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I feel like this needs multiplayer. Would be amazing to use it to teach others how to program.

It would be pretty cool, but it would be a lot harder to pull off. At this point the thought of having to be responsible for another server doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me, and preventing users from writing programs that suck up all the CPU cycles is really tricky.

Plus I really want to focus on the storytelling aspects. Especially the end-game scenario (see spoilers/readme.md if curious) would be extremely problematic to implement in multiplayer.

> preventing users from writing programs that suck up all the CPU cycles is really tricky

I like the low level programming / virtual machine approach for this reason. You can provide the player with a machine that is severely limited in speed and size, which makes for a fun challenge and makes it easy to keep things bounded.

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