TIS-100

[zespri]

Guys, can you explain me how this game could earn "Very Poisitive" review status? http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360
If you asked me to predict how good it would fare I'd tell you that it would not sell at all. Well, there obviously would be a niche of people who would like it, but mostly not. Why? Because if you are not a programmer  (90% of gamers) you won't enjoy it because if you enjoyed that type of stuff you probably became a programmer to begin with. And if you are a programmer, then you probably have much more interesting challenges at your day job.

Programmers that like puzzles will like it, but they are minority.

And yet "Very Positive" How? How on earths?

Btw, given that budget for a game like this is minimal, I think the creators of the game are better off - happy for them, liked spacechem (which is very similar in core).

[Mánagarmr]

You touched on it in your third sentence. "Niche" product. I'm guessing the only ones who bought this were people interested in it. The ones who weren't didn't take a shot at it and thus didn't leave a bad remark on it.

[Mick]

I don't see why it shouldn't be getting positive reviews. For the people who like this kind of game (I'm one of them) it gives them exactly what they want/expect. And nothing about the marketing for it is misleading.

[Traveller]

It's right smack in the middle of the same genre as SpaceChem...which is predictable, considering it was made by the same guy.  He's got a ton of these games under his belt, and SpaceChem was pretty big and polished; this isn't a crap first game put out by J. Random Unexperienced Indie Developer.  It knows exactly what it's doing as a game, and it does it really well.  The interface really impressed me, simplistic as it was, because it hit exactly the retro style it was aiming for, and the printable manual it came with was pretty awesome (even if not very useful because there's just not that many computer instructions that you need to reference).

As a programmer, I really like programming games.  They're a change of pace, and the type of challenge is very different from my day job.  You go into it knowing it's solvable, knowing it's not tedious, and knowing that the solution will be satisfying.

"Programmers that like puzzles [...] are a minority"?  Have you ever met a programmer?  We get into the field because we love this stuff.  Hell, games like this are what inspired/taught half of us to do it in the first place.


Take a look at Ruckingenur II sometime.  IMO it's the best Zachtronics game, and hey, it's free.

[Aklyon]

The review status isn't a meter of marketability or nicheness, its just whether or not the people who like this sort of game and played it think its a pretty good one or not, or at least if they got what they expected. The people who weren't interested didn't bother, thus it has a pretty positive score.

[zespri]

The review status isn't a meter of marketability or nicheness, its just whether or not the people who like this sort of game and played it think its a pretty good one or not, or at least if they got what they expected. The people who weren't interested didn't bother, thus it has a pretty positive score.

I think this hits it on the nail, in terms of answering my question. If I was one to put this game out to public, I would not dare because I would expect a downpour of comments "we want a game and you gave us a goddamn IDE!". My mistake, apparently is that the people who would write this won't bother buying or reviewing.

Thank you everyone who contributed to the discussion.

[zespri]

As a programmer, I really like programming games. 

Like corewars? 

[Traveller]

As a programmer, I really like programming games. 

Like corewars? 

Oh, God yes.  It's been too long.  There's really nothing quite like that kind of _competitive_ programming.

(I'm currently developing a web game where you build a robot brain out of logic gates, and then make it shoot other robots that other people submit.  It's pretty early in dev though.)

[Toranth]

As a programmer, I really like programming games. 

Like corewars? 

Oh, God yes.  It's been too long.  There's really nothing quite like that kind of _competitive_ programming.

(I'm currently developing a web game where you build a robot brain out of logic gates, and then make it shoot other robots that other people submit.  It's pretty early in dev though.)

Carnage Hearts-like?  That could be fun;  Carnage Hearts was a lot of fun, back in the day.

[Traveller]

Oh dang, I need that game.  This was more inspired by Mindrover: the Europa Project (~2000 PC game), though really it's a similar thing.  I also built something where you program your bots in assembly as a demo project to get into the comp sci major in university...this has clearly been a long term interest of mine.  In an ideal world, with the gate-driven one, players will want to build actual CPU processors so they can write complex programs for them.  From the benchmarking tests I did, simulating that is surprisingly viable.

I'll have to make a topic once it goes anywhere.

[Draco18s]

"Programmers that like puzzles [...] are a minority"?  Have you ever met a programmer?  We get into the field because we love this stuff.  Hell, games like this are what inspired/taught half of us to do it in the first place.

Mind, I haven't really enjoyed many "programming games" (I only managed a few levels of SpaceChem, for instance) but for the solving puzzles thing...that's what programming is.  The beauty of programming isn't so much "solve this puzzle with these pieces" but "solve this problem, you have an infinite number of pieces."

Which is kind of what bothered me about SpaceChem: it wouldn't let me be correct but inefficient.  It wanted every puzzle to be solved in the absolutely most efficient way possible.  Because of this, I couldn't make something that worked, but poorly, and look for optimizations.  I gave up on a puzzle where I'd managed to cobble something together, but it could only produce 1 of the output (#2 collided with #3, resulting in failure); I was hamstrung by the lack of pieces.

I'm also someone who looks at problems and says, "I recognize this.  This was solved 35 years ago, let me Google that" rather than work it out for myself.  I don't like solving arbitrary puzzles, I like solving problems of my own creation.

[zespri]

I was hamstrung by the lack of pieces.

Lack of pieces is the point of their puzzles. To produce something workable under severe constraints and make it better than everyone else's under same constraints. If that's something you do not like - and I expect many don't - the game is not for you. People who gave negative review of TIS, have the same complaint, they say, the stupid game asks me to do a sort, which is 3 lines in C++ but is a major pain in the game because there are no appropriate data structures and no memory in the sense we used to it...

Their pseudo-assembly explicitly designed to make things awkward. You do not have addressable memory if you don't count the ports. You have only two registers one of which non addressable. Retrieving the contents without losing of the unadressable register takes two operations (retrieve and store back) and you only ever allowed maximum of 15 operations in the program on a single "node".
You do not have JGE & JLE you only have JGZ and JLZ. Thank god you have both JNZ and JEZ. You clearly would find it off putting, and that I can understand perfectly. But look at all these positive reviews ))

[Traveller]

I know a lot of people who program in FORTH and stuff for fun, _because_ of how limiting stack based languages are for example.  No one said programmers were sane.

[zespri]

I know a lot of people who program in FORTH and stuff for fun, _because_ of how limiting stack based languages are for example.  No one said programmers were sane.

Factor is the new forth  And surely "a lot" is an exaggeration? Is it at least two, or just one, that you know personally? =)))

[kasnavada]

Well. I'm a dev on my day job, but I don't see myself buying that. Despite loving what I do. Interface look like crap, and it sounds like it's following spaceshem "game for a niche" design element by making them even "nichier".

I found Spacechem a few years back and basically what its own creator think about it is completely right.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/172250/postmortem_zachtronics_.php