4 ms·

Zachtronics became auto-buy with me around the time of SpaceChem. Check out Infinifactory too for a different, yet familiar, feel. Zach Barth is like the nerd

Zachtronics became auto-buy with me around the time of SpaceChem. Check out Infinifactory too for a different, yet familiar, feel. Zach Barth is like the nerd whisperer. His games speak to me. Good guy, too: I've corresponded with him over something as pedestrian as Steam keys and he responded and solved it in mere minutes, if I recall.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
If you're a programmer, you owe it to yourself to check out Zach's games. They very much focus on the same skills: if you like one, you'll like the other.
- lfowles 10y ago
  They are all at amazingly different levels of abstraction too. This game is probably my next buy. I have to admit I saw it yesterday and dismissed it as "some amateur is making Yet Another Programming Game that's going to be unbalanced and unfun" until I saw it was Zachtronics.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Which is to say, "some expert making Yet Another Programming Game that's going to be unbalanced and extremely fun" Because let's face it, masochism is what programming is about.
    - lfowles 10y ago
      >Because let's face it, masochism is what programming is about. True, but Zach is good at pulling out a simple representative subset for each game. There's no arcane syntax for using registers vs IO in TIS-100 for example. It's just another dest/source that works with MOV. Then he adds something outlandish and gamey like adjacent core communication. I've played some other attempts at the programming masochism genre and they struck me as fiddly attempts to cram complexity into the instructions vs the problem.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        This is why I like ZT games more than other excercises in masochism like BrainFuck. They're ultimately more about using a simple, well-understood set of tools to solve difficult problems than they are about using a deliberately obstructive set of tools. The fact that the tools are so easy to understand is what draws me to it over real asm programming: nothing's worse than trying to solve a puzzle when you have the sneaking suspicion that there's a few pieces you're missing that would make your job easier if you were to only learn them. Let the complexity emerge naturally. Because it will. By the way, if you like ZT games, and haven't checked out the work of Eric Wastl (The Synacor Challenge, and The Advent of Code) you should do so immediately. It's not as fun now that everyone else has done it, but it's still a blast.
        lfowles 10y ago
        Funny you bring up Braunfuck, I've toyed with making a brainfuck game[0], but gave up because working with terminal IO is the pits .... [0]: https://github.com/lfowles/brainporn https://github.com/lfowles/brainporn
        thaumasiotes 10y ago
        > This is why I like ZT games more than other excercises in masochism like BrainFuck. They're ultimately more about using a simple, well-understood set of tools to solve difficult problems than they are about using a deliberately obstructive set of tools. I tend to feel the opposite way -- the games are written to be deliberately obstructive; that's why we call them "games". It gets frustrating pretty quickly. Spacechem is a series of exercises in writing Befunge. I don't see how that could be characterized any other way than as "obstructive for the sake of obstructive".
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        But they don't feel obstructive: allow me to put it like this: With many games of this sort, or with INTERCAL and Befunge, you are asked to build a device with broken, strange tools that don't work properly, and are designed to be as annoying as possible. The TIS instruction set, OTOH, is perfectly well designed and clear in how it works, it's just very primitive. This is akin to BF, but BF is so low level that it's far more irritating.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lfowles 10y ago
I'm still barely past the first set of multifactory stages in spacechem. Multithreading is hard.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

If you're a programmer, you owe it to yourself to check out Zach's games. They very much focus on the same skills: if you like one, you'll like the other.

lfowles 10y ago
They are all at amazingly different levels of abstraction too. This game is probably my next buy. I have to admit I saw it yesterday and dismissed it as "some amateur is making Yet Another Programming Game that's going to be unbalanced and unfun" until I saw it was Zachtronics.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Which is to say, "some expert making Yet Another Programming Game that's going to be unbalanced and extremely fun" Because let's face it, masochism is what programming is about.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    >Because let's face it, masochism is what programming is about. True, but Zach is good at pulling out a simple representative subset for each game. There's no arcane syntax for using registers vs IO in TIS-100 for example. It's just another dest/source that works with MOV. Then he adds something outlandish and gamey like adjacent core communication. I've played some other attempts at the programming masochism genre and they struck me as fiddly attempts to cram complexity into the instructions vs the problem.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      This is why I like ZT games more than other excercises in masochism like BrainFuck. They're ultimately more about using a simple, well-understood set of tools to solve difficult problems than they are about using a deliberately obstructive set of tools. The fact that the tools are so easy to understand is what draws me to it over real asm programming: nothing's worse than trying to solve a puzzle when you have the sneaking suspicion that there's a few pieces you're missing that would make your job easier if you were to only learn them. Let the complexity emerge naturally. Because it will. By the way, if you like ZT games, and haven't checked out the work of Eric Wastl (The Synacor Challenge, and The Advent of Code) you should do so immediately. It's not as fun now that everyone else has done it, but it's still a blast.
      - lfowles 10y ago
        Funny you bring up Braunfuck, I've toyed with making a brainfuck game[0], but gave up because working with terminal IO is the pits .... [0]: https://github.com/lfowles/brainporn https://github.com/lfowles/brainporn
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        > This is why I like ZT games more than other excercises in masochism like BrainFuck. They're ultimately more about using a simple, well-understood set of tools to solve difficult problems than they are about using a deliberately obstructive set of tools. I tend to feel the opposite way -- the games are written to be deliberately obstructive; that's why we call them "games". It gets frustrating pretty quickly. Spacechem is a series of exercises in writing Befunge. I don't see how that could be characterized any other way than as "obstructive for the sake of obstructive".
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        But they don't feel obstructive: allow me to put it like this: With many games of this sort, or with INTERCAL and Befunge, you are asked to build a device with broken, strange tools that don't work properly, and are designed to be as annoying as possible. The TIS instruction set, OTOH, is perfectly well designed and clear in how it works, it's just very primitive. This is akin to BF, but BF is so low level that it's far more irritating.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

lfowles 10y ago

I'm still barely past the first set of multifactory stages in spacechem. Multithreading is hard.