Quick Look: Human Resource Machine

I love stuff like this, but me iz dumm =(

yay

This game is awesome.

That is all.

Also if you thought this looked interesting, try TIS-100 on steam. It's another puzzle/programming game, a bit harder, but oh so satisfying.

I should probably just learn to program at this point instead of playing these dumb games.

i'm in an assembly language class now and this game just looks like work

No math.

I get my logic puzzles from Phoenix Wright

@itwastuesday: no, your class is actually a game :)

This looks cool, but I think TIS-100 did the concept better. Still, I might get around to playing this, too.

Instabuy (sucker for this kind of game). Too bad the WiiU version isn't out yet (apparently Oct. 29)

@vinny you can double click instructions instead of dragging them, which makes mouse control tolerable. As others are mentioning, you'd probably enjoy TIS-100 too

5:30 they already messed up. That COPYTO should be called MOVETO. The 1 square would have stayed in the inbox if it was an actual COPYTO. Working this way COPYTO is the same as COPY, so I guess they get a pass.

It's copy to because it stays in your hands. You can continue to put it elsewhere (the outbox or another square).

This is cooler than I expected , stopped watching 15 min in and I'm getting it whenever the wiiU version is out.

@lestephan: this Thursday in NA (and November in EU)

I'm minoring in computer science, so i have coded alot, but i would never say that it was ever "easy", for some people it is, but not me, so games like this are really cool because being able to apply what you've learned in a less intense atmosphere like a game is really enjoyable.

More people need a taste of coding though, because some people are just naturally inclined towards it. Someone who breezes through even a simple code game like this should look into studying this stuff.

edit: also this reminds me of assembly, especially the bit where you have to create every function because none are built in, and the jumps if not zero/equal. Someone code Rollercoster Tycoon in this game, get chris sawyer on the line.

I loved World of Goo back when, but felt rather burned by Little Inferno. Ugh, puns. Hopefully this game is more satisfying.

@zmilla: I was thinking this and it was driving me crazy. I get why they'd avoid calling it MOVETO since it seems unintuitive but calling it COPYTO when it's removing the original from memory is just confusing.

Edit: Watching further it seems that they're saying that the employee's hand is where the value is being copied from or to - that acts as a COPY does in real life, leaving the original behind. The inbox where things are being moved from is actually more like a stack, where values are being popped. It's still odd, but their thinking makes way more sense this way.

i realized about 10 minutes in that i actually DO understand this game, but Vinny, as much as i love him, was not doing a great job explaining things.

@stevewinwood: Been having the same thought lately. Check out visual scripting. Unreal Engine 4 has a visual scripting system they call Blueprint which is really easy to understand if you understand the flow of stuff. And if you can play this game, then you kinda do understand flow.

Also, Paris Games Week starts tomorrow. Media Molecule (Little Big Planet) is showing off Dreams there. That game is essentially a game creation package with eeeeverything. Sculpting, music, animation and an evolved version of the LBP logics. Seeing as you can make ridiiiculously complex things with the LBP tools themselves, having all of this available in a true 3D world.. Mind boggling.

Anyways.. I got carried away.. Game development tools are becoming so accessible at this point. Gets me all excited.

So many random access cells... This'll be muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch easier than TIS-100.

I really wanna watch a youtube lets play of John Carmack playing this. It'd only take him 5 minutes, but he'd talk enough to make it last 4 hours and it'd be greatness.

They need to replace the garbage 100 level Intro to Programming course where you draw a bunch of flowcharts instead of actually touching a computer (which seems to be present in some form at every community and junior college in the country) with something like this.

Get ur puzzle games outa ma country

I'm really bad at stuff like this so just watching vinny play this gives me a giant headache

This looks overwhelming!

These sorts of games are always so weird to me because they are FAR more like programming problems from a class than they are programming problems anywhere else, I think the end result is the opposite of what they intend. I assume its about making programming fun to learn or use for gameplay, but it actually makes it weirdly more complicated because real life programming problems are rarely so abstract unless you are really low level programming, and what you are trying to accomplish is usually extremely clear because you know what you are trying to do. It is a bit like the whole issue with math from textbooks vs using math in real life situations, the textbook always ends up making it harder to understand because its trying to abstract a reason why you need to solve the problem.

The style of the programming used really brings me back to wasting time in middle school programming stuff on my calculator though.

I've played both TIS-100 and this game, and Human Resource Machine ramps up the difficulty more gradually. All of the Zachtronics games—Spacechem, Infinifactory, TIS-100—get very difficult very quickly.

Math game? So it´s like Pathfinder? That´s what Karen told me...

Man, watching something do its thing is so, so satisfying. I wonder what it was like to program this game...

@kid_gloves:The Web site of the game has interesting technical information for computer science people. The computer is a "single-accumulator Harvard architecture" as opposed to a von Neumann architecture.

spaghetti code simulator

Zing

This reminds me of SpaceChem. I need to play that game again.

This reminds me of a simplified version of x86(Intel) assembly code. Also it sounds like Austin is having a panic attack watching this. Better at writing than math I presume?

this game makes me really thankful that actual modern programming has separate functions and loops and more specific conditions instead of *waves hands* THIS, like yr a guy using assembly on a fucking commodore 64 lol

I've been enjoying this a lot and the fact that it makes assembly fun.

This looks like a great intro to programming concepts. And it made me want to go out and write MIPS code again

I.. don't think I'm smart enough to play this.

Can't wait for this to hit iPad - watching this quick look almost made me crazy, I could visualize the steps in this game the same way I could visualize copying data into registers during my Motorola chipset programming class probably 10 years ago now. Very satisfying

@decoyoctopusx said:

Wow, that's exactly what this is; I'm taking a low level programming course right now that has us doing stuff with i86 Assembly code and stepping through it with the debugger to figure out what is in the register and memory.

This game basically looks like my homework made prettier.

I'd say this is much more accessible than TIS-100 for non-coders. TIS-100 is definitely hardmode Human Resource Machine.

That last problem Vinny solved i only realized what the code was doing after i saw it running a few times.

Pretty neat !

I love Kyle Gabler's stuff, ever since World of Goo. I'm glad to see he's still making stuff.

I've always liked games about programming. My favourite is Colobot which a great game about programming robots on alien worlds. I've always wanted to make a space business game about programming drones to find, harvest and process resources (and I've got some ideas about how I'd make it work).

I failed precal. This is giving me a panic attack.

Memories of assembly classes... *shudder*

Wait.... is this assembler for children? What kind of a demented human being made that? I remember the horrors of my first word processor... ooohhh... got the shivers again

This looks really great, but super daunting.

I just bought it, and it's actually a lot of fun, although the user-interface makes it confusing sometimes. Would be nice to see more of the "code" at the same time