Saturday!

Back at the beginning of 2016, I reviewed Human Resource Machine. It’s a fun little game that is vaguely educational and vaguely like having a job and vaguely like programming.

Well, there’s a sequel. It’s called 7 Billion Humans.

That’s not the gameplay. That’s just the backstory.

The gameplay is that you have humans to tell what to do. They can step in one of 8 directions, look in one of 8 directions, and pick stuff up and put stuff down. It’s your job to write the program telling them how to go about it. In addition to the directions to step, there are also conditionals. So, like, if a condition is met, do this thing. If the condition is not met, do this other thing.

The problems start pretty easy. Pick up this thing then walk right until you reach the hole in the floor, for example. But they quickly get much more complicated. You want people to walk a particular direction if they are standing on a data cube (if it’s a 1, step up, if it’s a 2, step right) and eventually become downright diabolical.

If you don’t like coding, you probably won’t like the game… but if you’re one of those people who dreams in code and has fun coming up with orders of operation while you’re waiting in line at the coffee place, you need to get this game (well, after you get Human Resource Machine).

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]