September 17, 2023 - Day 260 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 281

Game: Autonauts vs Piratebots

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Jul 28, 2022
Library Date: Sep 17, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 41m

Autonauts vs Piratebots is a 3D base-builder survival strategy programming game. It's the last of this month's Humble Choice games and not an entirely bad way to end the bundle.

You're sent to Rigel VII (I guess the devs are Star Trek fans?) after your base of Autonauts is attacked and destroyed by Piratebots.

The survival comes into things with the good old "build stuff from blueprints by despoiling the world around you".

As an aside, even with what we know about climate and the environment, it's kind of wild how many games just fall back on "cut down or dig up the environment, and kill things" as the basic gameplay loop.

With that said, Autonauts vs Piratebots actually makes you build sustainable forests to cut down trees once you get started; it's just something I got to thinking about while playing.

The tricky part is that once you can start creating the bits you need, you can create robots to cut down the trees. Then you program the robots how to cut down trees.

However, their axes break, so you teach another robot how to make an axe, and program it to make an axe, and wait until the axe is taken before making a new one.

Cut down a tree? Someone has to gather the wood. It has to be put somewhere. Program the bots! Run out of bots? Build a bot factory.

41m in I'd worked my way through the basics of the tutorial, but just like programming in the real world, doing it when you're tired is going to lead to mistakes and debugging, like wondering why the bot won't do what you asked because you completely missed a section of the programming.

It's more scripting that programming per se, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, Autonauts vs Piratebots is:

3: OK

#AutonautsVsPiratebots #Strategy #BaseBuilder #Programming #HumbleChoice #MastodonGaming #Gaming
#Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay