Algotica Demo

Programming is no longer the dark art it used to be two decades ago, since there are more and more coders out there every year. The need for employees in the domain has risen exponentially as well, since there are many more companies competing on the market right now. However, the first steps are always the most difficult, especially if you don’t know where to begin.

Algotica is a puzzle game in which you have to use simple instructions and conditional logic to guide a helpless robot through a few levels, while making sure it doesn’t fall or take a wrong turn. You do not have to be familiar with programming in order to understand the mechanics, since everything is explained to you from the beginning, and there’s always a list of instructions nearby.

In short, your task is to write simple, linear programs in order to control the path of the robot. You have a few commands at your disposal, such as “forward”, “turn_left”, and “jump”, each one of which comes in handy at the right time. However, it’s also worth noting that you can only include as many commands as there are memory nodes, so you still have to perform some optimizations.

Although the game is still in development and it’s a tad early to make any definite claims about its quality, there are some things that need to be either fixed or polished as quickly as possible. For starters, it’s a real bother to see that the entire set of instructions disappears if one of them was wrong and the robot didn’t make it. Hence, it would make more sense to be able to edit a specific command and not have to rewrite everything.

The interface is clumsy as well, because you need to click the new command button, type in the instruction, then repeat the process. When the levels get more complex, it becomes an issue to take your hands off the keyboard and fumble around with the mouse. There are also a couple of bugs and glitches, such as the fact that the robot moves forward after the first corner without having to input the appropriate command.

Right now, Algotica too empty and unpolished to keep you busy or entertained for longer than five minutes. However, with enough work and dedication, this could become quite the engaging puzzle game, not to mention the fact that it’s also educational.