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The Games
- Automachef lets you build algorithms by piecing together complicated machines that will make delicious food.
- Return of the Obra Dinn feels like debugging unfamiliar code. You get on the ship with no idea what happened and start to slowly unravel the mystery.
- HackNet has you virtually hacking using real Unix commands. Learn the Unix terminal, and add a useful tool to your web dev arsenal.
- Wilmotâs Warehouse could just as well be called Refactoring: The Game. Arrange your warehouse so you can find items when orders come in. Then, re-arrange when you realize you did it wrong.
- Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes sharpens your communication skills to make you a better team member and improve your documentation.
- Vim Adventures just teaches you to use the code editor Vim. Iâll leave you to imagine how this might be useful. đ
- Kind Words teaches you to be kind to yourself and to others. Great if youâre dealing with imposter syndrome.
- Hypnospace Outlaw lets you relive (or experience for the first time) the wild west of the early web by taking on the role of a moderator of a community similar to Geocities.
Transcript
Hey, this is Devon, and today Iâm going to tell you about eight video games that will make you a better web developer.
Thereâs this whole sub-genre of games thatâs popped up in the last few years thatâs basically around, creating algorithms to do various things. And the one I played most recently is called Automachef. Itâs a really cool game where youâre sort of setting up this automated kitchen in a restaurant.
You start the level and the game gives you a food that you are going to be making and then tells you how you need to make it: the ingredients you need and the different processing youâll have to do on the ingredients to get the final dish. You take these components that each do different things â for example, you have conveyor belts that move food through your machine â and you piece them all together and build something, some sort of contraption that will make the food the game is asking you to make.
These are really just algorithms. Itâs the same sort of thing you do to solve problems in programming except, whereas in programming the syntax of the language youâre using makes up the components of your machine, in these games, you have a more visual representation of that with actual parts that youâre piecing together to create the machines you need to make to build whatever it is youâre making.
There are a bunch of games like this. Automachef is not the only one or even the best one as far as I know. There is also, Infinifactory, thereâs Factorio, and if you need something thatâs hitting on almost every platform, thereâs one called Human Resource Machine thatâs a lot of fun. itâs on mobile devices. So if you have an iOS or Android device, a tablet or a phone, you can play Human Resource Machine on that.
Automachef is a great game in this genre, and it is available on Steam for $15.
The first thing youâre going to notice about Return of the Obra Dinn is that it has a really striking look about it. Itâs made to emulate really old computer graphics, and you can actually pick which computer system you want to emulate with the graphics, and itâll apply different shaders to the game. But thatâs not really what the game is about.
The game is about being an insurance adjuster. Fun, right? But it actually is pretty fun because what youâre doing as an insurance adjuster is youâre sort of investigating this mystery. This ship, the Obra Dinn, it set sail with some trade cargo, never actually arrived at its destination, and now five years later, itâs drifted back ashore, completely empty.
So itâs up to you as the insurance adjuster to go on the ship and investigate and find out what happened to the people who set sail five years ago. And to do that, youâre given this superpowered pocket watch that lets you turn back time and watch the events when you come across someoneâs remains, and your job is to go through this book and fill in the name of the person that died, how they died, and where applicable, who killed them.
It reminded me a lot of debugging or coming into a legacy code base that youâre not familiar with because you donât really have a frame of reference. You donât know whatâs going on or how, so you just kind of pick a spot that seems relevant and you start investigating from there and trying to understand how the pieces fit together, and, in the case of your code base, when youâre debugging, where itâs breaking, where itâs not doing what itâs supposed to be doing. I think that The Return of the Obra Dinn does a great job of capturing that and wraps an interesting story around it and some really cool graphics too.
Return of the Obra Dinn is $20, and you can get it on Steam, Switch, Playstation 4, or Xbox One.
HackNet is a game about hacking, and itâs not the first game about hacking, but it is one of the more authentic games about hacking. Whatâs authentic about it is that it uses actual Unix commands to do the hacking.
Youâre going to be using âlsâ to list the contract contents of a directory. Youâre going to be using ârmâ to delete files. Youâll use âscpâ to copy files across servers. If youâre not comfortable with the command line, this is a great low-pressure way to get some comfort using the command line and doing things and understanding sorta how you get a sense of where you are on the computer and what youâre able to do when youâre using the terminal â when youâre using a Unix terminal specifically.
If youâre running Linux or Mac , you have access to this by default. Itâs a really powerful tool for developers. If youâre using Windows, newer versions of Windows have the Linux subsystem that lets you access Linux inside of Windows, and so you would have access to a terminal too.
