Hey guys. First things first, let me introduce myself. My name is Ross Friedberg and I designed this Shepherd Company ARG and have been running it for the last several weeks. I'd like to heartily thank everybody who's been involved in any capacity, especially the PTI mappers who helped us start the game and the people on TWP who solved it together. So what's the point of all of this? I'm glad you asked!

For about a year now, I've been working on a new game with my partner in crime, Ben Bryant, whom many of you know better as Mevious. For those who aren't familiar with Mevious, he's currently the only Portal 2 PTI mapper who has been spotlighted by Valve. He also has a number of other full-length Portal mods under his belt, namely Portal Pro and Rexaura; if you haven't tried these out I highly recommend them.
The game itself is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer called Electric Sheep. In it, you play a man who wakes up to realize he doesn't know where or who he is. He quickly finds this odd little robot that seems to be linked to his predicament. He must guide his new robot buddy and himself to the exit of each level as he unravels the mystery of who he is and what his involvement with The Shepherd Company is. At first, the game uses all the standard tropes: levers and pressure-sensitive buttons to toggle doors, ladders, and deadly spikes to avoid.
Eventually, he learns that the robot can be programmed using a simple circuitry interface. For example, an early program might connect the "Facing Right" condition chip to the "Traverse Ladders" behavior chip, which would tell the robot to go up and down ladders, but only when it's facing right. Things get trickier and more devious as more conditions are found, then those conditions are combined with "and" and "or" chips, or counted with counter chips and basic numeric chips (e.g., climb every second ladder you reach when facing left), or connected to additional behaviors, like "Push Blocks" or "Use Teleporters." That said, one of our primary goals is to have the game be accessible to non-programmers, as long as they're willing to get into the puzzle game mindset. We will be slowly introducing the "programming" concepts and the new chips, and making sure that when we introduce something new, we teach it to you before moving on.
In broad strokes, I'm the lead programmer for the game and Mevious is the lead level designer, which means you can expect to be scratching your head regularly until you finally reach that satifying "aha!" moment. We plan to have roughly 100 levels in all over 5 worlds, and the difficulty will be similar to Mevious's Portal levels, so there will be plenty of play time in there if you choose to do all the levels and find all the collectables.

So, what's next? Well 3 days from now on August 30th, Valve is going to launch Project Greenlight. For those who haven't heard of it, Project Greenlight is Valve's way of letting the community have more say in what games make it onto Steam. This is especially helpful for indie developers get through Valve's arcane and under-staffed curation process, which only a small percentage of games make it through. What we're asking of you is to help us. If you think this game sounds up your alley, on August 30th, vote for Electric Sheep and tell your friends to do so, too; I'll make another announcement providing a link and more information once Project Greenlight launches and we get Electric Sheep's page up.

Oh, and I think I promised you guys a present :) Everybody in this group at the time of this announcement will get a free copy of Electric Sheep when it's released, regardless of whether we make it to Steam or not. However, if we do make it onto Steam, everybody will also receive a free additional copy of the game to give to a friend!