a deep deep well
Creates a constant feeling that if you’re doing it yourself you’re probably doing it wrong, which isn’t entirely pleasant, but I suppose that’s true for any programming – someone’s done this before and we’re just ignorant of it and making it up as we go
They’ve updated this game to make piston arms cost 40 and to disqualify solutions that don’t loop indefinitely after reaching the goal. (I only have one like that.)
With these changes, they are also going to reset all scores within the next few days. So I guess anyone who cares about the leaderboards will have to run all machines again. I don’t think I saved all of mine, but sometimes just kept editing to go for a different approach.
It’s better than what I did, which was shrug and go for smallest area instead.
Do people think this game will work for those who just want a solution no matter how needlessly complicated it may end up, or does it really depend on wanting to go back and try to optimize one’s previous solutions? I ask as while I managed to eventually complete Spacechem I never really felt much of a desire to go fiddle with old designs to make them more efficient.
Now those puzzles eventually became so insane that it’d take hours to get through one and by that point any amount of replayability became a very distant secondary concern. I have no real context to the puzzles shown here but from afar they don’t seem dramatically difficult to just get any old solution for (they may also be very early ones, again no real context). It may just be the nature of this kind of friendly competition thread to focus on this part of the game, but I’m curious if those here feel that this is just a pleasant side bonus or if this is the real meat of the experience, if simply just playing through each puzzle one time straight to the end would still be fine or rather meh.
You can def just play through them just to complete them and be done.
It’s perfectly alright to just aim for a solution, no matter how rube goldberg it gets. There’s enough meat in there for that type of problem solving.
It helps that there is essentially infinite space to work in.
Yeah, I have definitely had some ones that were rube goldberg as fuck, but that is kinda the fun of it sometimes?
I really liked this one I made tonight though. There’s something just really satisfying in watching things come together.
It’s there for aesthetic purposes, obviously.
If you finish this game while it’s still in early access, you can get a patch for basically just the price of shipping. I completed the last puzzle (though probably not very efficiently) and ordered the patch. I don’t really collect patches, but I have unexpectedly received two others within the past month and figured I might as well get this one, too. (The other two were for pre-ordering the second Deep Dark Fears book and for having a subscription to Hi Fructose magazine.)
Yeah, I did that in my…um…questionable copy this morning, and then my unemployment check came though, so now I can actually legit get that.
Also I vary wildly compared to scores on my friends list. I beat wourme sometimes on cycles, other times I do not. IDNGAF about that money though. SPEND IT ALL FOR SPEEEEEEED.
Also I beat my previous Invisible Ink by 2 cycles, fuck yeah. LOOK AT THAT MONEY!
Also @VastleCania, shoot me a friend request on the Steams.
beat it for the second/official time today. This game just works in my brain the way the other Zachtonics games have not and that is awesome.
They just nerfed the Piston Arm in the last update. Now its 40g instead of 30g.
Only matters if you care about costs, but I am all about them cycles.
The annoying thing about this change is that an area approach can no longer double as a cost approach in most cases.
They reversed the other change that they’d made at the same time, so a solution once again counts if it will not loop indefinitely.
if you go for the beta campaign, this is the easier zachtronics game by far. you have plenty of space for bad solutions. i hope they do some extra challenges by the end of it.
maybe theres a second campaign, like infinifactory.
comparison:
Yeah, cycles is clearly the endgame here.
Im now focusing only on cost and area. Still waiting for some quality of life update that adds subroutines to the arms instructions to tackle cycles.
The latest update reset all the scores. However, there is a button in the menu that runs all of your solutions again in about a minute (total) and records the scores anew.
