Do you have to be a fucking genius to be able to play Zachtronics Industries games...

Do you have to be a fucking genius to be able to play Zachtronics Industries games? Just looking at pictures of gameplay makes my head hurt.

git fucking gud

it's programming. It's not that hard.

How the fuck do you learn programming concepts? Is there some kind of book that will teach a complete dumbfuck how to program? I feel like a brainlet playing Zachtronics games

SICP

just practice honestly. But once you grasp the difference between a value and variable and that all programs move "linearly" or in order of the way the program is written, it's all pretty easy. You just have to think of the logic with the functions given to you.

With TIS-100, it's more like assembly so it's very restrictive on what you can do. So you have to use "hardware" tricks to solve the puzzles. Also TIS-100 is more about parallelism which is a higher programming topic. But it's mostly just utilizing the few resources you have to the best of your ability.

Looks like an ancient-ass DOS game.

Prob better than some warioware shove it up yo ass game

Generally there's a pretty good (but steep) learning curve to these games. Shezhen-IO crosses the line, but up through TIS-100, they're all still block-pushing puzzles. I'd recommend just playing through Codex of Alchemical Engineering if you really want a good baseline to get started in his games.

Avoid Kohctpyktop for now though, it's one of the best puzzle games I've ever played but you're building circuitry from N and P silicon. Of all his games, this is the one that you could say actually requires domain-specific knowledge. Ruckingenur you could probably play with zero knowledge too but it's a different type of puzzle game, not really the programming sort.

hey man don't knock warioware, twisted is gotyay

Well to be fair, "game" is kind of a stretch in TIS-100's part. You're programming and they added leaderboards and win states.

It's not hard. All there games are the same. The optimisation is fun. It's move things from A to B games with synchronisation.

It's just like spacechem but with a programming skin on it. Move things from input to output while transforming them along the way.
How is it not a game? You're solving puzzles, there's goals and win states, there's even a (hidden) loss state even though a loss state is not really necessary in puzzle or story games. If the whole game were just the sandbox mode or that one puzzle in Shezhen-IO where you are asked to make a video game then yeah, it would be more of a toy than a game but it isn't. It's a solid puzzle game.

I see it as programming with leaderboards. If you actually become a programmer, "win states" turn into deadlines or project objectives.

Which is why while I appreciate Zachtronic's games, I can't bring myself to play them. It's pretty much unpaid work for me as a software engineer

it's only 6/14+ games to be fair and his best puzzle game is not one of those 6.

Infinifactory is probably the best entry point into Zachtronics, really good difficulty curve

I hadn't realised he made ironclad tactics.

My issue with Infinifactory is how messy you can make your assembly line. With TIS-100, you have a limited amount of space per node.

Ruckingenur III when

Examine what others have done and why it works or in some cases doesn't work.

Trial and error.

I wouldn't call the top four "same"

Infinifactory is an evolution of spacechem, and Shenzhen is an evolution of TIS but in that case it has a whole different meta element to it which makes it very different

TIS hard part wasn't the programming, it was dealing with the fact that each core effectively can only remember 1 number if you want a halfway optimized solution, Shenzhen gives you a lot more leeway

In TIS you still get messy as fuck by using more nodes than you need

I like that Infinifactory gives you so much room because it makes it really satisfying when you build your shit as concise as possible

I view TIS as being a lot like Spacechem in moving numbers from input to output sometimes doing transformations on them. It's still the same sort of moving boxes along an assembly line just with a programming theme. You spend most of the time in TIS in that zoomed-out view from spacechem.

If you have no prior CompSci experience don't even bother.

I'm just a Python scrub, but having completed TIS-100, I'd say that you don't need prior knowledge of programming concepts to play it. The core of the game revolves around moving values to and from places, sometimes with a conditional (jump if equal to 0 etc.), which doesn't bear that much resemblance to real high-level programming.

That's not to say it's easy. It can be hard as fuck. But like a lot of other games, you just have core mechanics and you're challenged to work within the constraints of those mechanics.

When you look at a puzzle, think about the instructions available to you (very few). For example, if you see the puzzle sends sequences that are zero-terminated, you can guess that a conditional like JEZ might be useful. Then, you know that you'll need to move each value in the sequence into an ACC, so that JEZ (or JNZ, whatever) can work at all. If you run out of space to store numbers, you might need another node. The manual is a necessity, so look over it well, though I never needed some things like ANY/LAST or NOP.

what's the best way to teach yourself programming and what's the best language to learn? I kind of want to teach myself then possibly go back to college and get easy A's

teachers pull megabullshit in programming classes

even if you wrote the language yourself you can still fail

Why do you want to learn programming? What problems do you want to solve? There are tons of different entrypoints for people with different goals.

I understand most of OP relate game, and got halfway through untrusted, and I am self taught

so, no.

by actually making things
>best language
meme question, pick one, learn it, move on to ASM and C when you know what you're doing. learn a script too.

They're niche games made for programmers/engineers. Why are you even considering buying any?

You need to be autistic to enjoy this shit

my thoughts added onto what the other guy said:
>best language
use the right tool for the job, you will come to understand all their strengths and weaknesses
>best language to learn first
imo Python for how to think like a programmer, stuff like loops and functions and how to structure your code to solve a problem
Sup Forums probably has a programming challenge roll thread to get your hands dirty
some other scripting language is a fine start too
then learn C and assembly to understand how a computer works better