The “assembly line” genre is one of those games that is educational despite itself. It teaches stuff like order of operations and efficiency and it doesn’t even particularly feel like learning (though, yes, sometimes it does feel like math).
Factorio is the gold standard of these games but there are a ton of themed ones like Big Pharma where you make drugs (pardon me: “Pharmaceuticals”) or Satisfactory (a first-person version of Factorio) and there’s even a bare-bones stripped-down version of the game called Shapez.io that just has you make widgety shapes.
Well, this week’s free game from the Epic Game store is Automachef.
So let’s play through the tutorial together.
First things first, you get a factory floor and are told that you move around with WASD and can tilt the camera with X and C. Fair enough, standard.
Okay. You need to make a burger…
Simple enough. First thing you do is plop an assembler down… its job is what it says on the tin. It takes in the burger parts and puts them together.
A burger, we see, consists of a bun and a burger patty (cooked).
So next we need to put down a couple of dispensers… one machine that dispenses buns, one that dispenses raw patties… Oh, I know where *THIS* is going!
So we put down a grill and then we’re ready to put down our conveyor belts… but you can’t feed to a grill directly from a belt. So we have to put a robotic arm down that will move from the belt to the grill…
And one to take it from the grill to the assembler… hoo, boy. We need to program it to only move cooked patties…
Set it up to do that, press start and see how our kitchen works!
Cool, easy peasy.
From there, the game only gets more complicated. You need to not use too much power, you need to make sure that everything is assembled in the proper order, so on and so forth. Eventually they’ll have you do stuff like “work with spices” and “work with liquid ingredients” and the finished products are more and more and more complicated (one of the future levels is “Thanksgiving Dinner”).
Well, that’s Automachef.
The music for Automachef is fun music that feels lifted out of a bossa nova/samba enthusiast’s record collection from the 60’s and, as you can see in the screenies, the flavor text is a cute theme of robot domination via food production.
If you’re not into assembly line factory games, this one isn’t going to change your mind but if you’re looking to dip your toes into the genre, you can’t do much cheaper than “free”.
Check it out.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is a screenshot of Automachef’s splash screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)
I’ve got two similar-style games in my library: Game Dev Tycoon, in which you play as a software company trying to author the next big video game, and Human Resource Machine, in which you try to program a machine to solve various problems–this one is flat-out a programming sim.Report
Human Resource Machine is probably one of the games we should use in job interviews.Report
Unless you’re interviewing for a job that requires assembler programming, I think it’s more of a (mediocre) IQ test than a test of job-relevant abilities. I’ve been in the industry for twenty years and really only had a period of a year or so where my job involved reading assembler code in a debugger, and I don’t think I’ve ever had to write it.
I actually had a test kind of like this for a job at a Japanese-owned company. It was on paper, but it described some kind of symbolic assembler language and you had to figure out the result of a sequence of operations. It wasn’t that hard, but there were a ton of questions and not much time, so you had to be quick. Oddly, this was the most technical portion of my interview.Report
It’s been almost 40 years now since I had to write in assembler. I had to build a physical layer for test system for a new communications protocol. Every vendor was implementing a different subset of the protocol and none of them conformed to the actual link activation/deactivation parts. So I implemented all the tricky parts in software using a new TI DSP chip that was faster than any of the other deterministic microprocessors available (the first pair of chips I got from them had handwritten serial numbers), and the higher levels of the system could load the appropriate version. At one point, I had the only box in the world that (a) could implement the full protocol correctly and (b) could talk to all the partial implementations.
Oh, and I had to design my own hardware.Report
A few years aso, my son had to take an assembly language course for his CS degree; I took one when I was in college too. But mine was PDP-11 assembler, which was designed to be written by humans: the whole OS was written in it, as were all of the device drivers. I wrote some of those at my first real job, so the course had real practical value.
My son’s class used MIPS assembler, which, like RISC machine languages in general, was intended only to be generated by compilers. I’m sure he’ll never use it. That class’s only value was to provide an idea of what computers are really doing deep down.Report