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.
“Xbox has its own lists,” Penn says, recalling the day Microsoft’s swear filter encountered Quarrel’s 130,000-word in-built Scrabble dictionary. “Cock, for example,” Penn recalls. “Well, we said, cock doesn’t have to mean penis. And we’re providing a definition, so surely that’s fine. ‘OK,’ they said. ‘But you can’t have train.’ ?! What the fuck? We can’t not have train. Apparently it’s a sex act. I hadn’t heard of it.
“Balls was on their list, though ball was fine.” Penn sighs. “It was a word game! We discussed things with them and, in the end, we got most stuff in. Balls got in. So did train.”
I’m sat with Penn at Gamescom as he whizzes around various Autonaut builds, showing me progressively more complicated systems constructed after more time with the game. We’ve now fast forwarded around 10 hours and it is absolutely no longer about teaching robots to chop down trees.