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<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nSeize power as the ruler of an empire of fuzzy cellular automata monsters!<\/p>\n
Inspired by Conway’s Game of Life<\/a>, Automata Empire challenges you to herd hundreds of mindless automata\u00a0to smash your rivals’ castles and steal their territory. Unlike a typical RTS, you don’t have direct control over your automata monsters\u00a0which\u00a0move on the grid according to specific rules. Instead, you sacrifice groups of your loyal subjects\u00a0to place buildings that influence their\u00a0movement. Roads creates paths that units must follow, taverns act like magnets which attract friendly and enemy units within a radius, catapults launch your monsters\u00a0across the map for fast expansion. You can also build walls to defend your territory and armorers\/arsenals to equip your units with shields and weapons.<\/p>\n Since your units function as\u00a0the construction resource, you have to manage your population. Expand too fast and you’ll run out of monsters. Fortunately, when two of your monsters move into the same grid cell, their numerical values add together. Once it gets to 5 or higher, they split, producing\u00a0one extra monster. Taverns facilitate this process, forcing monsters to keep splitting and recombining in a small area. Or you can engineer feedback loops on the grid by funneling your units into confined spaces where they’re more likely to combine.<\/p>\n When your units collide\u00a0with enemies, their values subtract from each other, killing the weaker unit. This makes it a challenge to keep your population stable while fending off attacks, catapulting\u00a0your units around the map and establishing new bases to keep producing more monsters. These mechanics are designed to teach players about feedback loops<\/a>\u00a0and how certain conditions can create rapid, non-linear changes in quantity. You can find more info about the game’s relationship with feedback loops in the Background section below.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n When I was a kid, I\u00a0played a\u00a0version of Conway\u2019s Game of Life<\/a> on\u00a0my first Windows 95 computer. It was nothing like the other games I\u2019d played; I was perplexed by its lack of stated objectives or win conditions. With each attempt to achieve some greater understanding of the game, I was confronted by the lack of any metrics to tell me if I was doing better or worse than I had before. This was very troubling to me as a child,\u00a0watching the cellular populations burble around the grid only to\u00a0suffer yet another extinction. When I was challenged to make a \u201cgrowth\u201d-themed game for the Indie Game Maker Contest 2015 game jam, I rediscovered those frustrating memories and set out to make an objective-based cellular automata game. While I ultimately abandoned Conway\u2019s binary alive\/dead cellular rules in favor of additive numerical\u00a0values, the themes of struggling to engineer sustainable populations and useful oscillators remain.<\/p>\n In the process, I discovered a new gameplay mechanic: feedback loops<\/a>. With the cellular reproduction tied to the automata’s numerical values, the challenge becomes herding the automata into positive feedback loops where each +1 increase in population feeds back into further increases in population. In the right conditions, this process is no longer a linear increase but an explosive growth. Feedback loops are important to understand because\u00a0many of the global threats to our species today\u00a0are driven by feedback loops. For instance, melting arctic ice both releases pockets of methane gas<\/a> trapped under the ice (which contributes to the greenhouse effect<\/a>) and exposes darker ground that absorbs more heat (raising the surface albedo<\/a>). Both of these outcomes contribute to rising surface temperatures, thereby increasing the rate at which the ice melts (a positive feedback loop), which again causes an acceleration of warming. Feedback loops are inherent not just to climate change, but also the migration\u00a0of invasive species, ecosystem collapse, and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I hope seeing this process in action in Automata Empire inspires people to learn more about the underlying principles of positive and negative feedback loops and how they affect our daily lives and our future.<\/p>\n
\nThe Features<\/h2>\n
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\nBackground<\/h2>\n
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