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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

When I was 9 I played Robot Odyssey, a notoriously difficult game even for electrical engineers, obsessively all summer.

I got to the last level on my own and learned a TON about logic gates. Maybe it's why I'm in robotics today.

The point I want to make is to never underestimate the capacity for children to learn and never assume something's too difficult. You don't have to get far for it to be a worthwhile endeavor.

Spacechem gave me a strong feeling of nostalgia for Robot Odyssey. It was very difficult. Didn't hold your hand. And was totally open ended on how you solve problems. Which results in feeling incredibly fulfilled when you do solve a puzzle. That feeling was what hooked me. I was so proud.

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It's available online https://www.robotodyssey.online/

I just tried this and the 'Rewired Palette' doesn't work for me, just gives a white screen. The other two palettes seem to work fine though.

I love that. I've played most Zachtronics games as well as Robot Odyssey at 15, was hooked on Robot Odyssey for a week for the same reasons. The difficulty was a challenge rather than an impediment.

What really got me was that the games encouraged something like hand-optimizing the size of your program. The levels were open-ended and the solution could be anything, but each solution has a cost, for example, least number of gates used in Robot Odyssey. In SpaceChem, it's number of symbols. In The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, cost is measured in total number of instructions, which encouraged solutions involving many different parts moving perfectly in sync. Those solutions were really difficult but rewarding to craft. However, cost in Opus Magnum is measured in total cost of parts (not instructions) used. That's less interesting to optimize, since the 'best' solution is often one part doing all the work (easy to optimize for), which in my opinion makes it a little less fun to play. Similarly, I remember the last few levels of Robot Odyssey didn't have much space in the way of optimizing (there is just one Correct Solution) which was underwhelming.

I guess my point is that the games were fun not because I had so much freedom in how I can finish each level. Rather it was the difficulty of optimizing each solution that attracted me. And it's hard to find games like that outside Zachtronics.

Opus Magnum keeps separate leaderboards for cheapest price, fewest cycles used, and smallest area. I generally tended to optimize for fewest cycles and ended up with the kinds of stuff you describe for Codex.

That's also fun up to some point. Whenever I optimized for fewest cycles in Codex it usually turned out to be "work with as many atoms per cycle as you possibly can", or something silly like building a solution on one side and mirroring the solution on the other side to get less cycles. The tedium of adding more and more tends to make least-cycle solutions less rewarding to craft, at least for me. (It's still fun though!)

If you open up a least-symbol solution for Codex you'll find a lot of interesting tricks used to reduce symbols. For example, grab-left-left-release-left-left can be accomplished with just grab-left-release-wait, if you sync it so the released atom is removed by another arm at exactly the right time. It's a nice feeling to successfully shave off even one more symbol using these hacks!

If Robot Odyssey really is open-ended, that would solve my problem with the Zachtronics games, which is that they aren't. SpaceChem gives you interesting goals and makes you fit your instructions inside a square. It's sort of like programming, except you have to do it in Befunge on a 4x4 (!) canvas. Or later... TWO 4x4 or 5x5 canvases. So I get frustrated that rather than the difficulty being in the programming, where I wanted it, it's in designing the spatial layout of the programming.

In Opus Magnum, there are a lot of interesting things you can do to get more parallelism going in your solution. Except that, again, "fake" difficulty is added in the form of restricted inputs. Maybe I could build the molecule faster with two sources of water, but I only have one, and one source can't produce more than one particle per two cycles. The parts with costs are unlimited -- they just count against your cost. Source and sink parts are "free", but limited in bizarre ways. So much for the parallel approach I wanted to try. :/

SpaceChem was the best iPad game I’ve ever played. It’s a shame Zachtronics decided to drop support due the changes with iOS 7.

> Robot Odyssey

Would give the game a try but, 15 year old electrical school guy would find this useful

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