Robot Colony review: Planet civilization created by code

Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest topics in recent years, unmanned driving in life, AlphaGo that defeated world champion Lee Sedol in the Go game, and OPENAI that beat professional players in the TI7 Easter egg link in DOTA2, artificial intelligence is showing its more and more mature side. This inevitably makes people think more, whether human beings can rely on artificial intelligence to improve production efficiency, or even replace human labor?

Denki, a game development studio based in Dundee, Scotland, thinks so. In their latest title, Robot Colony, there's a scene in which players visually program robots to work autonomously, and even command them to create new planetary civilizations.

In this work, 2D perspective is adopted in the picture, and the Q version model is chosen in the model construction, which first brings the player a casual visual experience in the painting style. However, subject to the presentation effect of this 2D picture, the visual presentation of the game's picture is slightly rough and the action presentation of the character in the construction or mining is also very simple, lacking more changeable action perception, which brings visual aesthetic fatigue to the player.

Of course, the advantage of this 2D screen is that it can bring higher tolerance to the modeling of characters or birds and animals in the game, which is reflected in the poor quality of the game can still highlight the image and characteristics of each model, and bring more recognizable shapes to the players without being visually strange.

Cattle grazing

At the beginning of the game, the player is randomly sent by a spaceship to a deserted planet. Guided by the initial robot OTTO-0, it starts by picking up branches and stones to build rough workstations, and gradually builds various needed structures on the new planet. In addition to the simple construction, there will be some basic operation tutorials to help players quickly pick up the game, and finally establish an all-encompassing colonial empire on this new planet.

Detail is the most impressive part of this game in terms of beginners, whether it is simple basic operations or teaching the player how to automate the robot work, every detail is presented to the player. However, such tutorials can only be described as detailed rather than exhaustive, because as the development progresses, it becomes apparent that the game lacks the necessary suggestive information. For example, a small number of buildings need to be placed on the floor to use, but this point is not mentioned in the novice guide or tutorial, this can be built but can not use the workbench will bring greater confusion and confusion to the player's game experience. If you add some notes to the construction of these buildings, I believe it will make the game experience more smooth.

Since the main workers in the game are robots, and the players themselves do not have the needs of food and drinking water and other necessary items for survival, there is no survival mechanism in the gameplay, and the whole gameplay is supported by exploration and construction of two points. The advantage of this is that the game experience is more casual and entertaining, and the player can play the game exactly as he wants without worrying about the punishment mechanism from the game. The downside is that there is less motivation from within the game, and without fun gameplay that keeps the player engaged, the game experience becomes boring.

The shaded areas are unexplored

The good news is that the game uses attractive programming gameplay in the beginning to give players a very interesting experience. When the player successfully built the first robot under the guidance of the novice tutorial, the fun of the game began to gradually show. The newly produced robot in the game can't do anything, which requires the player to write code instructions to teach the robot to do what the player wants it to do.

Taking into account the player's actual programming level, the game uses a visual programming scheme. That is, the player only needs to open the robot memory to read and write, and then personally demonstrate how to do one thing, the program will automatically write into the robot's memory, and then the robot can automatically do things according to the code written. It should be noted that the memory of the beginner robot is only 12KB, which means that the robot can only execute a maximum of twelve lines of code.

The idea of managing robots through code to do their labor is really innovative, and it's very appealing to players. The visual programming mechanism also greatly reduces the difficulty of getting started with the game, making the game experience more entertaining rather than boring and difficult real programming. The robot's memory limit requires the player to "write" without any delay as much as possible, which in addition to allowing the player to really feel the essence of writing code in the game to be concise, so that the gameplay of the game is also interesting because of the real.

When the player realizes the code to let the robot start working, it will be found that the robot can not achieve full automation. There are two root causes of the problem, the first is that the robot will gradually run out of power after working for a period of time, and the player needs to wind up the robot to make it continue to work; The second is the durability of the tools used. When the durability of the tools is exhausted, new tools need to be given to the robot, and the tools used by each robot are different because of the different division of labor. The player needs to give the appropriate tools to allow the robot to continue working.

After understanding the basic code instructions, how to make the robot fully automatic work is a new problem that the player needs to think about, and the different solutions to this problem will be an important standard to distinguish the player is an ordinary programmer or a good programmer. After all, in this game without any punishment mechanism, nothing the player does can be called wrong, only good and better.

The robot's initial 12 lines of instructions gradually began to fail to meet those more thoughtful programmers, so the game added some more advanced robots, such as some robots can store more lines of code, and some have a wider range of action, in addition to directly producing these more advanced robots, each robot also supports increased memory, action range and other expansion. All of these can help players direct a single robot to do more things and achieve more convenient automated operation in the game.

What supports players to keep streamlining code and upgrading robots is the game's rich construction system. As a planet with nothing but natural resources, players basically need to start production with simple tools such as axes and shovels, and gradually build up an industrial civilization like humans. In terms of construction content, the game is divided into eight different categories, and the vertical subdivision is countless. Large to the construction of houses and warehouses, small to the production of floors and clothes, human daily use is almost everything.

Rich buildable content including food, clothing, housing and transportation makes the building gameplay of this game seem very hardcore. The first is the construction of various workbenches, and when the construction of the workbench is completed and a variety of production begins, it is found that it is necessary to collect a variety of natural materials or to produce the necessary parts of other workbenches. Whether the player is manually producing, or using code to control the robot mass production will be a very hardcore game process.

If the player chooses his own manual production efficiency is slightly lower, and the more parts are needed in the later stage, this means that the need to rush back and forth in the production of various tables, plus some parts may need to be processed several times to obtain, which affects the production speed. If you use code to manage robot production, you need to think about how to deal with more parts in the limited memory capacity, and how to cooperate between different parts of production, how to write more efficient code will make players scratch their heads to scratch "bald".

However, when the game enters the middle and late stages, the game's repetitive and single drawbacks begin to gradually appear. After learning visual programming and thinking about the code that allows robots to automate production and construction, the gameplay of the game remains in the production of construction, and there is no new gameplay. Although players need to go out to find a variety of natural resources, but in terms of the actual experience does not bring new game experience, it is simply to find the resources they need, and then organize the robot to develop and produce. The single and repetitive gameplay makes the game gradually lose its appeal to the player after entering the middle stage, which is a shortcoming of the game.

In addition, although there will be day and night in the game, there will be different rain and lightning weather, but these changes in the climate have not caused any substantial changes in the gameplay. Robots are still working at all times, and trees are still growing wildly, so the climate change outside the game can't help but make players feel a little confused.

As an independent game, "Robot Colony" creatively brings the special gameplay of visual programming to the player, and indeed portrays this gameplay neatly and fits the work content of the programmer in reality, which is the commendable place of this work. Of course, the boring game experience exposed by the monotonous and repetitive gameplay in the later stage of the game can not be ignored, but fortunately, this does not prevent this game from becoming a highly distinctive simulation business work. To sum up, this work can still be called a work that cannot obscure the defects.