Autonauts

Autonauts starts simply enough. Craft a bot, train it to chop down a tree, watch it trundle off to do your bidding. What could go wrong? Well, it turns out, quite a lot - because these robots are only as smart as you tell them to be.

"We had something like this the other day," creator Gary Penn tells me. "The Scunthorpe problem." You can teach a machine how to do something and it will do it to the letter - without human intuition to stop when necessary. In the most recent case, it was developer Denki's own profanity filter used to double check the names players give to Autonauts bots. Such systems are notorious for deciding certain clusters of letters - such as those in the name of that particular North Lincolnshire town - are enough to set their ones and zeroes flashing.

But Penn is a veteran of dealing with such things. Starting as a games journalist, he later worked at DMA Design, the studio which would become Rockstar, making Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings - perhaps the closest game to Autonauts on his CV. After that, he helped found Denki, the team behind the Xbox 360 and mobile puzzler Quarrel - a brilliant kind of Scrabble meets Risk. That game hit the Scunthorpe problem, too.

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Autonauts - Drazzan


Ooh, how exciting is this!? Can't believe this is actually happening. It's finally time to officially announce AUTONAUTS, our awesome crafting sim with a lovely robotic twist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/979120/Autonauts

It's been forever and an age since we demoed the public prototype, and we knew we had something special here from the beginning. When Curve got their hands on it and we saw their little faces light up, that's when we knew it was twu 'wuv'.

Autonauts is an amalgamation of life simulation, combined with construction sims - with a heavy dollop of production line and resource management games - all wrapped up and served on the cutest adorable platter you can imagine. And don’t forget the biggest twist: a whole bunch of robots ready to be built and taught to automate your life.

These Bots can teach you a lot about systems and programming, but it's not meant to be some heavy educational tool; just by messing around with the Bots you can learn a lot. It's sweet and sometimes serious, but never mean or otherwise horrible. The main thing to remember when playing Autonauts is: if you find yourself caught in a grind, STOP and automate it instead.

Our adorable automation game Autonauts is coming out Autumn 2019 and we can't wait for you to play it. Check out the trailer below and don't forget to add to your wishlist to be notified of future updates!

Until next time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9iqasp7K6g

Autonauts

Colony building seems a lot of hard work if you have to do it yourself - which is the idea behind Autonauts.

It comes from video games industry veteran Gary Penn who has worked all over the industry in his long career (and written about it in Zzap!, if you're of that era), perhaps most notably on the early Grand Theft Auto games at DMA Design.

But it's another DMA game which comes to mind when watching the gameplay trailer below: Lemmings. Autonauts' main hook is that you can automate any process you can do yourself (harvesting resources, operating machines, building, cooking, fishing, farming) by building a bot and getting it to copy you.

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