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7 Billion Humans Discussion (Nintendo Switch) [game]
 
7 Billion Humans on the Switch
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The sequel to Human Resource Machine is coming out next week! Finally!

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10/18/18, 23:48    Edited: 10/18/18, 23:51
 
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Anyone else been playing this!? I know Zero is too busy being ENGAGED...

...it's fun! It's more Human Resource Machine. Programming in parallel adds a neat twist to it though, I'm not used to having to think recursively like this. Looks like there are way more levels than the first game too, somewhere between 1.5 to 2 times as many! And of course Kyle Gabler's soundtrack is amazing as well.
10/30/18, 17:39   
@Secret_Tunnel
I want to, but I've still got a few levels to beat in Human Resource Machine. If I can't beat those I doubt I should bother with this. I cannot brain, I have the dumb.
10/30/18, 17:59   
@Secret_Tunnel I WILL be for sure. I'm TRYING to get better at focusing on just one or two games at a time (and also Rocket League which I never stopped playing) but there is so much out right now!
10/30/18, 18:39   
@r_hjort

I don't think I ever solved the prime factorization level in Human Resource Machine. 7 Billion Humans isn't necessarily harder, just different!
10/30/18, 18:45   
@Secret_Tunnel Yep that's the only one I never finished.

I have the game loaded up on the computers in our school lab and a student of mine said he solved that puzzle. I made him show me, and sure enough, there it was. Foiled by my own student!

...except not. APPARENTLY he just looked up the solution online, copied it in, and claimed he solved it. Sneak!
10/30/18, 20:12   
Edited: 10/30/18, 20:12
Finally picked this up and burned through about half the stages. On occasion I will try to get the bonus stuff right away but mostly I've just been moving on when I beat a stage. Wow there are a lot this time!

I really love how they approached this sequel, by having you control multiple workers at once it is both familiar and totally new. Lots of new code pieces to play with too this time. Hard to say whether I like it more than the original or not but I definitely think it is a great sequel so far.

I understand that by introducing randomness there is no way around this but the whole "average of 25 simulations" thing for times is a bit odd. I actually had one that was close to the bonus but I just missed it so I didn't change anything and ran the program 3 or 4 times again and it finally it passed.

But yeah loving it so far. It's the ultimate series for programmers. With that said I feel like the first was already kind of not super accessible for non-programmers and they just made it MORE obtuse in some ways with having to track multiple workers. I didn't even think the first game did super well so I wasn't expecting a sequel but they sure didn't try to make the sequel easier to get into for the masses.
01/02/19, 21:35   
Edited: 01/02/19, 21:42
Awhile back Tomorrow Corporation gave me an educational license to put Human Resource Machine on all of the computers in our lab so I was showing the game to my students recently and a bunch have been getting into it and I got nostalgic watching them and thought hey, I should go back and play some more 7 Billion Humans.

So I did. And I finished it! Every single stage this time, unlike Human Resource Machine. (Would be tempted to go back and see if I could pull that one I never finished in Human Resource Machine off now but my nieces and nephews have my Wii U and I'm not going to start the game over from scratch at a school lab computer for this...)

WITH THAT SAID, oh man did I cheese the system in this game a lot just to pass a stage. I'd say at LEAST like 5 or 6 stages I solved it by killing off all of the workers except for one so I didn't have to manage all of them, because it's so much easier to manage just one. Of course, this isn't possible in many stages, and even in some you could theoretically do it, it would take too long to make it work and if you take too long to run something the game just stops and says you're taking too long. I TRIED to not rely on this too much but ah well.

Admittedly I used a hint... ONCE... in one of the stages near the end. And then instantly thought DUH, OBVIOUSLY and felt stupid for the really dumb, overblown way I had been trying to do it.

Example of me killing a bunch of workers to solve a stage:


Speaking of cheesing the game, it's kind of funny that you can pass a stage without making code that works for all scenarios if you just happen to not get anything that would cause a problem in your 25 tests. In fact, I had passed the stage in the video above, but when I went to make a video for it, I DIDN'T pass, and then it forces you to deal with a scenario that didn't pass, so you CAN'T pass it again until fixing your code. In this case, if one of the cubes had the number 99 my code would never finish running, so I had to fix that in order to get a clean video. What a strange game!

Anyway, in Human Resource Machine I made an attempt to get the size and speed challenges for everything (although I sputtered out around halfway through) but here I won't even try. So many of my solutions were SO FAR from being anywhere near getting the challenges, lol.

Not sure how I'd rate this compared to Human Resource Machine. It's a good sequel and it introduces something new with controlling multiple workers that really changes the feel of the game, but often it was just too much to wrap my head around and like I said, I sometimes just cheesed it and got down to one worker and solved things that way. Well, maybe only 10% of the time or so, but still. Plus it obviously didn't have the like... newness factor of Human Resource Machine either. It's different, but still a sequel.

No idea if anyone besides me and S_T ever played this game, but I figured I'd update nonetheless.
11/06/19, 02:18   
Edited: 11/06/19, 02:38
@Zero

I played a bit more of this a few months ago, started a new file, got back up to about where I was, and stopped again, haha. I actually do think it's harder than Human Resource Machine, I'm not used to thinking in parallel at all. I should probably get better at it since I might be getting more into GPU programming! (Which, apparently, most GPU programmers are really bad at!)

Speak of the devil, Zachtronics just surprise-dropped a new game yesterday, and I've been playing a bunch of that...
11/06/19, 03:38   
@Secret_Tunnel Yeah the parallel thinking is tough. It's easy enough to think in parallel in like, some Unity game dev or something where you can just stop and start any give coroutine by name whenever you want, but in a puzzle game like this, it gets tough managing a bunch of workers when you can't just easily control them individually! Which is why I cheesed it a lot!

And honestly I've never done any kind of programming that has the whole SAY / LISTEN mechanic they put in there, though I'm assuming it is based on some core programming mechanic, because everything in these games is. Like I guess I make up my own SAY / LISTEN stuff in game dev? Running coroutines that do X but will just stick in a loop that does nothing until some variable changes elsewhere that makes it able to move onto Y. I guess that's the same idea? But I've never used anything built into the code that has SAY / LISTEN functionality such as well, whatever I'm assuming they based that mechanic off of.

It does feel VERY nice when you do figure some complex, multi-worker thing out though. I think like, except for Baba Is You and such, a lot of video game puzzles are kind of a joke. A game like this though, it really makes you work at a solution, so it feels rewarding when you hit it. Especially since it has that thing programmers know well, where you hit "run" not actually knowing for sure if you solved it, and then when you watch it working in real-time, it's like... did I? Did I? YES, I did!

I actually was too nervous on the final puzzle I did (which is not the final puzzle of the game, I skipped it earlier) so I turned the volume up, hit run, and walked into the other room and just hung out until I heard the children scream YEYYYYYYYY and I was like well, there you go, beat the game. First time I ever beat a game from a different room, lol.
11/06/19, 03:54   
Edited: 11/06/19, 04:02
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