Saturday 14 November 2015

Human Resource Machine - Review

Another game I've been looking at, and enjoying, is one I saw Jacksepticeye playing abysmally on YouTube, I'd been aware of the developers of this game for a while, through their game "World of Goo", though I missed their second title.

So I was happy to pick up this, the third, the first game I've seen being a puzzle style game, based around what is essentially programming.  It's a form of assembler almost, as you have to really think hard to move values to registers, and jump for the comparisons, this is not your higher level language style thing at all... I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and enjoying it immensely.


The premise is to complete the task, so initially this is just to carry everything from left to right, "input -> output" over and over... So level 1 is easy, but then you can "optimise" it, using less commands might be "Start:   Input  ->  Output:  Jump to Start".


You run this, and it take just those three commands, but it takes lots more steps than just going "input -> output, Input -> output"... Giving you the end result challenges...

 


You can step through the "program" for your little man, and you debug what you're doing, and it does actually teach some very good lessons, I've had to teach myself to be ruthless, as I find myself very much programming verbosely, copying to place to place to compare things, when I could just hold one copy and compare to a value already stored etc, it's hard work to get things right, but then it's even harder to get the optimised number of instructions, but then sometimes harder still to get the right number of optimised steps, you literally (like a compiler) optimised for speed, or optimise for size...


At £7, this has been a great buy, and the music is nice too.

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