Quick Look: Human Resource Machine

This seems like an infinitely more accessible Spacechem/TIS-100. I'm totally cool with that

On paper I should love these kind of games, But I think since programming is a big part of my job, I find it hard to play something like this.

Whenever I see games that involve light programming I get the itch to reopen one of my long-dead GameMaker projects.

I reckon you'd enjoy it. I'm a software developer myself. Bought this on the strength of the QL, and 100mins in, I can happily say the game is fantastic. "Casually taxing" would be a good way to describe it, I think.

Make a nice change of pace from phsysics-based "bridge builder" games :-)

I don't understand anything about this game.

Man this looks rad.

As a person who codes for a living (among other things), I don't understand people who love coding so much that they think it makes for a good game despite doing it enough in their daily lives to actually make a game.

This is a fun and infinitely more accessible than TS-100 (which becomes a real nightmare about halfway through, mostly due to it forcing you to think about parallel processing).

Hell no.

Why do the games from this company always have mind blowing background music in them?

I have no idea what the hell is going on. Programming is too much for my feeble brain but I can dig it in theory.

I stopped the video 30 minutes in to buy and start playing the game.

I played it for 4 hours without noticing the time.

I started at 2am.

For some reason Quadrilateral Cowboy still seems interesting to me. Do any of these "baby's first programming tool" games actually teach an idiot like me how to program, or do they all assume you at least have a basic knowledge of how things work?

Vinny's doing to Austin what he once did to Ryan with Archon.

Hah!

As a developer games like this always feel weird to me. I love my skillset but seeing it gamified feels... weird.

This looks fun. Why did I spend the weekend funning around with matlab when I could have been playing this?

That perspective is weirding me the hell out

Definitely want to see more stuff like this from Austin and Vinny. I love these kinds of quick looks. Maybe some extended coverage for a GB East Playdate?

After 2 hours of playtime, I can confirm that this game is amazing. World of Goo is one of my favorite games of all time, and this is quickly rising up there as well. I thought Little Inferno was dumb, but this more than makes up for it.

PLAY SPACECHEM

@cooljammer00 said:

I think most of the ones you've likely heard of do a pretty good job of teaching you the mindset needed to approach programming. As in, most programming could be conceptualized as really elaborate flowcharts passing along or modifying information in some way, like Human Resource Machine.

In practice, actual programming can get kinda fiddly because the syntax and commands you use are rarely intuitive. And most programming languages are not as visual as these games are, so when your code screws up, you have to painstakingly figure out why it's not running the way you want it to.

I like programming issues/concepts turned into more of a game form, but for me this is not taking it far enough. Math puzzles via simple programming like here and in TIS-100 are fun exactly once, for me that was in TIS-100.

So I would love it if people tried to do more with the whole "run program" style puzzle game by going further away from on-the-surface-programming. There are a lot of small browser games doing some of that and Spacechem(the best one), Infinifactory and Big pharma(to a minor extent from what I´ve heard) are the big ones, but I very much think there are a lot of different ways one can mix this stuff and there are places to go with it.

Noice Vinny!

lol my cousin is taking intro computer science classes in high school. now i know what to give him for christmas xD

also kudos to Vinny for using proper variable names like temp and count like a pro!

nope. cant even watch a quicklook of this. started giving me a headache at level 3. fuck this. im out.

Seems pretty cool, although I have a problem with them using "jump." I mean it's basically equivalent to a "goto" statement which is considered a terrible programming practice these days. They make code needlessly complicated. So take it with a grain of salt and don't go out trying to program like this.

Also the Fibonacci scale is much simpler than it looks. It just involves adding current number to the last number in the scale. ie. 0 + 1 = 1, then 1 + 1 = 2, then 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 3 = 5, then 5 + 3 = 8. etc.

As someone who does programming for a living, this was the single most frustrating quick look I've ever watched :)

Good job, guys. I'll definitely buy this because I really want to support these types of games.

