tenements with rows of dark windows, a pale stone block on the right, a sunlit square at the top with a few people crossing it. HUD: 08:50 DAY, THE STALLS.
On the roofs of The Stalls in the morning.
A crowded square in The Stalls: blocky townspeople in brown, blue and green standing between two market stalls with red awnings and a blue well. The hooded figure stands among three of them in the middle. Beneath, a yellow label ROOST 39 with an arrow pointing down to a tall narrow building.
Standing in a group of people is how you disappear on the ground. The gold arrow points to the roost.
On a ledge between terracotta roofs at the Quays, with dark green trees and lawns behind. Top right in yellow: SUSPECTED, with a bar half full. Below the figure, a red ring on the street marks someone, and a prompt reads SPACE AIR ASSASSINATE.
From a ledge above someone, the action key becomes an air assassination. Someone has noticed: SUSPECTED.
A narrow dark lane in the Old Citadel between high terracotta-roofed blocks, the hooded figure walking up it behind a guard in blue. A grey fortress wall at the lower right. HUD: 09:40 DAY, OLD CITADEL in red, and a yellow tag ROOST 130 on the roof to the left.
The Old Citadel is shown in red on the HUD: restricted ground.

All five are the live page in a 1280×720 browser window. To get into the city quickly, the figure was put in place with the game's own hook for screenshot tools instead of being walked there.

What you do

The game says it in a few lines of capitals. The pause screen: blend in crowds – sit on benches – dive into hay – on a TV, use game mode. The controls page: sprint, climb, leap, catch ledges. The first objective is follow the gold arrow to the roost; from there you survey a perch to travel fast, take contracts (fifteen of them on the map screen), and after a kill: vanish – then report to the roost. A heat meter fills as you are seen, and the status in the corner goes from anonymous to suspected and on. Guards can be countered in the flash, there are throwing knives and smoke, a herald can be bribed if you have the coins, and one rule is printed in full: Kestrels do not kill the innocent.

It is made for a couch. It reads a gamepad (stick / d-pad choose, A select, B back), pauses itself when the pad disconnects, and a failed start prints the error on the screen instead of leaving a black TV. Keyboard and mouse work too.

built
on the TV machine; online since the night of 11 to 12 November
world
4,096 × 4,096 tiles from one seed, 103 places, a capital laid out after Rome
controls
gamepad first, keyboard and mouse as well
made with
plain JavaScript in 21 modules, bundled into one 325 KB file (about 8,100 lines); the blocks drawn with WebGL, the HUD on a 384×216 pixel canvas; no image files
Play Kestrelgamepad or keyboard, best on a big screen

Still rough

It is called a prototype, and it is one. The build that is online is the only source on this machine, so how it got here, what was tried and what was thrown away is on the other computer and not in this post. The map screen starts dark and fills in as you survey perches, which makes it a poor overview for a first look. No contract was played through for this post; what is described above is what the game itself says it does.