Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • The game looks fun and pretty, but am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

    All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial. (And in many instances hypocritical if coming from people who defensively claim “it's just a tool”…)

    by jgtrosh
  • You are not alone. I don’t get why you are downvoted.
    by hosteur
  • The Farmer Was Made Into Sausage By Automation
    by aduwah
  • >am I the only one to get triggered by the “replaced” naming?

    >All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

    Yeah they should be using corporate euphemisms like "let go" or whatever!

    by gruez
  • Farming isn't artistry, society benefits from its automation

    Is it still bad if the farmer gets replaced?

    by sebstefan
  • >All of these eager claims to replace humans feel violently antisocial

    Then I suggest you dig ditches with a spoon.

    The problem isn't replacing human labor in itself. It's a few hording all the resources and leaving the rest to starve, aka the luddites and why they revolted.

    If you had a way to live, then boutique farming, or whatever would be leisure if you chose to do that.

    by pixl97
  • teaching optimization this way seems ideal
    by djmips
  • Is this Windows only?
    by ceving
  • No the game is also fully playable on linux via Proton (About other platforms I have no clue)
    by mixel
  • Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

    OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

    Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.

    by slightwinder
  • Solid 2-3 hours of entertainment; assuming you know python. It's also not as complicated as I expected.
    by incomingpain
  • Currently a sweet spot with Steam games if you price them correctly to the value they bring.

    I'm working on a very simple incremental game that has exploded in popularity called, A Game About Feeding A Black Hole.

    by ckdarby
  • I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge.

    When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops).

    An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code.

    [1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

    by madethemcry
  • I bounced off this game.

    It was fun and rewarding early on, as an idle game addict, but there's a massive complexity cliff.

    You go from "just plant the newest crop on every square" to "Okay, now you need to manage farm-wide state in a way that the tools do not support, and develop powerful planning systems and priority systems to actually yield meaningful results and higher level crops" and I just don't understand why.

    The reward for rewriting an entire working (nice and simple) system to a behemoth full of complex logic and systems engineering is.... another crop? At least until you get to spawn new drones which is locked off until you've already basically beaten the game for some reason?

    Like it feels like there is massive missing transition and purpose to that complexity. In factorio, you deal with the insanity of petrochemicals because it gives you fun toys.

    I found myself quite unable to engineer an entire system like that just to... improve my rate of resource growth. Somewhat.

    by mrguyorama
  • Maybe don’t do everything at once. Try cycling through optimized whole-farm algorithms and clear() between them
    by cheschire
  • I am playing this right now! A very nice, addictive game. The programming language is a kind of subset of Python.

    The in-game editor is still a bit clunky, but one can edit the source code in an external editor like VS Code. The game has an auto-reload option.

    Caution! Just because one saves the code in the external editor doesn't mean the entire game state is saved! It cost me a few unlocked upgrades the first time I closed the game, not saving because I thought it automatically does so. One has to save the game state explicitly, before closing.

    I already have the full game area and a max speed drone, but I'm only just about to implement planting cacti. So it'll be a while before I unlock multiple drones. But I have already implemented efficient algorithms for planting a giant Pumpkin, Sunflowers and Poly cultures.

    What the game could have is that dictionaries retain their insertion order and a built-in array.sort. And it is sad that the nice music stops running as soon as one starts the game.

    by nilslindemann
  • I played this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLesViK53beXfFohR1I08S...

    Skip the first video. The early game is painful if you already know how to program (they gate things like variables, loops, and functions behind unlocks). And tbh I didn’t know how to make a video or use a microphone when I made that video. I just sat down one evening and played it - I had no idea it would resonate with people the way it did.

    It’s a great game, and I imagine a very good way to learn programming in a goal oriented way. But I concur that there’s not a great deal of content if you already know how to program.

    by sd9
  • Fun to see you here - I discovered this game through your videos! I think despite the lack of raw "content", I got a LOT of playtime out of this game by trying to push higher on the leaderboards.
    by shhsshs
  • I played this! The quadcopter with the straw hat got me. Funny and great fun. At the end I was still full of ideas for optimizing my code and the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite (a good time guaranteed) but I was more compelled to go back to Factorio due to the Space Age expansion. The rest of this comment would be about Factorio but writing on HN does not help the factory to grow.
    by skeltoac
  • I had spent ages optimizing my maze solver ( https://github.com/VrIgHtEr/TheFarmerSolvedAMaze ). Meticulously going over which operations take how many ticks. But then the dev made a bunch of breaking changes and couldn't be bothered to rewrite everything.
    by vrighter
  • > the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite

    This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.

    by __jonas
  • To make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite.

    “Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!

    by abtinf
  • As someone with hours of time in Factorio pre-space age update, I've really struggled to get back into the game. I really want to build out a mega base with the new train logic, but every time I try to get into it it just feels like work. Space age seems like it had a pretty lukewarm reception, and some of the tech tree changes seem like artificial padding (cliff explosives).
    by candiddevmike