Every second day of October Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated - to commemorate the famous English mathematician of the XIX century, and the first programmer in the world. To mark this occasion, we rounded up a party of games that are not only fun to play, but can teach you to think like a true engineer and feel like a tech wizard! Welcome to Programmer's Sale. Hello, world!
Zachtronics games are usually pretty good. Depending on how comfortable you are with coding etc. some of them are more “overtly programming-y” than others, so could be a better or worse fit.
TIS-100, Shenzhen IO, Exapunks all use (stylized) “assembly” languages.
SpaceChem, Magnum Opus and similar games are more drag and drop.
TIS-100 is meant to evoke sitting around hacking at weird, old hardware and has a whole story to it. It gets hard. I’ve spent less time on Shenzhen but it is basically the same gist - except now you’re an electronics designer, and the language works somewhat differently. Exapunks is “hacking”. Most games tend to feature the same kind of scoring allowing you to optimize your solution for speed/cost/space etc
Also a lot of them seem like Factorio clones. It’s not on sale (never is) but it’s reasonably priced and a very decent game with cool devs.
Thanks, I keep looking at factorio and wondering if it would like to be on sale for me. It would be good to have some more games I’ve never downloaded in my Steam library.
Factorio will never go on sale. Wube has said many times that puting the game on sale would be a slap in the face to those who crowdfunded the game before it launched.
The best time to buy Factorio was during the crowdfunded campaign. The second best time is now.
As a consession there is the free demo you can play to see if you like the game.
Zachtronics games are usually pretty good. Depending on how comfortable you are with coding etc. some of them are more “overtly programming-y” than others, so could be a better or worse fit.
TIS-100, Shenzhen IO, Exapunks all use (stylized) “assembly” languages.
SpaceChem, Magnum Opus and similar games are more drag and drop.
TIS-100 is meant to evoke sitting around hacking at weird, old hardware and has a whole story to it. It gets hard. I’ve spent less time on Shenzhen but it is basically the same gist - except now you’re an electronics designer, and the language works somewhat differently. Exapunks is “hacking”. Most games tend to feature the same kind of scoring allowing you to optimize your solution for speed/cost/space etc
Also a lot of them seem like Factorio clones. It’s not on sale (never is) but it’s reasonably priced and a very decent game with cool devs.
Thanks, I keep looking at factorio and wondering if it would like to be on sale for me. It would be good to have some more games I’ve never downloaded in my Steam library.
Factorio will never go on sale. Wube has said many times that puting the game on sale would be a slap in the face to those who crowdfunded the game before it launched.
The best time to buy Factorio was during the crowdfunded campaign. The second best time is now.
As a consession there is the free demo you can play to see if you like the game.
Spoiler: it would not. Good game, though.