I’ve been having a great time with a couple different programming-centric games over the last few weeks, curious what else is out there that I haven’t seen yet.
I’ve been enjoying:
Bitburner → early-mid game (endgame mechanics didn’t do it for me)
Codingame.com → lots of “practice challenges” and some very interesting competitive AI leagues.
Y’all played any other really good programming-centric games?
I looked into it.
Bitburner is free to play on Steam.
I’ve been playing Minecraft with ComputerCraft and associated mods for a long time, probably since ~2014.
It’s still fun, and ComputerCraft forks(and public servers!) are still around for recent versions.
I find this way more long-time entertaining than all the “hacking simulators” type games(nothing against bitburner and the like, or even the more traditional CTFs),
or the very abstract “automate-this” type games ala. TIS-100(Which is a very fun game) or NANDgame(Which is very interesting, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a game).
This was my first time reading about Lua, that’s really cool.
Haha, I actually got into programming Lua because of ComputerCraft, and I’m still stuck with it 
Lua is awesome.
Lua is an excellent language, it’s mix of simplicity, and embed-ability make it a good language, from microcontrolers to full-blown desktop applications and games.
The regular Lua interpreter is fast compared to other scripting languages like python, but if you want really good speed, LuaJIT is one of the best JIT compilers for any language and can often out-perform even a native C implementation.
Over the years, I’ve used it personally for web development, general applications and scripts, low-level graphics, game development, and a lot more.
It’s almost “paradigm-neutral”, in the sense that you can do a lot of patterns like object orientation, functional programming, pattern matching, etc. without forcing you to any specific patterns.
And then there are coroutines. You can replace most callback-driven stuff like HTTP requests with synchronous looking code(without actually writing synchronous code).
One thing to keep in mind though is that it doesn’t come with a large standard library, so you often end up implementing a lot yourself, or using another library.
And because Lua is often embedded in other applications, the Lua environment a script runs under might look quite different(e.g. both Roblox and Wireshark use Lua, but very different functions are available).
Also, because Lua doesn’t “force a paradigm”, you can find code online that is written in very different “styles”(e.g. callbacks vs. coroutines, functional vs. procedural, etc.).
A great option a friend of mine introduced me to is Project Euler:
A big pile of math-focused problems to solve with code. Word is after the first 100 the math gets spicy.
I have never tried programming games.
I believe what is meant is games that promote learning programming.
I have spent probably too much time playing Shenzhen IO. I highly recommend it as a programming game. It is from the people who made TIS-100!