Programming is my career. I didn’t find the leaderboards very challenging; I especially noticed this in Opus Magnum, which I partially blame on them picking boring optimization targets. I typically picked one category to optimize on my first play of the level, and often tied the best score for that category on my first try.
Your realization that the fastest cycle time would be limited by the max input or output speed is something that I figured out immediately; once you’re aware of it, reaching that cap is basically just a matter of parallelization. Hitting the exact best possible “warm-up” time to produce the first output wasn’t completely trivial, but getting in the top bucket of the histogram was usually a breeze for me.
Optimizing cost is even simpler. You can put a lower bound on the cheapest possible cost by listing the obviously-necessary components (e.g. if the output has a bond that the inputs don’t then you need at least one bonder), then calculating the shortest possible track that will allow a single arm to use all of those, then checking whether it’s cheaper to replace the track with an extending arm instead. As far as I can recall, I didn’t find a single level where it was difficult to hit that lower bound once I’d calculated it; doing the entire level with only 1 arm is sometimes a bit tedious but it’s not actually complicated.
Doing the minimum-cost solution will usually get you very close to the minimum-size solution automatically, since you’ve already crammed everything around one arm. This is probably the hardest category if you want to be literally optimal, but I was often in the top bucket by accident.
I think they should have had players optimize for something like “rental cost” where you pay for (components + space) multiplied by running time, so that you have to compromise between the different goals instead of just doing one at a time.
Wow, that sounds like those games really were way too easy for you. That said, after reading your comment, I can’t help but think that you’re obviously not the target audience for these games. A popular programming-style game marketed at gamers was unlikely to challenge a career programmer, otherwise it would’ve never gotten popular in the first place. For people like you, maybe code competition websites are more suitable?
That’s definitely not Zachtronics, at least any of the games I’ve played. If that game exists it would be pretty awesome—although probably even more niche than Zachtronics games (which weren’t too niche to support the makers for a decade+, granted).
Programming is my career. I didn’t find the leaderboards very challenging; I especially noticed this in Opus Magnum, which I partially blame on them picking boring optimization targets. I typically picked one category to optimize on my first play of the level, and often tied the best score for that category on my first try.
Your realization that the fastest cycle time would be limited by the max input or output speed is something that I figured out immediately; once you’re aware of it, reaching that cap is basically just a matter of parallelization. Hitting the exact best possible “warm-up” time to produce the first output wasn’t completely trivial, but getting in the top bucket of the histogram was usually a breeze for me.
Optimizing cost is even simpler. You can put a lower bound on the cheapest possible cost by listing the obviously-necessary components (e.g. if the output has a bond that the inputs don’t then you need at least one bonder), then calculating the shortest possible track that will allow a single arm to use all of those, then checking whether it’s cheaper to replace the track with an extending arm instead. As far as I can recall, I didn’t find a single level where it was difficult to hit that lower bound once I’d calculated it; doing the entire level with only 1 arm is sometimes a bit tedious but it’s not actually complicated.
Doing the minimum-cost solution will usually get you very close to the minimum-size solution automatically, since you’ve already crammed everything around one arm. This is probably the hardest category if you want to be literally optimal, but I was often in the top bucket by accident.
I think they should have had players optimize for something like “rental cost” where you pay for (components + space) multiplied by running time, so that you have to compromise between the different goals instead of just doing one at a time.
Wow, that sounds like those games really were way too easy for you. That said, after reading your comment, I can’t help but think that you’re obviously not the target audience for these games. A popular programming-style game marketed at gamers was unlikely to challenge a career programmer, otherwise it would’ve never gotten popular in the first place. For people like you, maybe code competition websites are more suitable?
I suppose I was hoping for a programming-based puzzle game, with some new clever insight required to solve each level, rather than pure programming.
That’s definitely not Zachtronics, at least any of the games I’ve played. If that game exists it would be pretty awesome—although probably even more niche than Zachtronics games (which weren’t too niche to support the makers for a decade+, granted).