A video game where you are an operating system
plbrault.com
plbrault.com
I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.
It's top-down 2D. You are alone in a large, empty warehouse. At regular intervals, a truck drops off a load of assorted objects at the back, and a few people ask you for some specific objects at the counter in front. Your role is to arrange the objects in the warehouse such that you can fill the requests in the least amount of time, and you can do this in any way that works for you (by color, function, name, etc).
As the game goes on, the truck drops off more and more different kinds of objects (usually ones that fit into more than one category), and the requests get more and more complicated.
At the end you get a time-lapse of the whole warehouse over the whole game and you can see your strategy evolving over time.
Pretty well executed and simple. Heard about it from one of its devs in a HN comment actually.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376284/defrag
There used to be a few old ones in the day that I recall trying which were a bit more direct simulacrums than these. Not sure if anyone else might find them!
Is it, though? As much as the autorouters "known" to not work, I expect that a working one is less than 10 years away. Even for PCIe-level complexity.
That said, I'd suspect it's similar to CS: autoprogrammers are "known" to not work. If you can understand and articulate the business logic in a concise way, understand and articulate all the components of the system and how they may interfere with each other, understand and articulate the system's nominal and practical input ranges, etc., then sure something might autoprogram the code for you, but it's not the autoprogrammer doing the real work.
Recently though, I've been doing 8x8 - 4, which means picking 4 squares to remove from an 8x8 square and then filling in the rest (I have some wooden boards i picked up from an etsy seller but you can just as easily trace the outline on paper and color in the forbidden cells, which I've also done). Which has been delightful!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=clear.tap.geom... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tap-away-3d/id1568058543
They are simply engineers perfecting the implants so that they operate better.
I’m reminded of the in house help desk tech support that someone calls for in the film Vanilla Sky, analogously.
One of the best ways to grok a problem like this. “Hey now you’re the memory manager. Good luck.”
I love this idea so much. I bet it could be dressed up in a cute way where it’s a take on the restaurant management sim. But the restaurant is a computer and your customers are the resources.
Human Resource Machine was great this way. I remember at one point thinking, “wait, did I just make a linked list?”
For example, when gears were high tech there were people that drew heads with gears turning inside of the head, likening the act of thinking to the motion of gears. And I think in cartoons etc we still see this sometimes.
:D
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg...
Computer analogies are different. These are direct, not metaphorical, and rightfully so, because computation is fundamental and not just a piece of technology. Computer science stands at the intersection between mathematics and physics.
Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP response it can provide network boot instructions telling other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box. But on a network where they use net boot already you might be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the clients to boot your OS image instead.
As I posted there, it's a really good concept. Add in levels (eg microcontroller in $interesting_product, is on a smartphone, load balancer or api box for a SaaS company), with the levels letting you introduce concepts one at a time, and then you've got yourself a college grade operating systems class. Throw in a bit of programming for automation and dig deep into OS cache algorithms (LRU baby!) and that's something I could have finished before I graduated high school.
Maybe I'm getting old, and I get that being an OS is stressful, but so is my job. I don't need another one!
With more forgiving pacing that starts out easy and then increases to keeps just outside of my comfort zone, this could be a very fun game.
Basically games that innovate beyond what a game engines like Unity or Unreal can offer are, by design, going in a direction that is more likely to succeed than anything we see come out these days...
Making super nerdy games that are so far off the field the engines users can't touch you, puts you in a different league; even if your game looks like a dog's breakfast, as long as it's fun and usable.
Indie games are dead, in the sense that they were indie games 5 years ago. This, is the new indie games now. GG. (ref: failed indie developer with 2+ commercial titles).
It's a shame that Zachtronics stopped, they've always been ahead of the game.
And I'm pretty sure you can make this game in Unity...
Game tech is basically universal for zero-graphics games like this, it's 100% "business logic". If you have to fight with the UI/display system for even a moment to make a game like this, then you're probably either using a library without enough features (which, ahem...Pygame, yeah...) or you just don't know the system well enough to be efficient.
Specifically, I want to have some fun developing a few game ideas into at least prototypes. I never really had time to do a proper analysis of Pygame, Godot, Unity etc.
Unity can create any type of game. In the end it's just helping you push vertices and shaders around.
I do agree Unreal has it's roots more in 3D character shooters. A lot of assumptions built in but you can still work around them there too.
It depends what you mean by “succeed”. If you mean, “turn a profit”, probably not. Games that are far off the trend supported by engines optimized for what the market is looking for probably will fail more often than games within it.
If you mean, “become a surprise, breakout, hit that changes the direction of gaming”, yes, the extremely low probability of that happening in either case is probably higher for games that are outside of the box.
Better chance of a home run, but also better chance of getting out, and less chance of getting a hit.
Oh I see...
In fact, several of them have been rather explicit about the idea of humans subordinated into thankless jobs for machines, considering titles like "Sushi For Robots" or "Human Resource Machine".
How did yours compare?
Strangely fun.
You command coroutines, threads and processes across machines to do work for you, like units.
You can collect data from database, transform it in a pipeline and give it back.
P.S: I'm also a big fan of Zachtronics games: TIS-100, Shenzen I/O etc etc
Definitely distinct from idle games.
Mini Metro is another well known game in the time management genera. I've seen some recent games with this design and played a demo of a not yet released game. It seems like a common small indie game genera since larger developers don't seem to touch it that I can think of (except possibly some mini games? I can't think of anything off hand but there must be some). I guess the larger developers go for RTS games instead.
Possibly the OS theme could be turned into a kind of "bot combat" game (at least I think that would be the general genera I'm thinking of, but without direct combat in this case) if the internals are automated and then compared to the market as a whole, with established OSes that are fairly good at everything but not great at anything. These established OSes could then take various anti-competitive actions along the way that force you to get better at a different specialty than you previously targeted.
Kinda sad that the dev quitted
I think easy makes you forget about memory-swap side of the game. Still feels unfairly hard tho
Maybe one of my extensions designed to skip "wait 10 sec to skip this" is messing up the timings of the game?
Might be related to time accounting differences between browsers also... are you using firefox?
Edit: Also, keyboard shortcuts would be really, really nice.
Edit2: Also, the "menu" button in the top right isn't clickable (unless I resize) because the "Follow drfreckles" and "add to collection" buttons overlay it.