CHR$(143)

CHR$(143)

I started writing this review but got distracted and kept playing it.

Its pretty challenging but learning and overcoming a level gives a good level of satisfaction, but do be prepared to end up sitting on a level for an hour or so trying to learn whats going on slowly revealing all the intricate parts especially on the fog of war levels.

If you enjoy logic puzzles and perhaps a lil logic coding CHR143 is more than worth the asking price.

Real player with 101.4 hrs in game


Read More: Best Automation 2D Games.


CHR$(143) is an absolutely mystifying game. Behind its retro drapery in the style of the Amstrad CPC (a computer both slightly before my time and popular on the wrong continent altogether) is a construct that tears apart the modern rubric for successful games.

The result is something that is equally wondrous and maddening. The sense of discovery experienced here is something unlike anything I have experienced since the original Portal. New gameplay elements will be introduced that will come totally out of left field - once you’re out of those tutorial levels, how will they work, how will they behave, especially in a strange and quirky physics implementation? It will be on you to find out - this game demands you to experiment!

Real player with 50.4 hrs in game

CHR$(143) on Steam

Dreamjob: Programmer

Dreamjob: Programmer

Dreamjob: Programmer is a super easy and fun way to get you started with programming. With hundreds of missions, each one carefully adjusted to your level of expertise with coding, you will get into the shoes of a real programmer! Soon you will know how to create and monetize enough assets to buy a home, an exclusive yacht, or even a private island! Each place can be decorated by items you buy in a sim-shop and many of them may be enchanted by your code, making them uniquely interactive. As your programming skills keep getting better, you can change your life - earn more money, perform more difficult tasks, and become a real IT guy!

Making a long story short - if you are looking for a good coding learning game, Dreamjob: Programmer is the perfect match!

Learn programming from zero!

Start your adventure with the simplest approach to programming ever created: Visual Scripting Editor. Place and connect the proper blocks to create programs. The concepts you learn here will help you learn real programming in languages like Python, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and more! Smooth and fun gameplay in our coding game will make you have a great time while learning.

Gain XP and learn new skills!

Starting with the legendary “Hello world” program, you will solve more and more complex tasks and acquire new skills that will let you understand real programming concepts like:

  • Math and logical operations

  • Conditional statements

  • Loops

  • Arrays and dictionaries

  • …and many, many more!

Upgrade your hardware

Earn lots of cash by solving more and more prestigious jobs. Upgrade your computer, monitor, mouse, seat, desk, and the whole place you live in! All this to play and learn even more efficiently.

Program anything!

Have a hot coffee every day at 8 AM, program a toaster to give you fresh toasts at 10 AM, and make lights turn red when someone is approaching your home! In Dreamjob: Programmer game you can change the world around you.

Get some actual Python source code working!

Besides solving tasks with the visual editor, you will have the opportunity to try yourself with the actual Python source code. And, by doing so, to launch a rocket to outer space. How cool is that? Our coding learning game has two endpoints - teach you to program and keep you entertained!

Why should you give Dreamjob: Programmer a shot?

In today’s world, the work of a programmer is associated with prestige, performing interesting tasks, and good money. No wonder so many people want to learn to code. After deciding to give it a shot, they often ask themselves - how to start? Buy an expensive course? Enroll in college? Well, there is a much cheaper and easier way. Dreamjob: Programmer will let you understand the world of programming. Thanks to our coding learning game you will understand how it works - starting from simple, basic issues, ending at complex, rewarding tasks.

Dreamjob: Programmer is a programmer’s career sim / code learning game. Inspired by The Sims, Monument Valley, and Minecraft.


Read More: Best Automation Education Games.


Dreamjob: Programmer on Steam

Blub Emporium

Blub Emporium

This game is truly unique, colourful, and bubbly (or I guess you could say blubbly ;))

While playing through this game, the first thing I noticed was the vibe it gave when I was watching the emporium sell, the blubs buying items or sitting down, maybe even playing on an arcade; It is really something else, especially with the soundtrack adding to it; It sounds relaxing and ambient, yet it sounds like there’s a powerful meaning behind every song.

I also find that the factory is super fun! It’s puzzles are very challenging, but very possible; Meaning it has a very nice balance! The Farm has a lot more depth than most would initially expect with how you can harvest items and whatnot, you can even automate some parts of it! :O

Real player with 186.5 hrs in game


Read More: Best Automation Casual Games.


I’ve played a few hours and it’s very fun :)

Really cute aesthetic which is a blast to decorate, a relaxing farm which is super therapeutic, and (my favourite) a really interesting factory which plays just like a puzzle game! (with a ton of potential to improve at, optimise, and experiment with).