It gives you a fun story to explore too. There is a well known hacker whoâs been killed and youâre trying to understand what happened, and so youâre working through this story and unraveling the mystery as youâre actually using real terminal commands.
HackNet is available for $10 on Steam.
In Wilmotâs Warehouse, you play as this little square with a face and youâre actually managing a warehouse. Youâll get deliveries and the deliveries are also little squares with icons on them, and you donât know exactly what the icons mean, but youâre tasked with arranging the warehouse and organizing it despite that.
At certain points throughout the game, people will come in and give you orders and youâll have to go fetch the items out of your warehouse and bring them to them. And you have a time limit in which to do that. So hopefully youâve organized your warehouse in a manner thatâs at least efficient enough that you can go and find the stuff.
But without a doubt, you havenât, and youâll discover that as youâre trying to fulfill these orders. So the next time youâre between orders, youâre gonna want to go back and reorganize.
This is basically a game about refactoring. I do this all the time when Iâm writing code, Iâm, Iâm actually trying to maintain code Iâve written months back that seemed okay at the time. Maybe I wrote something before that didnât quite work exactly the way I wanted it to, and now I want to go back and fix it. Iâve always got a limited amount of time and Iâm left with a decision about whether itâs worth it to go back and refactor the code or if I just run with it. Wilmotâs Warehouse does a great job at capturing that and creating that same decision for you and giving you lots of opportunities to practice making that decision in the low stakes context of this game thatâs actually really fun too.
Wilmotâs Warehouse is $15 on Steam and on Nintendo Switch.
In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, you and another player are tasked with diffusing a bomb. The catch is that one of you can only see the bomb and cannot see the bomb diffusal manual and the other player has the manual but cannot see the bomb.
The game is about communicating back and forth. The player with the bomb is describing what they see, and itâs not always very straight forward. Itâs not always easy to describe. Some of the markings are abstract and itâs just difficult to get across what youâre looking at. The player with the manual is having to describe⊠first having to understand what bomb the person is actually looking at so that they know theyâre looking at the right section of the manual and then describe how to diffuse that piece of the bomb.
As a developer, youâre often working on or with a team, and communication is critical. So this is good practice for that. But also even if youâre not working with a team live in real time, youâre hopefully at least documenting what youâre building and that documentation is just an asynchronous form of communication.
What Keep Talking does for you as a web developer is it lets you practice really quickly and figure out what works and what doesnât. You can incorporate some of what you learn there into your real time communication with your team or into your documentation of your code, your software, and your libraries.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is available on just about every platform you can possibly imagine. Itâs $10 on a mobile platforms, Android and iOS, and then itâs $15 on Steam. Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, and just about any virtual reality platform you could have. If you have a virtual reality headset, itâs a really fun way to play this game because it enforces that separation between the player that can see the bomb and the player that can see the manual.
VIM Adventures is the most directly applicable game on this list. It is actually teaching you how to use a code editor called Vim. Vin is a really interesting editor. Itâs almost game-like itself. I use it on a regular basis and it sort of makes me feel like Iâm playing a game when Iâm writing code, but itâs not just for fun. Itâs also really useful. It lets you do some things that typical code editors do not. So if you think about Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text or Atom, those texts editors are always in insert mode. That means when you open one of those applications and start typing, whatever keys you press, those letters are going to start coming out in your code.
In Vim, thatâs not the default mode. Youâre not inserting by default. So when you launch Vim, each of your keys have some sort of function that affects your code. One of those functions is to change to insert mode. In insert mode, you can start typing just like any code editor.
But when youâre not in insert mode, you have some really powerful features you can use. For example, you can replace words or you can do selections. You can navigate through your code in various ways. The best way Iâve heard it described the, the benefit of coding in this way is that you wouldnât paint a picture by taking the brush and holding it down on the canvas and keeping it down on the canvas the entire time until the painting is finished. Most of the time, youâre gonna have the brush off the canvas and youâre gonna be doing other things. Maybe itâs thinking about where to place the brush or mixing colors together. Something along those lines, and code is really the same way.
Most of your time spent coding is not entering characters into your editor. Well, it shouldnât be at least, but most editors sort of enforce that mode of working on you because theyâre always in that mode by default. Vim breaks with that and gives you some other options for ways to manipulate your code.
