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[OK, so I hit send too soon...]
cheap. But I've become utterly addicted to it.
So what is it? Well, basically it's a computer game about computer
programming. That's essentially what it comes down to.
Describing exactly how to play the game is like trying to explain
exactly how tetris works. It's a simple enough idea, but there's a
surprising number of bits you need to explain for it to make sense.
Basically you design reactors. A reactor is basically a robot for moving
atoms around. You have an infinite supply of input molecules, and you
have to construct a specified quantity of a specified type of output
molecule.
You control the reactor by building a kind of train track. When you hit
the start button, a cursor drives down the track. You can put various
command nodes on the track, and when the cursor reaches them, the
commands execute. There are commands for picking up or dropping atoms,
rotating them, making or breaking chemical bonds, and so forth.
All of this /would/ be pretty easy, except that the game works on a
grid. The grid is pretty coarse, and you can only put one command per
grid square. You also can't lay a track that goes through the same
square twice in the same direction. There are two different colours of
track, so you can visit a square twice. But if you need to visit it
three times... the design becomes very, very tricky.
Therein lies the puzzle. Sometimes you can rotate a molecule so that a
particular atom ends up on the same square twice even though the cursor
doesn't. Sometimes you can use one track to move the molecule and the
other track just to generate control signals to script the first track.
And sometimes you have to do something even more devious to find a solution.
Having come up with this concept - build a robot that transforms
chemicals - they could have just kept giving you harder and harder
assignments. But I've been playing it for a day or two now, and every
few levels they add something new and interesting. For example, a sensor
that lets you conditionally branch depending on what kind of atom is
detected.
Initially you work on building a reactor. But each reactor has up to two
inputs and two outputs, and only a limited number of grid squares. Later
levels give you multiple ins and outs, and you have to design and
connect together multiple reactors. The initial inputs and final outputs
are stipulated; what the intermediate stages should be is up to you. On
top of that, molecules pile in in the pipelines between reactors, and
enough of a backlog can bring a reactor to a halt. All of which adds an
edge of economy management flavour to the game as well. Sometimes
getting one reactor to run as fast as possible can be critical, so
there's program optimisation in there too.
The sound is pretty poor, the graphics are cheesy but functional. The
game does have the occasional glitch where I don't think it did what it
should have done. (And I'd love to stop it trying to install the .NET
framework every time I launch it!) It's frustrating that if there's an
error, the whole network resets itself and you can't inspect it to see
what went wrong. (Especially annoying for networks that only fail after
several bazillion iterations!)
However, in spite of all these flaws, I just can't put this game down.
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On 5/3/2011 8:47 AM, Invisible wrote:
> [OK, so I hit send too soon...]
>
>
>
> cheap. But I've become utterly addicted to it.
[...]
> However, in spite of all these flaws, I just can't put this game down.
Ooh... Thanks for that. I need something to get my mind off things.
--
~Mike
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On 03/05/2011 02:47 PM, Invisible wrote:
> cheap. But I've become utterly addicted to it.
>
> So what is it? Well, basically it's a computer game about computer
> programming. That's essentially what it comes down to.
It's a game where you program robots to construct chemical molecules.
That's basically it.
On the other hand, if you did this with any half-decent programming
language, it would be really easy. (That's kind of the purpose of a
*good* programming language - to make stuff easy.) So, suffice it to
say, you have to write these programs using a crappy language, and some
of the puzzles require utterly violating any semblance of modularity,
maintainability, or reliability. I almost wonder if being an expert
programmer is actually a *disadvantage*. ;-)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On 09/05/2011 19:48, Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
>> I almost wonder if being an expert
>> programmer is actually a *disadvantage*. ;-)
>
> In that case you shouldn't have any problem.
Warp is a programmer who writes computer games.
SpaceChem is a computer game where you write programs.
And in Soviet Russia, computer programs YOU! Or something.
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