Alleycat

Who We Are

Philosophy

How we design Alleycat, hardware, games, and the frameworks to work with the people who bring it all to life.

Why This Exists

Alleycat started as a question: wouldn't it be cool if strangers in a cyberpunk city had a reason to talk to each other? This question grew into an open source platform for immersive, in-person play.

This page is how we think about that work: the rules we embed in firmware, the social contracts we design on purpose, and the values we try to honor when we ask volunteers to build hundreds of devices.

Neotropolis is our flagship deployment. These principles outlive any one event, theme, or game mode.

Immersive Icebreaker

Every Alleycat experience starts the same way: give people a reason to find each other.

Quickdraw is not the whole game, it's the front door. Two players jack their Portable Data Nodes together, wait for a countdown, and press a button. The device decides the winner. The moment between strangers is the point.

Multiplayer modes, Fixed Data Nodes, and LARP layers stack on top of that foundation. Alleycat is an immersive icebreaker: a structured excuse to start a conversation, compete, cooperate, or slip into character without needing a rulebook in your back pocket.

If a design doesn't make it easier for two humans to interact in physical space, we rethink the design.

Sandbox Systems

We borrow the name from Elli's Hackaday Supercon talk: Sandbox Systems, hardware for emergent games.

The idea is rooted in Conway's Game of Life: simple rules, complex behavior. We don't script the best moments. We build a platform with clear constraints and let players invent alliances, house rules, catchphrases, and rituals we never wrote down.

The PDN is the door to that sandbox. Open-source hardware and firmware exist so other makers can fork the stack, reskin the fiction, and run Alleycat at their own events.

Platform, not skin. Cyberpunk bounty hunting is our reference implementation, not the identity of Alleycat itself. The same devices can power a different world, a different aesthetic, or a different kind of event. The game logic and the skin are yours to define.

Hardware Embedded Rules

Neo 2022 taught us a hard lesson: paperwork sucks.

Staff spent the weekend pushing forms instead of playing with players. Captures lived on clipboards. Disputes needed a human referee. Everyone wanted a cool prop, but nobody wanted to stop the fiction to adjudicate it.

That year we ran 42 analog Data Crypts with no firmware. It worked well enough to prove Alleycat belonged at Neotropolis. It also made automatic scoring and hardware embedded rules non-negotiable goals for everything that came after.

Today the PDN decides winner and loser, enforces timing, penalizes button-mashing, and uploads results without a staff member breaking flow. If your game needs a referee, ask what the device could adjudicate instead.

We optimize for flow, players stay in character, in motion, and in conversation.

Inclusive vs. Exclusive Design

We use "inclusive" and "exclusive" deliberately, they mean different things here.

Inclusive means room for every kind of player with as little complication as possible. You do not have to roleplay to play. You can go deep on character or treat Alleycat as a social game that gives you permission to talk to strangers. The experience is built for the bold and the hesitant, intuitive enough to pick up at a convention, rich enough to sustain a four-day LARP.

Accessibility is not an afterthought. Features built for access often become features everyone loves. Cyberpunk-styled closed captioning on our intake films started as an accommodation and became part of the aesthetic. Design for the edge case; the whole crowd benefits. It's the curb-cut-effect in action.

Exclusive, for us, means intentional constraints, not gatekeeping people, but gatekeeping complexity:

  • Hunter and Bounty are different teams, not different tiers of player.
  • Training films and booth intake processes create shared vocabulary before you hit the field.
  • The device enforces fairness so social play doesn't depend on who knows the rules.

We exclude friction that kills immersion, not the ability to give the player something to solve for.

Honoring the Work

Alleycat has been mostly built by volunteers, makers, and friends who show up because the project is worth their time, not because we pay enterprise salaries.

Honoring that work means:

  • Building Community. Match roles to strengths. Build redundancy. Transfer knowledge on purpose. Invite people to the table, have enough to feed the curious.
  • Respect timelines. PCBs landing five days before an event and asking the crew to sprint-build is not a sustainable pattern, for people or for hardware quality.
  • Write the manual. Documentation, staff training films, and repeatable booth ops exist because the people who build Alleycat deserve systems that work as hard as they do.
  • Credit the community. It takes a lot of good ideas from a lot of people to get to where we are. Our Team page is dedicated to all of those people. Players too co-create the world, characters, and lore. We ship the tools. They make Alleycat unforgettable.

Every badge, warning label, and graphic in the kit carries DNA from people who contributed before the current season. Honoring the work means leaving the project better documented and better built for whoever shows up next.

People Before Tech

Make the experience as simple as possible so players can put their own spin on it.

Neotropolis is a role-play event. The PDN should enable character, not dictate it. Opportunities over demands: Hunters deliver a Declaration of Intent to Seize when they encounter a Bounty, but the catchphrase is entirely theirs. Structure creates drama; freedom creates stories.

Technology is a tool for community building, not the main character. Emergence theory is the through-line: complex social outcomes from simple, well-designed components. We want players looking at each other, not at a screen trying to parse our UI.

Sell the Story with the Tech

Fiction and hardware should reinforce each other.

"The doodad", a 3D printed element on the PDN with no gameplay function, exists because it looks like it should live on cyberpunk gear. Laser-cut acrylic, resin buttons, scoreboards at the event, pewter coins for rewards: the prop sells the world before anyone reads a lore doc.

That does not mean decoration instead of engineering. It means both, devices that work reliably and feel like they belong in the fiction players are already performing. A different enclosure design could make the PDN fit in almost anywhere.

Open Source, Open Field

Alleycat is open source because closed development stalls interesting work.

A custom operating system on an ESP32. A hardware abstraction layer so game logic survives board revisions. State machines so multi-stage experiences do not collapse into spaghetti. The same core library powering PDNs, FDNs, and whatever we build next.

We publish so others can fork, fix, extend, and deploy without asking permission. GitHub is the source of truth for firmware, schematics, and build docs. Notion is where collaborators, or the curious, can go to see how every game system connects and what features are coming next.

If you want to run Alleycat at your event, in your theme, with your rules: that is the point.

Start Simple. Ship Anyway. Learn in the Field.

The PDN did not arrive fully formed.

2022: Data Crypt, eight-week build window, no MCU on the device.
2023: Proto-PDN, dual hardware per role, Quickdraw born.
2024: PDN MK I, first custom PCB, universal Hunter/Bounty config.
2025: PDN MK II, wireless scoring and the first full data season.
2026: FDN MK I, multiplayer modes, platform year in the desert.

We watch how people actually play when given new tools and turn that into flexible platform to grow into. The LARP community teaches us more in one Neotropolis than any design document could.

Start simple. Ship anyway. Improve what breaks in the real world.

Where to Go Next