Walaber Entertainment LLC (JellyCar Worlds, Parking Garage Rally Circuit) have just released Replicube, an open-ended programming puzzle game where you make 3D voxel-based objects.
Could serve as a fun and interesting way to get yourself or others into programming and test your knowledge. A truly nerdy puzzle game that's for sure. Check out the Steam trailer below:
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Direct Link
Direct Link
Highlights:
- SOLVE PUZZLES - The main content of the game involves trying to match a reference object by working out code that will replicate it. There is no "right answer", if your code produces the same object, it's correct!
- PLAY AROUND - You can always open the voxel tool in "free edit" mode and just play around, making whatever you want. In addition to the main 3D voxel editor, there is also a bonus 2D image editor for writing code to generate 2D images and GIF animations. You can even save your image creation as the background image in the "OS" interface of the game!
- JOIN THE COMMUNITY - Every puzzle has 2 leaderboards, measuring source code size, and execution efficiency. Often optimizing for one will be at the expense of the other. If you enjoy trying to squeeze a bit more out of your code, the leaderboards are waiting!
- There is also an in-game online forum where players can share their own voxel creations, and even challenge other players to try to recreate them, all presented in an old-school online forum wrapper.
- EXPORT YOUR CREATIONS - Generated 3D voxel objects can be exported into common formats to bringing into other 3D creation tools. Generated 2D images and animations can also be exported as png or gif for sharing online.
The release arrives with Native Linux support and it already has a Very Positive rating on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Ehvis a day ago
It's an interesting concept for a puzzle game. But the demo did reveal a few issues that diminished things for me. The biggest problem revolves around using LUA as an interpreter. This is a full featured scripting language and without limitations solving these puzzles becomes fairly trivial. It also makes optimisation less fun since execution times and code size now become somewhat vague as there is no real info on how the lua code translates to either. Some things you can figure out by trial and error, but others times details seem to get lost in lua internals. I'd much rather have seen a more compact dedicated script to make it more of a puzzle game instead of work.
So not really for me, but at least it's cheap.
So not really for me, but at least it's cheap.
1 Likes
sonic2kk 6 hours ago
Got sucked into this for a few hours last night. Some of the optimisation and token count that people get on the leaderboard is unbelievable, I think I'm too poor at maths to get some of the probably more elegant formulaic-type solutions. But the good news is it's fun despite that. It's honestly just fun to experiment with random solutions and see what insane patterns of shape and colour you can get from tweaking variables and comparison operators.
There are also a ton of cool details, like at the game's bootup screen it shows your actual machine specs. When you type, the game plays a mechanical keystroke sound, and you can customise the type of switch it's supposed to sound like! Since it's made with Godot it takes full advantage of the UI controls and you can do a ton of cool customisation of panel sizes and window sizes too, even minimizing them! The UI is so cool and immersive.
It's a shame they went with a custom account leaderboard instead of using Steamwork's leaderboard functionality. It also doesn't have achievements. I'm not even sure it has Cloud Saves, maybe they weren't using GodotSteam for integration? Anyway, sometimes submitting to the leaderboard or browsing the pages fails and you have to retry loading a few times.
I've been playing the Native Linux release and it works on my system without issue. So cool!
EDIT: I'd love to see this one on GOG, with the account functionality stripped out if needed.
Last edited by sonic2kk on 26 Apr 2025 at 2:16 pm UTC
There are also a ton of cool details, like at the game's bootup screen it shows your actual machine specs. When you type, the game plays a mechanical keystroke sound, and you can customise the type of switch it's supposed to sound like! Since it's made with Godot it takes full advantage of the UI controls and you can do a ton of cool customisation of panel sizes and window sizes too, even minimizing them! The UI is so cool and immersive.
It's a shame they went with a custom account leaderboard instead of using Steamwork's leaderboard functionality. It also doesn't have achievements. I'm not even sure it has Cloud Saves, maybe they weren't using GodotSteam for integration? Anyway, sometimes submitting to the leaderboard or browsing the pages fails and you have to retry loading a few times.
I've been playing the Native Linux release and it works on my system without issue. So cool!
EDIT: I'd love to see this one on GOG, with the account functionality stripped out if needed.
Last edited by sonic2kk on 26 Apr 2025 at 2:16 pm UTC
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Klaas 5 hours ago
I don't think there is a Linux version of a game that uses GodotSteam on GOG, since they all seem to use GOG's wrapper that has no Linux version.
If you need knowledge of the implementation of the Lua runtime to optimise the solutions that does not sound like a lot of fun.
If you need knowledge of the implementation of the Lua runtime to optimise the solutions that does not sound like a lot of fun.
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