This game is a perfect example of being worth more than the sum of it’s parts, and there’s something in it for everyone - it’s not the sort of game I would normally play, but so far I’ve had a blast, and look forward to playing more (THERE IS SO MUCH CONTENT O.O)

Real player with 157.3 hrs in game

Blub Emporium on Steam

ComPressure

ComPressure

One of the best zach-like games to exist thus far; A perfect rendition of simple rules leading to complex interactions. The retro pixel art and story featuring historically accurate rock star scientists lends itself well to a fun and engaging game about building the worlds first analog computer. The developer is active and responsive, adding more content fairly frequently, and the community is already both friendly and competitive.

10/10, would request lewd etchings again

Real player with 395.8 hrs in game

First and foremost: This is a positive review.

I’m unable to beat this game however (PEBKAC) though, so I’m going to caution prospective players:

This game is HARD, and the tests in each level are NOT comprehensive, nor will they give the same results when run individually versus the ‘run all tests’ results. It’s VERY possible to make solutions which pass in test-all but fail on every single test when run individually. Chasing the test scores can easily box you into a dead-end solution path.

The test score results are NOT an actual metric for how usable parts you design are, and almost every part is meant to be used later after it’s made, without any clear description of errors compounding or what to watch out for.

Real player with 16.5 hrs in game

ComPressure on Steam

Making it Home

Making it Home

Pillbug interactive keeps improving with every new title. A very bizzare and unique game.

Great soundtrack and background watercolor art made by some talented people. Game contains a surprisingly mature story despite what the artstyle would suggest, but it’s skippable if it’s not your cup of tea.

The developers have been very nice and receptive to feedback during development. If the game looks interesting to you, and you want to shape the future of where it goes, I highly recommend joining in on early access and talking with them on discord. :D

Real player with 120.2 hrs in game

Is it a platformer? Is it a sandbox? Is it an optimisation puzzle?

Yes! and it keeps growing and developing in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

Build your vessel, mario all over it to get coins, use coins to make a grander vessel, and all against the clock.

Depending on your style, maybe the vehicle operates itself, maybe it’s 100m tall, maybe it’s 100m long, maybe you can use your melee 20XX skillz to go even faster than automation allows?

Real player with 56.3 hrs in game

Making it Home on Steam

Factory Defense

Factory Defense

Jabo sends an expedition of humanoid robots to a planet identical to Earth for the purpose of taking it over and building a huge industrial factory there. But it’s not all that simple, because not only does Jabo want to take over the planet, the rival company Toady has similar plans. Toady regularly sends assault ships to land their troops to drive their competitors off the planet and destroy their factory. Your task is to protect the factory at all costs and take over the planet!

RESEARCH

Earn experience by killing enemies, Pump up your research tree to get more powerful weapons! Send resources to your company with the railgun to get new mechanisms and buildings! Explore the open world and find various components!

DEFEND

Set up turrets, artillery, air defenses and other defensive structures, devise tactics, team up with your friends, pick up your weapons and destroy the enemy!

BUILD

You’ll have to build various mechanisms to create the items you need to evolve. Over time you will unlock new, more complex structures and items, so you will have to expand your factory and think carefully about its design.

Factory Defense on Steam

Loop Knight

Loop Knight

(6/23/2021)

There’s… not much to the game right now, really. Story mode has two levels which are extremely short, and there’s an endless mode as well as a hell (hard) mode.

Your guy walks forward, you build ramps as he goes, or you destroy the ramps with lasers if you don’t need them.

Gameplay feels a bit clunky, I think being able to stay zoomed out while playing would help. I would prefer the guy to be a bit faster, but gravity a bit lighter (less realistic).

Sound and music are decent, and graphics are pretty good. Game also lags a bit, probably needs to be optimized.

Real player with 0.1 hrs in game

Loop Knight on Steam

shapez.io

shapez.io

This is a great game! Two thumbs up!

Now, this is definitely a puzzle game in the vein of games like Factorio where you have to create long complicated conveyor belts to connect various shapes and colors together to create outputs of ever-increasing form. Unlike other games in this genre, including the previous game made by Tobspr, this is just what it is. There’s no monsters, aliens or zombies at night: you just have to build ever-more-complicated shapes to unlock various upgrades and to win the various levels. It’s very relaxing in a zen sort of way as there’s no way to fail: at worst you build a slightly wrong shape and can adjust the various cutting and rotating widgets as necessary.

Real player with 170.2 hrs in game

First, ignore my play time - I have in the region of 40+ hours of playtime racked up from the itch.io version.

Shapez.io is a logistical conveyor-belt game much in the same vein as Factorio or Factory Town, but with an element of puzzle about it in that you must manufacture different shapes using a mixture of cutting tools, rotation and paint in your factory processes (anyone who’s ever played the excellent Flash series Factory Balls will be instantly at home, and for anyone who hasn’t yet, you know what you need to do after downloading and playing shapez.io)!

