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InterviewAttract Mode
Autonauts is a positive, warm-hearted, and
not-at-all negative experience. Which is nice.
do, and some are more conflicting than
others – like being a creative child at the
same time as a production [focused] adult.
The community built up around the
prototype we first released in 2017 has
been wonderful. We updated the ‘Pre-Pre-
Pre-Alpha’ with new features and bug fixes
every single week for 22 weeks without fail.
We made sure we shared our feature and
bug list with the players, to help shape our
output, and that relationship reminded
me very much of working on a magazine.
We learned a lot from doing that.
The game acts in part as a stealth
teaching tool for coding fundamentals
- was this always the plan? How did it
come about?
Puzey: We’ve never had the intention
of teaching coding. The scripting was
really just a happy accident of prototype
evolution. The first version featured
farmers without any scripting. You clicked
on a target, and the robots assumed what
it was you meant. It worked but felt too
simple, and sometimes didn’t do what the
player intended. Initially, we displayed a
commentary just as a way for the player
to see what was going on in the farmer’s
head, and then it was an obvious choice to
allow the player to edit it. It’s still not a full
coding platform, but we would like to make
it more like Scratch in a future version.
Are you working with any schools or
learning establishments? Why/why not?
Puzey: We’ve been so focused on
making it play well, we just haven’t
had time to consider the educational
value of Autonauts. We’ve had a lot of
encouragement from people saying how
well this would work in schools and it’s
definitely something we want to push.
An obvious inspiration for this has been
Scratch. I’d like to see a free, educational
version of Autonauts released which
has the current missions replaced with
more coding-focused ones. Time is our
enemy right now. If we could automate a
time machine...Realistically, how useful will Autonauts
be for an individual’s understanding
of coding?
Puzey: This has to be a game first, and
the coding is just a tool for the player.
It doesn’t try to teach coding. Ever.
It really is just a means to an end as
far as the player’s concerned. They will
gain an insight into some fundamental
coding concepts whether they realise it
or not, but this will happen over a long
time as they solve the various problems
they encounter.The complexity of the commands
your robots can accept is limited by
their memory capacity, I believe, but
how complex can things get for your
auto-friends?
Penn: It gets complex when you have
dozens or even hundreds of simple bots
all working together. I used to make fewer The game world is substantial, so your
robo-towns can cover vast areas. Putting that robot force to
work is inherently satisfying.bots and fill their heads with long-winded
scripts, ‘cos I thought that was clever, but it
isn’t – it just unnecessarily overcomplicates
things, and I’d quickly get into a right
old pickle.What is it about automation, about
making things work, that’s so
inherently satisfying?
Puzey: For me, it’s the contrast between
doing it yourself and having someone else
do it. I’ve been slaving away chopping logs,
unable to do anything else because it’s
consuming all my time. Suddenly, I have
a bot to do it for me, and it’s such a great
feeling of freedom – I have time to do
something new and interesting.
Penn: The sense of achievement when
you make even the simplest of processes
self-sufficient is unprecedented. Until it
stops and you have to figure out what’s
gone wrong and fix it, which is satisfying
in itself – more so when you put it right.“It’s still not a full coding
platform... we’d like to
make it more like Scratch
in a future version ”InterviewAttract Mode