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Comment by nddrylliog | Hacker News Reader

Hi! The Choice dev here - this is Episode 1, there'll be more to come. Tell me how you like it, how you felt doing it, what was hard, what was easy, what was fun, what was annoying, everything! Episode 2 may come out in June if I find enough people like it ;)

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I accidentally hit Alt-Bkspc instead of Ctrl-Enter and lost all my state. Gah. Had I been a little farther along I probably wouldn't have been willing to start over to get back to where I was.

It would be nice if the game put itself in the history, so that Back would only take you to (say) the previous challenge. (That would also really help when you're trying to remember the syntax of a command.)

Little know fact: there are 'save codes' - you can load the codes using hashtags, e.g. http://thechoice.amos.me/#firstdoor will bring you right to the programming part.

Didn't take the time to update the hash to reflect that though - some people would've noticed the URL has changed, others wouldn't have, and I would have needed to find an interface artifact to make sure most people get it.

TL;DR design is fucking hard but if you dig most dev-friendly features are in.

As for backspace doing back, blame your favorite browser maker. And change the defaults. And report an issue. That behavior (previous on back) was always idiotic, imho.

Maybe store the game state in cookies so it can be resumed implicitly, but have the game restarted explicitly, by clearing them?

Can you list some of the save codes for us? I've lost state more than a few times (old habit of hitting command-r to run code doesn't work well in browser-based development).

firstdoor, twodoors, secret, randomsecret, conditionals, lying, ship

Oops, I just lost my progress by pressing Backspace… you might want to save the progress in local or session storage.

I like the humor of the machine but I arrived at the tests about conditional but couldn't remember the command to ask for a key. A way to get back to what I've seen could be nice.

Nice idea, the start was a little bumpy though because it wasn't really clear what I was supposed to do (answer with the word answer xxx, answer 'xxx' or just xxx). For a non-programmer this would be a bit of a leap perhaps. The first puzzles didn't really feel at all connected to the rest of the game to me (questions about ineffable things).

It'd be nice if the program initially responded to more english words, to make the initial interaction more fun.

At one point I got stuck because '' was expected around a value but this wasn't obvious from the previous steps.

The use of @ before predefined variables doesn't really seem necessary.

Allowing users to add variables is a nice touch

Chrome sometimes took cmd-return to mean open a new browser tab, not sure why.

I like it. Perhaps for further chapters, an escaped human could be be controlling a machine, that has had it's memory wiped, remotely in order to infiltrate a machine base.

Marry me! I mean, join the team!

But seriously, Chapter 2 is all about deconstructing the game.

It's easy at first.. but then it gets harder. Erasing your traces... reverse-engineering protocols.. introducing you to netsec against your will.

Consider Chapter 1 an appetizer.

What are the answers? I can't even get past test one.

look in the console log if you're stuck :)

Hey, have the source while you're at it - http://github.com/nddrylliog/thechoice

You only get to experience it once though - once you spoil it for yourself, it's spoiled. Choose carefully.

The source is really fun to read through. I definitely responded 'cataracts' to 'The more you have it, the less you see. What is it?' question and it was cool to see it in your wrongdir category.

Thanks for the source - I completed the game though didn't realize at first that the vehicle was auto-unloading - at first I thought I was just losing numans somewhere in space :) I now see I was a bad test subject and didn't read the description properly.

I try not to blame players - although it might not show I've already done quite a bit of user testing (esp. with non-coders to make sure it's relatively easy to follow.

In this case, the 'numans' part was the last one I added, in a hurry, and only had 2-3 iterations on this part of the dialog/instructions.

Which goes to show: testing matters, iterations makes things better.

Thanks for the feedback!

with regards to numan parts, its not creative. just plain code repeat. Get a condition going. like numan and borg where borg will eat numan if numan is less than borg or something

It's merely a setup for a more creative problem which I didn't have time to include. Here's the actual problem: numans have different weights, which incurs a speed penalty on the transport vehicle - numans[i] has a penalty of 2^i - the goal is to write code to carry them all in the minimum possible time (15 units).

For a coder, the numan part is easy and boring and repetitive - then again, it fits with the universe. For a non-coder, it's their first or second encounter with a piece of code that's more than 4 lines long, with a detailed log so that they can go back and forth to see where they went wrong. They have several rules that they need to pay attention to (capacity, 1 passager minimum required, auto-unload, be very precise with station names) - which, again, seems trivial to you as a coder, but isn't to everyone.

There's already so many instructions for this problem, I wanted to add the time penalty part as a second problem, e.g. "your solution would work, but we can't afford to spend N time units on this transfer - (insert additional instructions here)". I'm sure you understand the need for a consistent difficulty curve.

I've forked the repo and I'll help what I could. By the way, I never played much text games. But the existence of the overlord voice and funny lines is something that makes me keeps going.

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