What is Reddit's opinion of
SpaceChem?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
25 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
He isn't talentless. He's also very productive. But this level of success is pure luck. He just happened to find a spot in the evolution of a particular genre where it exploded. I'm not mad at him for that. Any indie developer who gets into this as a full time job does it out of passion for the medium, not money. He couldn't have predicted this. But you also enter a lottery to, if you're lucky, find that sweet spot and make a ton of money, as Notch did.
I think the biggest arguments against him deserving the success are a) That he ripped off InfiniMiner and b) that he viral marketed the shit out of his own game. Neither are particularly despicable, IMO. InfiniMiner wasn't a huge hit (check out their new game, SpaceChem, which is excellent, btw!) and all he "stole" was essentially a simplistic voxel style. Also nobody can blame him for advertising his own game, it wouldn't have worked if the game wasn't genuinely interesting in itself. The main issue was that he promised features while selling the alpha and beta releases that never showed up in the final version, that's why /v/ is mad at him.
In the end I'd say he deserves the success just as any indie developer would to strike gold.
Scrolls looks awful, though.
I'd suggest you try out SpaceChem! It's a visual-programming game disguised in chemistry. It gets deviously difficult, but the best satisfaction comes from the fact that you're not trying to find the solution, you're trying to make one.
We do owe Notch in the fact that he has made a game that has brought the concept of the fully-playable world into the mainstream of gaming. That's what this guy is building off of, the basic premise.
Anyway, the dude who made InfiniMiner made a much cooler game, SpaceChem, I highly suggest it:
I think it's very common to feel that your game isn't fun. It's (hopefully) a phase and something you need to work through. Some random ideas that might or might not help:
- Is the game not as fun as the vision in your head? Try to figure out what exactly makes your vision better than the game, then develop the game towards the vision.
- Let other people play your game. Preferably with you standing behind their shoulder. Take notes. You will get a million ideas on how to improve the game. You might also notice that they are enjoying your game!
- Focus on getting one level in the game really fun. Early on in Sling Ming we created a boss level, which turned out really good (imho). When we struggled with a lot of other levels, we knew at least that it was possible to create fun levels.
- Check out other games in the same category. You say your game is about programming robots. Take a look at SpaceChem or BlocksWorld. You might get inspiration or even an idea or two.
- Take a break! Honestly, giving it a rest for a week or two might be the best thing to do sometimes. If you're eager to get back to the game afterwards, that's a really good sign.
- Finally, remember that you love to create games, and you're in the position where you're doing what you love. It's the journey that's important, not the goal.
>I think Portal is the current ultimate game for teaching these skills. The satisfaction you get from solving a really difficult puzzle in Portal perfectly parallels the high I get from solving a challenging math problem (from math contests), and they expertly guide players in developing the skills they need. There's something very satisfying about succeeding at something intellectually challenging, and Portal offers a challenging, engaging, well-scaffolded (teacher language for guiding students appropriately) experience.
If you haven't you should really look into using SpaceChem. It has open ended puzzles where I regularly go from, "I don't know that I can do this," to the awesome feeling when I finally do figure out how to make it work, and then being able to go back and look at how I can improve my solution.
What you should do is set up a private server with some friends who are new to the game and set up a group skype call. It may reinvigorate you...
Failing that SpaceChem.
Are you specifically looking for engineering / physics based puzzle type games?
Spacechem is a pretty technical puzzle game where you need to build circuits to assemble molecules and chemicals. I don't know, it's pretty complex. Watch some videos if it interests you! It was made by the creator of infiniminer (the game Notch later used as the basis for Minecraft).
SpaceChem is an incredibly fun and addictive puzzle game. It's basically programming, the video game. It's a great way to teach yourself to explore the limits of a programming language and architecture, especially dealing with architectures with limited space and processing capabilities.
No one wants to take risks anymore. Even through a Dungeon Keeper remake would be an instant success, it does not fit into a standard AAA formula. The only way a publisher would be interested is if they could tie it into 'nickle and dime' DLC and do a console port.
"Don't make the game too complex",they say, "We don't want a 7 year old complaining to their parents that they hate the game they brought because it is too hard."
Indies are basically our only hope now that the tools are becoming available. I look forward to the wave of small indie studios developing the next Black and White, Dungeon Keeper, or any of the other titles that dared to go outside the box.
You may want to check out SpaceChem, it is not a builder but more of an engineering puzzle game.
PS When I say indies I am also referring to smaller developers.
Thank you for this! I saw it on Steam but thought "Oh, another puzzle game" and didn't give it much thought. This post got me to play the demo, and it really is pretty impressive! (And it does get hard fast, but in a good way!)
Link to the game's site to make it easier for people to get the demo: SpaceChem
Anyone interested in this should definitely check out SpaceChem. I've yet to find anything that scratches the same itch as program as well. If you enjoy this game, you'd probably enjoy programming.
