HN Reader

I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.

I bounced off this game.

It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff.

You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why.

The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason?

Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys.

I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.

I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge.

When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops).

An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code.

[1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)

teaching optimization this way seems ideal

Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python.

The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option.

Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing.

I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures.

What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.

I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S...

Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did.

It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.

Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.

Is this Windows only?