Vim Adventures is a game that teaches you how to use Vim. The biggest downside of Vim is that itâs extremely difficult to learn because thereâs not a good way to discover what each of the keys do in the application. So you sorta just have to memorize what they do. I donât think anybody really memorizes them all, so you just memorize the ones you use.
Vim Adventures does a great job of teaching you that by using Vimâs keys to navigate through an adventure game, and itâs actually a pretty fun little game.
The way you buy this one is a little bit different from all the others. Most of the games, or actually every other game on this list. You pay for it once and then you own it and you can play at any time. Them adventures. You pay $25 for a six month license and you just access it through your web browser so you donât, as long as you have access to a web browser hooked up to something that has a keyboard and you can play, but the $25 only gives you six months, so you canât, you canât go to it in three or four years and pick up and start playing again.
The good news is that. Six months is probably all you would need to clear all of the content of the game. And by the time you do that, youâll have a pretty good grasp of Vim. The game is not really compelling enough to go back to after youâve finished it, and really the goal of it is to learn Vim. Once youâve done that, you, you wonât really need it anymore. So effectively, $25 gets you this game.
The next game on the list is a little different from most of the others. The game is called Kind Words, and itâs something like a forum. Itâs like an internet forum wrapped up in a game.
When you launch the game, you see a little person in a room from an isometric point of view, and you see that person sitting down at a desk. There are these paper airplanes flying through the screen, and you can click on them and each one has a motivational message from a real person whoâs also playing the game.
You can also write your own motivational messages, and those get sent to other peopleâs games as little paper airplanes that they can read. The other thing you do in this game is you can make and fulfill requests. Youâll type a problem youâre having, and other people can receive that â itâs anonymous â but they see your problem and they can respond directly to your problem.
Itâs a more direct way to get help than the generic motivational messages that are flying through as paper airplanes. You can also look at other peopleâs requests and send messages to help them. This game is really something different and I think itâs a great way, one to get your head out of code for a little bit, which is really important. You donât want to get burned out, and this is a way to sort of break out of that and also gives you some strength that you may need, especially if youâre suffering maybe with imposter syndrome. Thatâs a good opportunity for you to get in and make a request and while youâre waiting for people to answer your request, jump in and look at some other peopleâs requests and try to see what you can do to help other people feel better, to help other people move through their days and get over the problems theyâre having.
Kind Words is $5 and it is available on Steam.
If youâve been around the internet long enough, you probably remember Geocities. It was a place where anyone could go and build a website and they would host it. They had these, I think they called them neighborhoods, and they were just basically sections of Geocities around different themes. So if you had a sports website, you would be in a particular neighborhood with other sports websites, video game websites, all shared a neighborhood, movie, websites, music websitesâŠ
It was really the first place that Iâm aware of that democratized access to publishing on the internet. It closed and a few years back. Some people kept archives of it, but itâs just not what it was before.
If you want to get a little taste of that, thereâs a game I discovered called Hypnospace Outlaw that really captures the feel of Geocities. In Hypnospace Outlaw, you are essentially a moderator on the internet, over a community, very much like Geocities, and youâre given these tasks and you have to go through and moderate the pretend Geocities community.
Itâs got a really fun, quirky sense of humor thatâs fun to read the pages. They all have music blaring in the background and theyâre just tacky and pretty gross, but itâs fun to look at and theyâll remind you of that time if you experienced it. If you didnât experience it, itâll give you a taste of what the web was like in the late 90s and maybe into the early 2000s. All of itâs wrapped in this interesting game with a fun story and lots of cool things to discover.
Hypnospace Outlaw is available on Steam and it is $20.
Those are eight games to help you become a better web developer. You probably have your own that I missed. Please comment below and share them!
Thanks for watching, and Iâll see you in the next video.
Top comments (10)
"Baba is you" should be on the list. It's a problem solving game using "programing"-like logic.
while true: learn() is also noteworthy but falls short as far as problem solving goes.
Hi Devon, great list!
I'd like to add more that I like most.
hackmud
else heart.break()
screeps
Have You tried
Baba Is You? Seems great game to develop problem solving skills :DThat youtube intro was the raddest. subscribed.
You have to be joking đ
Great list Devon! One that is not on the list and I love is human resources machine.
You may add ShenzenIO, not specifically for web development, but it greatly helps creating algorithms with reduced complexity.
Dont forget to check out Game of PODs
Scroll down to check out the tutorial here:
kodekloud.com/p/game-of-pods
AMAZING POST, Devon!
Hi there. Thank you for the list, and for making a transcription of your video. I prefer an article over a blog, but having both is wonderful. Thanks!