[Tomorrow Corporation] Human Resource Machine

[hitbyambulance]

2 hours spent so far on on the Fibonacci challenge on Human Resource Machine. still trying to figure out the exit criteria algorithm - i shouldn't be having such difficulty with this.. anyways, i seriously go into another world with this and TIS-100. i'll get so absorbed that hours just go by without me noticing.

How does HRM compare to TIS-100? Harder, easier? Different?

[there was no thread for this game, so i thought i'd make one]

HRM has more puzzles, and i believe ramps up more gradually. it also has branching sets of optional tougher challenges (such as the aforementioned Fibonacci one). also, you can go back to any puzzle to optimize it for the 'least number of statements' and 'least number of program steps' goals, which means you can approach many of the puzzles in three differing ways - such optimization chores can be quite difficult and time-consuming. it might be easier for many in that it is much more visual (you drag and drop commands and jump arrows from a list), tho presentation is still pretty bare-bones for a Tomorrow Corporation game - the actual play area is the most thinly-disguised set of registers ever - and i found TIS-100's 'ASCII/terminal interface' more satisfying. i do like how you can copy your code and paste it into a text editor outside the game (and vice versa) if you're more inclined to work on the problem that way.

in short, it seems like Tomorrow Corp. saw TIS-100 and decided they could make a more accessible version of an assembler programming game. i am super not sure they succeeded at this vision, but if you want more ADD, SUB, INC, DEC, STA, JMP and JSR puzzles, this will work.

[hitbyambulance]

also note this is included in the Humble Freedom Bundle.

[killbot737]

As a dev, I enjoyed and was enraged by the assembly challenge of HRM. I also enjoyed the "make things talk" challenge of TIS-100. HRM has that programming puzzle feel though - like "swap the values of a and b without using a third variable", and much more of that sort of thing if you are an achievement whore like I am. The squalky talk of the characters makes up for it a lot, even when the boss is berating you about an incomplete solution.

If you're a programmer that knows anything about registers and pointers and unrolling loops and the low level stuff that you (may have?) learned in CS/CE classes I highly recommend them.

If you don't know anything about programming they're still "puzzle" games at their core, but you probably won't grok them as much as programmer folks. P.S. You'll want to look up recursion.

[jztemple2]

Well, there hasn't been a posting for a while, has there? I thought I'd post a video of level I just completed, the Level 22 Fibonacci Visitor. Obviously a spoiler if you haven't solved it yet, but since the game has been out for years, I figure that unless you're waiting to play the game, you can enjoy the video.