Try looking at The Codex of Alchemical Engineering [free]and Spacechem [free demo], both by Zach Barth
I would suggest spacechem. It's one of those games where the rules are somewhat simple to explain, but the gameplay is very compless puzzles, and it has the added value of being high on the science cred for working with chemical compounds rather then just the killing of blobs or dwarfs.
Added trivia: The creator was also the creator of inifiniminer, the game Notch copied when he started developing minecraft.
So, there are three main problems with the method you describe:
1) You can't see atoms and molecules under the microscope. To "see" atoms and molecules, you have to use NMR, x-ray crystallography, or similar techniques (I guess cryo-EM can do this sometimes?). And for these, you need lots of pure molecule. This is expensive, and it means you can only isolate what you're already looking for.
2) While we understand the basic behavior of atoms, using quantum mechanics, the math required to actually solve for the electron density of anything with more than like 15 atoms is pretty much impossible. We just don't have the computational power yet, if ever.
3) In addition, even if we knew everything that was in a living cell, and what it did (already a very tall order), how would we make it? Look at the structure of the ribosome (makes protein from mRNA). That's fucking huge! It is totally beyond our synthetic ability. Real chemistry is not like SpaceChem, as much as I love that game. Take a look at this introductory chemistry lab experiment. This experiment takes on the order of six hours, and it's a change of two chemical substituents. The ribosome has on the order of 50,000 atoms. Totally unmanageable in the lab. But the ribosome, along with many other large biomolecules, is required for life as we understand it. DNA is the exception with respect to the ease with which it can be manipulated, not the rule.
Does that help you understand?
I tried learning C++ and Visual Basic at different times in my life and gave up... programming isn't the thing for me. Visual programming games aren't too bad though!
"I want to expand my horizons" - You can't expand further than this...
If you buy at the developer's site it can be registered with Steam and you get access to the different platforms (PC/MAC/Linux)
SpaceChem is a great little puzzle game. PC Gamer gave it a 89 and if you buy it from the developer, the registration key they give you will also work on Steam if you have a Windows machine you wanted to play it on.
http://www.spacechemthegame.com/
There's a Linux demo too.
It'd be a massive project, but I think it could be both very fun and informative. You'd obviously need some machines to go along with it... not too dissimilar from some of the industrialCraft stuff... most elements don't exist in pure forms naturally, so you's need a means to isolate and extract them... advanced furnaces, centrifuges, rock crushers and quarries, lab equipment, particle accelerators...
many go through transitional compounds in the process of isolating them, some need to be cooled or heated, so things like freon or glycol would be helpful... as would a more nuanced electrical simulation and thermal modeling.
not to mention a whole system for collection and isolation of gasses and a much more detailed liquid system.
edit: have you checked out http://www.spacechemthegame.com/ ?
http://www.spacechemthegame.com/
Spacechem is a puzzle game roughly based on the Turing machine concept, where you have to assemble a (sometimes branching) line of instructions to build/disassemble molecules out of atoms. Basically you do on planets, pick rock out, give the people who have been under it a brief summary of the game, then use the content of the rock (silica, carbon, methane, etc...) to deliver specific products (other things) to specific locations. Each planet has its theme, like one is focuses on hydrocarbons, the other one of ices; and as mentionned before each planet is quite more difficult than the previous one.
Try Spacechem, at first it looks like you'd need a phd in chemistry to understand it, but its actually quite simple yet deviously complex and very very addictive. Excellent demo as well, very long.
I wish Minecraft was on Steam the way SpaceChem is on Steam — you can buy it separately and get a code to register it in Steam, so you can play with or without Steam.
Might I humbly suggest purchasing from the SpaceChem Developer Website. It costs $8 dollars there instead of $7.50 on steam, but you get Mac and Linux versions and can activate on Steam as well.
Gives them a bigger slice of the pie, and supports indie devs! Also steam/valve have plenty of dosh already =D
It's a great puzzle game, regardless of tf2 items!
And no I am not a spacechem dev, just an indie game enthusiast! ... Or perhaps that's what said dev would say ... dun dun dun. But no really, I'm not. XD
Yes. In 30 years. When such things might exist. As I said in my comment. I'm certainly not reporting anything that already exists, nor promising that something will exist.
Except SpaceChem. That definitely exists now.
Out of the two games you mentioned, one isn't out on PC yet (and may or may not have a beta when it is).
Ultimately, though, I don't think betas aren't as good as demos. If a company offers an open beta it's only going to cover the multiplayer gameplay, and it's going to be shut down when the game comes out, which kinda sucks for anyone that hears about it a week later and wants to see if they'll like it.
Here's a very recent example, a forum I'm a member of had a thread about Zachtronics Spacechem, which has a demo. If I were to look the game up on youtube I would probably think... nothing because I wouldn't know what the hell I was looking at, instead I've been playing it all day because after playing the demo I bought the game.
Making a demo for Spacechem earned him at least 20.00 that there's no way he would have got otherwise, and I'm damn sure he has made more then that, and will continue to make more, solely because there's a demo. it's also why I bought Arkham Asylum on day 1 (for the PC).
Demos are awesome, betas are ok, neither kinda sucks.