https://store.steampowered.com/app/716490/EXAPUNKS/
EXAPUNKS is the latest open-ended puzzle game from Zachtronics, the creators of Opus Magnum, SHENZHEN I/O, TIS-100, and more.
I received it as a gift and started playing and … I have questions. I am playing it on Ubuntu, and it’s working great. I don’t login anywhere else though so I’m hoping I can find people to talk to about it on Lemmy.
Cheers if you have played and can help. Sorry to bother otherwise.
Questions!
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How does it know who my steam friends are? Is that just an api or something?
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What are size, cycles and activity? It shows me these things but I can’t find an explanation.
Thanks!
Size is how many lines of code in your solution
Cycles is how long your program takes to finish
Activity is how much you had to interact with the target system.
They’re measures of your solution’s efficiency. A low size program fits on simpler hardware. A low cycles program can do a hack faster, and do more hacks in the same time. A low activity program is harder for security systems to detect.
Oh man, OK, thanks. This is helpful. When I played the first few missions, the game showed one of my Steam friends did it with much lower numbers. I assume I can replay those later when I know more how to do things.
I don’t think it has any effect on the story. It’s just for bragging rights. Your friend gets to say they’re a more efficient programmer with a more elegant design.
I last played it in 2021. Steam says I have the achievement “Complete every task in the main campaign”, but I seem to recall not finding this game as fun as the other Zachtronics games.
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Yes, many Steam games use a few API calls to integrate with Steam, such as seeing your friend list, usually to invited them to a multiplayer game. Hit shift-tab to see the Steam overlay in any game to get an idea for what this API can do.
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They are a measure of the cost of your solution. They account for things like how many total squares you touched, how many total instructions were executed, and how much parallelization you had.
Got it, thanks!
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Loved this game! Really liked the cyberpunk vibes and even printed out the zines into little booklets. It’s been a while since I played but what kind of questions did you have?
Haven’t played it (probably in my wishlist), so I can’t help directly, but I can offer this: go ahead and ask the questions. If someone else around here has, then they can jump in to comment with advice and answers at any point in time later.
One of the perks of forum-style comms like this.