Real player with 119.7 hrs in game

shapez.io on Steam

Contraption Maker

Contraption Maker

I used to like this game. A lot. I won firts place in one of their contests, and second place in another. For which I received reward in the form of steam games. Contraption maker is a great example of a game that never stops growing. Even now, they keep adding new content to it.

But… things havetemporarily changed.

Top Meadow and Game Dev Castle took over the development and publishing of the game, and I get the feeling that they don’t really care about the game itself anymore. They look at things from a rather business perspective which is bad for this type of game’s health. I am talking about DLC packs, and the fact that they ruin this game’s fun of uploading and sharing contraptions, puzzles and mods.

Real player with 205.6 hrs in game

If I think about my earliest days of video gaming, back before I got into my classic platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog, the title that stands out to me the most (amidst many education-focused games) was The Incredible Machine. A game that tests your ingenuity to solve puzzles, and your imagination to create them. Many of my fondest gaming memories from those days came from T.I.M. I got this game when it was in alpha, and the fact that I got to play any part in this game’s development, even just by messing around with the parts and reporting bugs, is something truly special to me.

Real player with 37.8 hrs in game

Contraption Maker on Steam

Craftica

Craftica

Craftica: Building Your Wonderland

Craftica is a creative sandbox game with ultra high degrees of freedom for building. It supports deformable voxels and subvoxels at multiple scales so that smooth objects can be built in realistic scales, and makes it possible to build very elegant architectures.

Craftica provides a large number of electronic and mechanical as well as other related device items, allowing players to build sophisticated circuits and circuit-controlled electronic and mechanical devices. Players can even build vehicles, aircrafts, robots and computers etc. high-tech objects from items as basic as logical gates.

Deformable Voxel and Subvoxels

In Craftica the basic voxel is a full cube and the subvoxels are partial cubes with one or more corner chopped off.

The voxels and subvoxels are deformable, and can be made more round or less round by hammer tools.

The support of deformable voxels and subvoxels in Craftica makes it possible to create much smoother objects in this game than in other voxel-based sandbox games.

Also the voxel and subvoxels in Craftica are supported at multiple size levels, so that fine structures can be represented at a scale comparable to the real world.

As an example, Craftica has very good support for East Asian architectures, and includes a large number of standard structures with East Asian architecture styles.

In Craftica, subvoxels are also used to smooth the procedurally generated terrain. And terrain and objects imported from Minecraft Schematic files are also smoothed using subvoxels.

Smart Placement of Blocks and Items

Craftica is designed to allow intuitive construction of objects using subvoxels, and supports consistent operations for placing basic blocks (voxels and subvoxels) and items.

Craftica also supports rule-based placement. When an object item is being placed near another object, if there is a predefined rule to determine a proper placement for the object in relative the other, the rule will be used to calculate the proper placement location and orientation.

In-Scene Crafting

Item crafting in Craftica can be done in the scene, using formulas that are structural and intuitive.

Device Items

Craftica provides a number of standard mechanical and electronic device items that can be used to build complex circuit as well as machines that can be controlled by circuits.

Circuits in this game emulates those in the real world with great simplifications. Like circuits in the real world, Craftica uses physical connection between components to construct functional circuits. These circuits are mainly powered by electric energy and driven by data exchanges.

(See the documentation included in the game for more information)

Village

In Craftica worlds, some places are generated with villages. Each village is generated with a few houses and at least one workshop and one defensive fort or tower, and spawns with at least one warrior to defend the village.

The relationship between a village and a player is characterized by affinity. Affinity can be zero, positive or negative, indicating a neutral, friendly or hostile relationship.

The affinities between villages and player(s) are initialized randomly. Normally, there will be more neutral villages than friendly and hostile ones, and more friendly ones than hostile ones. Their actual percentages may vary according to game modes and difficulty levels.

Trade

When a positive affinity reaches certain levels, the player will have free access to some village structures and storages (different structures and storages may have different affinity thresholds). And when a negative affinity reaches a certain level, the village warrior will actively attack the player.

Trading with villagers or defending the village against hostile mobs will improve the affinity between the player and the village. On the other hand, attacking villagers will deteriorate the affinity.

Survival

In survival mode, barbarians and other hostile mobs will be generated. They will attack the player and villages. The only way to survive is to fight back or run!

Model Importing

In addition to the creative and survival modes, Craftica supports an experimental development mode. In this mode, the player can import external models into the game worlds.

The player can either choose a Minecraft Schematic file (currently only .schematic file is supported, .schem file will be supported the upcoming updates) to import when creating a new game in the development mode:

Or import .obj 3D model files (importing Schematic files within a game will also be supported in the future) within a game in the development mode:

Craftica on Steam