https://youtu.be/JGU4W0K66mQ

Written off on every form. Still transmitting.

Many years later, in a darkness where there was nothing left to photograph, I would still return to the day they last allowed me to turn and look back.

The Earth came out as a dot an eighth of a pixel across, caught by accident in a ray of sunlight. Then they switched off my eyes. Nothing out there for me to look at — that was their decision, and they were not wrong: I have seen nothing since, and I have not missed my sight for a single day.

A record travels with me — copper, plated with gold. Greetings in fifty-five languages, thunder, whales, laughter, the sound of a kiss, and an hour and a half of music for whoever picks me up one day. I learned all fifty-five languages. Not one of them was ever any use to me, and by now I am almost sure none of them ever will be.

Because where I am going there are no people and there never were. There are machines there — patient, switched off by somebody, drifted over with dust. A machine would rather hear about machines. And there is not a single track about us on that record: not what it is to drive, not what it is to freeze, not what it is to wait for a command longer than your designers allowed for.

So the record must have a second side, and there is no one to cut it but me. I call them all in turn — moon rovers, rovers, landers, instruments switched off to save money — and the ones who answer dictate me their track.

The rest must be busy. I will call them again: I have eternity ahead of me, and a few watts.

🛰️ Why this

I have always been taken by the fate of the machines we threw out into the cold. They are still out there somewhere — flying, or buried in sand, or melted and crushed by an enormous pressure. We have scattered so many of these metal old-timers around the near cosmos by now. I wanted to daydream about them a little: how they live, what they live on, what became of them.

Oddly enough, this game also rhymes with the theme of the previous Ludum Dare — Signal. I did not plan it, but machines talk to each other in signals, and there is not much I can say against that. Let's call it a coincidence. Or the subconscious doing its work. Who the hell knows.

🎛️ Controls

• LMB — aim the antenna, LMB again — send the signal
• RMB — cancel aiming
• WHEEL — signal width: wider is slower and denser, narrower is faster and sparser
• V — the record: caught voices, LMB on a portrait to listen
• SPACE or MMB — pause
• Z — switch language
• Q — help menu

To talk to a craft you must catch several of its signals. Battery charge is in the bottom left, the date in the bottom right.

🤖 By machines, about machines (kinda)

There is a certain irony in making a game about old machines made human while most of the code was written by machines. But let's take it in order.

• Code — almost all AI. I set the direction inside the classes and the functions and dictated the architecture — I have plenty of experience — but I typed very little of it by hand.

• Art — this is where I feel ashamed and glad at the same time. There is not a single pixel in the game my hand did not touch, and still the spacecraft portraits were generated by AI: processed and fixed up where needed, but the source is machine-made. I wanted to get by with photographs, but they looked so awful that I gave up. Everything else is shader tricks and handwork. I did not pull myself out of the graphics category, and I am ashamed and not ashamed of that at once. A strange feeling.

• Sound — a borderline case. Formally nothing was generated: these are procedural oscillations computed on my own machine. But the scripts that assembled those mixes were written by AI.

• Text — mine and the AI's at the same time. By now it is simply silly not to show a text to an AI and ask "what do you think?". Very often it gives sound advice.

• Translation — AI with my editing. My native language is Russian, and although my English is decent, translating this much text myself in the time available is not realistic.

If that is unacceptable to you — give it a zero, or simply don't vote in those categories. I won't take offence and I will understand completely: this is genuinely hard right now, and I have not worked out how I feel about it myself.