Robo Instructus

The controls right off the bat are miserable. They don't make sense. It tells you to only use Left and Forward and yet your robot floats right for whatever reason. It's not intuitive.

Interesting game testing out your programming mindset for an evening or two.

I truly want to say thank you to a dev who listens to even the minority voices. Having a 'game' that allows those of us who also just want to build and explore do our thing? WOW! It really opens up a title to sandbox lovers, and also harder core gamers and adventurers. I wish all open world titles took that into consideration. I love that I can just play some good tunes and build some bases, mess around and relax in the Dev world creation. I think the user customized open world sandbox is a very viable genre still! I almost never buy a game for the 'gaming' aspect of the title. It's graphics, how much I can customize, and enjoyibility factor. Thanks again to this top notch dev! Still loving The Infected!

If you know what Dijkstra's algorithm is, you are probably the targeted public for this game. With this leetcode type of programming puzzles, I tend to prefer puzzle with an aesthetic about them: simple problem statement with an elegant solution that is hard to find and thus satisfactory to discover. In this game, I got none of that: I need to think about boring corner cases, do "if" statement for all the ways to go right from a triangle to another one and keep track of the orientation. --> WHY TRIANGLES?! WHAT'S WRONG WITH SQUARES?! The concept is nice, but the choice of puzzle lacks taste IMO. Maybe check out exapunks or turing complete instead.

I'm a huge fan of programming games. I've bought most all of them on steam. This game is a very good programming game. Yes, it's hard. I'm not a fan of artificial difficulty. So, the one negative I could say is that the whole "go forward' or "go left" idea can be a little irritating at times. But, it seems consistently applied so you just have to get used to it. I suppose one more nitpick is that auto complete is TAB not ENTER and if you're anything like me you will mess that up 700 times per game. So, two things I kind of didn't like. But, there's much more TO like. The programming language is nowhere near as annoyingly incomplete as most other programming games. You can do a lot of things here and aren't really limited by # of lines (really irritating in other games!) The puzzles can be tough. You probably should be a programming in real life before you start this game. The fact that only about a third of all players even get past stage 1 should tell you that the difficulty ramps up A LOT and quickly. But, stick with it. It's tough but not impossible. If you think about it long enough you can find a solution to the challenges. Overall, if you like programming games you'll like this one. I held off on buying this game for far too long because I wasn't sure if I'd like it. But, I do like it and I wish I had bought it sooner.

I like this game a lot, but I think the most important thing to know about this game is that as opposed to most other games of the genre (at least ones I encountered) this feels much more like a programming game for *programmers*. So I would recommend it to only one of two possible audiences: 1. Experienced programmers who are looking for fun and engaging challenges 2. Beginners who are *highly* motivated and are looking to learn what real programming can be like, with many of its (essential) nuts and bolts You'll have a more fun and engaging experience the closer you are to being in one of the above two categories. Otherwise you will likely find this frustrating and perhaps even say to yourself at some point "This feels like homework! Not a game". The reason is that this game is very open ended, as opposed to, for example, Zachtronics games (which are great in their own way), the main challenge doesn't come from artificial limitations of space, lines of code, etc. that the game imposes on you to give you that fun puzzle experience albeit within very well defined borders for the solution space. Apart from some API limitation that the game imposes on you from time to time (e.g. "Some function X is not available in this level") most of the challenge here comes from your own ability to concoct the right algorithm and express it in code (the syntax is highly reminiscent of Python), that can be of any length, to solve the given challenges. This game is unique and I like it a lot, precisely because it is well suited to a small audience that I happen to be a part of. Thank you for making it, and I hope you keep maintaining it and taking it forward.

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Played many puzzle games, as well as several programming games, and this is definitely now one of my favorites. Unlike many programming games I've played, this one comes with its own text editor and language. It gives you the freedom to declare functions and variables, some of which you can copy and use for later levels. When the game ramps up the difficulty, it gets really difficult but is extremely satisfying when you complete a level. On more than one occasion, I had to give up, return to it, and scrap the old code to take a new approach to reach a solution. The level design does a great job at adding, removing, and changing functionality to keep you on your toes and force you to take different approaches than you have in the past keeping the game from feeling like you're repeating yourself each time. A few times I thought I was outsmarting the game by writing code general enough to carry on to a further level only to have a new mechanic completely nullifying what I wrote. Exceptional job Alex. I look forward to going back and trying to optimize each level.

It is a great game for those who already have some decent programming skills and basic grasp of graph algorithms. Unfortunately, the game does not teach/instruct but simply throws difficult programming tasks at you. This could work for some, but definitely not everyone. I think that a beginner will very quickly feel frustrated. This is especially true because you cannot skip levels. According to unlocked achievements, less that one percent completes the game and only 6 percent make it to the second chapter (out of four). This game feels much more like solving topcoder problems than a programming game. At the same time, the game seriously suffers from underspecification of programming tasks: you never know how general must be your solution to get accepted. The game simply gives you a bunch of functions and a goal: reach the exit. The story is rudimentary and it is there just because the game needs one. The graphical presentation and music are OUTSTANDING. I have some minor complaints about code-writing environment, but overall it works.

Would recommend the game if you like programming puzzles and already have some programming background. Although the game includes some written tutorials on how the commands work, the puzzles get brutal pretty fast. For some statistics, at the time of writing only 6% (!!!) of players have completed act 2 (out of 3). The in-game programming language is nice to work with, and the game even includes auto-complete, which is a boon. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of search function, which makes it sometimes frustrating to rename variables and functions. Also the auto-complete is somewhat bugged and doesn't always work inside functions or when handling sequences.