I agree that it certainly seems like abstract problems that you will never do, but as I played through it, much of the stuff I came across I had an easier time with because I had done the same or a similar thing with recent projects, just in a different programming language.

When working at my menial retail job I always used to imagine how I could program a person/robot to do the job in the most efficient way. This looks like a lot of fun, certainly going to pick it up.

This is bringing back vivid terrors of me doing the Fib sequence in assembly.

I think Vinny and Austin get how the Fibonacci sequence works, but that puzzle is daunting because of the way the game makes you store and add and increment variables. What the puzzle asked for wasn't particularly hard to imagine, but it was maybe a little beyond the scope of this Quick Look to actually implement the code for it without accidentally overwriting the wrong variable in a variety of ways.

I feel like my small amount of programming experience actually works against me when I watch Vinny play this game, because I keep wanting to think of the puzzle solutions in terms of a for/while loop with the proper conditions, but that doesn't exist in their simplified list of commands. Instead, if you want to repeat lines of code you have to set up weird gotos all over the place, which is a practice that most programming teachers have discouraged so it's not a tool my brain even thinks to use when envisioning the algorithm to solve each puzzle.

Reminds me of scratch

https://scratch.mit.edu/

I get why it is the way it is, but having a "jump if zero" instead of a "jump if NOT zero" instruction makes loops really counter-intuitive, especially if you're using zeros as stop conditions.

Anyway, this looks cool! If I ever need to teach basic programming to anyone I know what to do already: just buy them this.

This game is meant to imitate assembly programming, where jump and jump if whatever are your bread and butter. Most high level languages don't even have a goto statement anymore.

This game looks super rad! The "String Storage Floor" assignment is basically how copying strings is implemented in C as well (if you ignore security considerations).

so um this seems like it would be work ...

Super cool, this is basically teaching you low-level Assembly code! I'm actually taking a Compilers class right now, where you learn the structures which semantically analyze and translate high-level code (stuff like C++ and Python) into low-level Assembly (that's in this game). It's an utterly fascinating process. Computer Science is one of the only majors around where I can actively encourage people: DO NOT SKIMP ON SENIOR YEAR! The BEST classes are only available at 4000+ level, and they're mind-blowingly cool.

Also, I should give honorable mention to SpaceChem. That's an awesome visual programming game that's a little more abstracted than this one; a lot of it is being efficient with spatially laying out your machine and timing your functionality.

This is exactly what I've come to expect from the Tomorrow Corporation. A fun, interesting and darkly comic game. Definitely will play this.

Man, I really wish I could enjoy this. I swear seeing this makes me wonder if I don't have an attention problem. As soon as I look at this I get confused and want to walk away.

Well, I liked my old Assembly classes and SpaceChem was pretty cool. So.

@darkstar614: I'd be interested to hear what you think the alternative to jump instructions for an assembly language should be.

Good point. Like you said, low level. Someone with zero programming knowledge could master this game, then be shown some programming tutorial based on how most programming is done and be totally clueless. It's like going through a computer science program and being like grrrr why do I have to take this one assembly course :). Yeah I know there are arguments for why it's good to at least be exposed to it, but for most people it's not the fun part.

@itwastuesday: Exactly my thought. I'm in assembly right now as well. Might have ruined the game for me lol. But for people who think this is a simplified version of programming, it is VERY similar to assembly.

I can't ever seem to get into these types of games. Feels more like work than play.

this game gets super hard. year 35 broke me for now.

the last puzzle kind of made me mad with how annoying it is to code this way. here, have a version of it in a better language :] :

#include <string>

#include <iostream>

int main() {

std::string input = "fuckyou";

char store;

for(int a = 0; a < input.length(); a++) {

for(int b = 0; b < input.length(); b++) {

if(input[b] > input[a]) {

store = input[a];

input[a] = input[b];

input[b] = store;

}

}

}

std::cout << input;

return 0;

}