Links

http://joxi.ru/D2PDPEwhpRQWa2

I really enjoyed this as a programmer, and I wish it got more attention then it did. I think some of it could be made more approachable by starting out with a smaller board and scaling up over time.

@OccultOne yeah, it came out too complex. I have plans to simplify it in another iteration because I think it has potential. Would you mind if I reached out to you with the new version when I do it?

I could see this becoming a cool puzzle game like the ones Zachtronics makes. Maybe rather that aiming for points you could have a target state of the terrain, so you pass a level by achieving that state, and score based on how many transitions/cycles you used to get there?
Really nice clean visuals btw!

Not very intuitive game and I have some math background so I feel like I should be able to pick it up quickly. The UI could be more responsive like highlight what are you currently changing etc. The tutorial is not helping that much either. The UI is pretty though.

@kaisean-games Sure man, hit me up! @OccultSoftworks is my twitter handle.

Quite hard to get this at first, but very enjoyable when you understand it. Maybe the game needs to be more intuitive, and help you in the proccess of making a machine that works. I kinda like that there's no compete mode, and the just let you be creative with the machine.

Not my kind of game, I must say, but I found it enjoyable and I had fun trying to make something that works (and I even made one, hah!). As far as I know, this kind of games have a lot of potential and there are some games like this on Steam, so you could improve and expand this, I'm sure a lot of people can find this interesting.

Hmmmm...Not sure I can really wrap my brain around this one. I'm familiar with Turing machines, but I can't for the life of me get this thing to do anything other than change a row of tiles. I'm not quite sure how to make it transition to a different step, and there's a lot of things to fiddle around with on the UI, in a few different ways (some things you click, others you scroll, etc.), and because nothing was changing, it was hard to discover what impacted what.

Seeing the screenshots and stuff, I can tell that this is potentially a really cool terrain generator, and I'm sure it feels awesome once you get everything working right. But I couldn't really get past step one and I kind of had to give up...Perhaps reworking your tutorial to something that's not just front-loaded text on the title screen before you even see the game board and what you can interact with would go a long way. Something that sort of guides the player more.

Another option would be to "simplify" what the player is working with. I can understand why you might not want to do this, as the concept of generating a unique terrain with a simple TM sounds (and IS) pretty bad-ass (I still think it's an awesome idea), but folks who maybe have no idea what a Turing Machine are doomed to be lost and confused as to how to operate you game, because there are too many things for them to tinker with, and the rewards for randomly fiddling with it are few and far between.

I'm curious to see what you plan to do next if you decide to continue working on this. :) Best of luck, it really is a cool idea!

@coleslaughter I plan to simplify this game by removing clutter from the UI and moving to a 1D circular track in one dimension instead of 2D field. Would you mind if I contact you to try it when there's a demo? I promise,I'll even make a tutorial :)

This was pretty fun. I got it to make some interesting diagonal patterns by modifying the default instructions, I'm sure if I put more time into it I could do even more.

Might I suggest using icons instead of letters in the list of instructions - one of the things I had to figure out is which letter meant which thing in the instruction - is it a state? a direction, a terrain type?

Some polish and some goals and this can definitely be a game that would get me interested.

Seems like a cool concept, although I never really understood what I was supposed to be doing.

Very interesting entry. Now you have a good concept for a game, and my suggestion is think in a way to make the machine instructions more intuitive to lay peoples.

Good job!

@Kaisean-Games: I'd be happy to try it out again. :) My free time can get a bit sparse sometimes, but if you keep me in the loop I'll be sure to play it!

Yeah this is a bit complex, but i have this feeling that by playing a long time i will able to do some great complex pattern !
Maybe a mini tutorial would have been so much more demonstrating because since i'm not an english-speaker, the "instruction" part got me reading again for too long and still don't understand.
It lacked too of sound effects in my opinion. Not music really, but just feedbacks would have been great !
Anyway i just found the idea great, good job !

I really like "puzzly" games (one of my old LD games was about wiring logic gates), and I think this is an interesting take on a Turing machine. It's not very intuitive at first, but with enough fiddling around I got it to make simple patterns. Maybe have a simpler 2D interface as well? The interface looks very clean, but it would be better with more explanations embedded in it. Graphics look good, and I hope you keep working on this. Another suggestion would be to add levels where you have to fulfill certain objectives, rather than just having a score system. Good job!

Awesome challenging game! The UI was a bit hard to learn, but when I got what I was actually supposed to do it was truly a really cool challenge. I hope you keep up development of this game.

Pretty cool visual and 2d interpretation of the Turing Machine, this could do well teaching people about it since it makes much more 'sense' coming from a general purpose computing point of view than a machine that writes symbols on an infinite piece of paper.

Could be cool to make a terrain generator in an entertaining way, but as hard as I try i miss something.

To my understanding the program:

```
(*|*) -> (A|=|=)
(A|GCHMD) -> (A|S|E)
(A|S) -> (=|=|S)
```

shall cover the terrain with water, but actually it does nothing not even counting cycles :s

@sgadrat there is a limit of 1000 cycles, and a bug that sometimes prevent the machine from moving. However, your program is incorrect. If you have only these 3 transitions it will always fire the first one because it fires the first transition that satisfies. Which is of course bad on my side cause I didn't have enough time to implement reordering so you have to plan transitions ahead of time.

@kaisean-games will you make the source code available?

@pietptr Probably not at the moment. Especially since I plan to keep working on it and perhaps publish it. However, I am willing to answer any questions you might have, if I can be of any help.

Thank you sincerely for your interest. :)

This is a neat concept and I enjoyed flying over the world when zooming in. I thought the UI text was fitting, and the colour palette was well done. The snow graphics look a bit pixelated for some reason, which was strange. As for the game, it felt like a nice sandbox game. The instructions were a lot to take in for me when first playing, so I spent most of it autogenerating terrain and then deleting random conditions as I went along. I even managed to terraform the entire board, which was cool.

I'm not really sure why the orange generating contraption stops moving once you set in new conditions, even with the speed set to something that is, say, medium. If I save my changes and it stops moving, I have to click the speed button rapidly to go back the desired speed. Well, I did think the fastest speed was very funny, especially when the generator is only terraforming in a very small area and the squares just go flying off the board. XD

It's an interesting game, though it would be in need of an in-game tutorial for casual players, especially if there is going to be a competitive mode.

I had some fun with this. It's certainly well-presented. Nice art, decent UI.

I'm no CS grad, so I was a little scared at first but I managed to get to the point of clearing the board with all water.

This may defeat the whole point of the Turing Complete thing, but I feel like in order to do anything more complex in 2D, you need to at least be able to reset and check a cycle counter. That way we could do rudimentary positional checks. But then I guess a *counter* isn't a *state*, so it doesn't enter into it being a state machine?

For instance, I wanted to try and do a checkerboard pattern, but because the board positions wrap around, I couldn't figure out how I would move up instead of across once I had completed a row. Maybe another option would be to not wrap around, and have a check to see if you *could* move in a direction. But again, that wouldn't be a state so I dunno.

Lots to think about, which is great for an LD entry!