You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.
It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.
On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.
I'll plug Scandal by Shusaku Endo. It is by a Japanese Catholic novelist and was written near the end of his career (lifetime achievement award timeframe).
It is about a Japanese Catholic novelist near the end of his career, who is accepting an award when he is accosted by reporters asking about rumors that he has been seen carousing in the red light district. He decides to investigate the rumors, but he isn't ready for what he's going to find.
It's a kind of meta, semi-autobiographical interrogation of the author and the pillars on which he built his life, that in some ways would be impossible to adapt to any other medium.
Amazon warehouses are shelters for things. Either someone pays the fee and adopts the thing, or it goes to the farm upstate.
There are lots of thing mills breeding special things that wind up in the shelter. It's a cold and cruel business, but that's humans trying to make a buck for you.
If things don't get adopted, they don't always get killed though. Sometimes they get adopted for pennies on the dollar, and move elsewhere in the system.
Definitely, although the quality of life goes way up with a computer doing admin.
There was a weekly column at Rock Paper Shotgun that covered them (and adjacent stuff like simulation), and lately the writer has taken up residence at a new URL.
You mostly play the vanilla game of Minecraft without programming. The survival loop is to mine resources in order to craft better tools that allow you to explore, build, and defeat enemies.
You can get a lot of mileage out of it this way and never touch the programming side. It is an all time bestseller for good reason.
There is an in game material called redstone that is used for simple electrical engineering and circuitry. The devices can play music, push blocks around, open doors, fire arrows, run train cars, and other applications.
The programming starts with command blocks, which can use redstone triggers to execute keyword commands.
There are a bunch of mods that can add automation through programming. For instance, programming a mining robot to drill out a tunnel, using Lua.
Mod programming itself would often be in Java, and add new game entities or systems. This can get fairly advanced and there are some total conversion mods (eg some Pokemon clones).
There are other fun games that are more like programming, like those from Zachtronics. So why Minecraft? It's fun and familiar, and provides a massive canvas for creativity that fires the imagination.
Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company.
Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre.
Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
"Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player and let them fix it...
Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books. And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if their original purpose was just to aid testing.
Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.
I'm intrigued by the idea that users will be able to solve this problem on the client side. Perhaps not on the underlying data directly, but running an adversarial browser agent clicking its way purposefully through the internet, in a tab you never look at.
I interviewed people for Amazon as well before moving to another FAANG. All I would amplify here is that entry level is entry level, especially in software. None of the college hires have professional experience (maybe internships, but they had to start from nothing to get those anyway). So what you are trying to do is
1) not be an asshole; look at their leadership principles and figure out how you resonate with them; answer honestly if you never did that
2) beat the technical questions. they are a proxy for skills and experiences
I used and recommend Leetcode for #2... for entry level I don't think you should need the paid tier.
If there were a Leetcode for not being an asshole, I would recommend the paid tier.
> " I interviewed people for Amazon as well before moving to another FAANG. All I would amplify here is that entry level is entry level, especially in software. None of the college hires have professional experience (maybe internships, but they had to start from nothing to get those anyway)."
100% agree with everything you said, although depending on the Org 'entry level' can mean 'just graduated from college'. In Premium Support, at least, they're always tinkering with their recruiting models.
I was hired as entry level with 1 year experience at a startup. These days, that entry level job is reserved for recent college graduates or people getting out of the military. They wouldn't slot me as entry level today for recruiting/interviewing purposes.
Not sure how AWS handles entry level software engineering positions.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/376240/Hadean_Lands/
You are an alchemist whose spacecraft crashed at a nexus between worlds. You need to discover and perform alchemical rituals to explore and try to escape.
It has some great quality of life features, such as allowing you to re-perform any ritual you have successfully completed in a single command, and allowing you to recall any significant information you have deduced.
On top of this, some great writing and a very strange atmosphere.