Human Resource Machine is a game about writing programs that make a little person do stuff. Every level has a new task, and the initial tasks start out very easy, and then the difficulty builds up. The final level has you writing a sorting routine in a programming language.
The programming language is a bit like assembly, for a computer with a single register. The primitives are similar to assembly too, 'jump if zero', for example, along with indirect addressing in later levels. If you know assembly, you might have to adjust to the style: you cannot increment a register, only memory locations.
Leaving the technicalities aside, it has beautiful music, it has a compelling storyline, and the puzzles are engaging and fun. The levels in the end get difficult, and you might lose interest in solving them.
The levels are a beauty, it works great on Linux.
The most fascinating thing for me was to watch its adoption on Steam. The game was made five years ago, and about 12% of the players have finished the main plot. This is incredible. That means one in ten people who bought the game have solved the toughest challenge in the main story. That is not the toughest challenge, which is prime factorization. I still haven't solved that one.
It is made by the same folks who brought us World of Goo and Little Inferno. As is the case, their plot has a sub-text that continues on this game as well.
Buy the game, you won't regret it. Here's my solution of the last level: and you can see how the main game works. You get letters or numbers at the IN line on the left, your man processes them, and then puts them in the OUT line on the right. The floor is numbered, and that's the main memory. The program you wrote is along the right side of the screen. In the video, the zero-terminated lists are being sorted using a naive insertion sort. And once they are fully sorted, they are output (smallest to largest) in the OUT line. Then the little man sets up the memory and inputs more lists.
The programming language is a bit like assembly, for a computer with a single register. The primitives are similar to assembly too, 'jump if zero', for example, along with indirect addressing in later levels. If you know assembly, you might have to adjust to the style: you cannot increment a register, only memory locations.
Leaving the technicalities aside, it has beautiful music, it has a compelling storyline, and the puzzles are engaging and fun. The levels in the end get difficult, and you might lose interest in solving them.
The levels are a beauty, it works great on Linux.
The most fascinating thing for me was to watch its adoption on Steam. The game was made five years ago, and about 12% of the players have finished the main plot. This is incredible. That means one in ten people who bought the game have solved the toughest challenge in the main story. That is not the toughest challenge, which is prime factorization. I still haven't solved that one.
It is made by the same folks who brought us World of Goo and Little Inferno. As is the case, their plot has a sub-text that continues on this game as well.
Buy the game, you won't regret it. Here's my solution of the last level: and you can see how the main game works. You get letters or numbers at the IN line on the left, your man processes them, and then puts them in the OUT line on the right. The floor is numbered, and that's the main memory. The program you wrote is along the right side of the screen. In the video, the zero-terminated lists are being sorted using a naive insertion sort. And once they are fully sorted, they are output (smallest to largest) in the OUT line. Then the little man sets up the memory and inputs more lists.