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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

I must be an exception (or a lousy programmer) because I do not particularly enjoy games that require programming to play, I write programs for fun (and programming for me is fun) and I play games for fun but have not found a game that appeals to me, that combines the two.

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I've played a few hours of TIS-100 (Jeff is super late to the party). There's a line between "this is a fun intellectual puzzle" and "this is actually just work" and TIS-100 crosses that line for me. I really enjoyed SpaceChem and Infinifactory (the two Zachtronics games that preceded TIS-100) and they are on the good side of the line. Very enjoyable puzzle games, and vastly better than any of the games mentioned in the article.

Don't forget Codex of Alchemical Engineering, one of their free browser games:

http://www.zachtronics.com/the-codex-of-alchemical-engineeri...

I fall in the same camp as you. I have played TIS and SpaceChem, though not to completion. After banging my head against one problem all night long, I decided I'd have more fun just playing HotS or some other game instead.

The dopamine rush from solving a hard problem is pretty intense, but not worth the hours of frustration after more hours of frustration at my job.

It's a bit of a stretch to call it a programming analog, but Factorio is appealing to me in many similar ways. The ability to construct factories with input materials and output products and optimizing those factories for the best ratios and minimal footprint is very fun.

Not a stretch at all! I spent many nights playing factorio trying to make an efficient static typing (dumb inserters but smart belt routing) system to replace a costly dynamic typing quick hack (smart inserters with big bus belt routing). Drawing the parallels has been half the game for me and has given me more insight into how everything fits together in programming.

I'm there with you. I can enjoy some programming games, but it's typically short lived. What I enjoy in programming is creating real and at least semi-useful stuff, not getting more points on a scoreboard.

I fully agree. Plus, most of those games are lacking in at least one of the two areas, so that you end up with either a bad game, or a bad programming lesson. Maybe the new VR market is going to introduce some new ideas in that area, but so far I'd prefer to either play an actual game or follow a proper programming lesson, instead of a mediocre combination of the two.

Which ones have you tried? I have only tried SpaceChem, but it's certainly different enough from work!

TIS-100 sounds more like one of the old ICFP programming competitions - 2006 and 2007 in particular, both were about reverse engineering esoteric systems.

TIS-100 doesn't require any reverse engineering whatsoever: The game comes with a very retro looking manual that documents the system pretty well. What makes this fun, and not work, is that it's a pretty unique system: inter processor communication between very primitive processors.

In comparison, The Human Resource Machine has far better production values, but it's really an assembly class in disguise. The end level is to write a sort, so I see it a lot more as an educational tool for kids than a game that could be fun for programmers.

> In comparison, The Human Resource Machine has far better production values, but it's really an assembly class in disguise. The end level is to write a sort, so I see it a lot more as an educational tool for kids than a game that could be fun for programmers.

I found it to be a good "ideal assembly" playground. It definitely could use more depth, but more often than not I didn't meet the cycle count or code size bonus criteria after finishing a level, which turns into its own challenge.

I'd say Infinifactory is an improvement over SpaceChem, in that your creations are a lot more viscerally satisfying.

Yeah, I feel your pain.

I like these games a lot, but I almost feel like the act of typing out the solutions is the funner part. Getting stuck on an especially hard problem for too long just gets frustrating.

although it is not exactly programming, it is more about linux stuff, i've been enjoying the overthewire.org games

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