06 / wfmag.ccInterviewAttract Mode
We might all lose our jobs when the
robots arrive in force, but for now we
can just enjoy the likes of AutonautsS
truggling through Unity
with a lone programmer
on the team, having to rely
on the Unity Asset Store
for solutions to problems
popping up – it’s not the romantic notion
of Creating Art that you might think
of when it comes to small teams with
big ideas, let’s be honest. All the same,
Autonauts has – through sheer force of
will (and a lot of effort and iteration over
a number of years) – made itself one of
the most intriguing and engaging titles in
recent memory.
The ultra-basic thinking is: you’re a
person trying to keep other people alive.
At the outset, it’s your typical survival-
type game, all chopping down trees
and building farms and so on. But soon
enough you unlock a basic automaton,
and this is where it gets really good.
The robots can be programmed to do
what you can do – you set them to record,
go out and do what you want them to
do, then have them do it. So they can cut
down trees and carry the logs back to a
storage facility, say. Need something more
complex, or the order to be changed?
The logic of the robots can be tweaked ina simple coding-light interface, switching
around instructions, nesting actions in one
another, and so on.
As you progress more, the complexity
of the actions required increases and
the limitations of your clockwork robots
become apparent. Fret not, though,
because... well, there are more, better,
and increasingly complex robots to create,
each capable of carrying more instructions
in its limited memory banks and, so,
becoming capable of more actions and
more delicious automation.
While you might start out life chopping
and harvesting with your own hands,
things do progress – if you code your bots
efficiently enough – to the point where you
have an entirely self-sufficient town, robots
chopping wood, farming, baking pies, even
building more robots. It’s that inherently