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Zacktronics Infiniminer Oh it's a minecraft ripoff... that minecraft rippedoff.

Tiny Tower

Look, I can post a crap load more, but I'm not your personal fucking google.

Shit's been going on since the first videogames. It's like you fools don't know who Nolan Bushnell is. So, here's the thing. They will steal your shit if it's possible. If you do the crazy hard work of cranking out a shit ton of games & prototypes and testing them to find what's fun, and get some popularity (read: do market research for them), they they will steal your shit.

If you're a random indie gamedev, then chances are no one will play your game except other indie gamedevs and a few fans of the indie scene. Do that 100 times and get even a modicum of success? Yes, those mother fuckers will rip off your shit. STFU, you sound like a damn Noob.

If you haven't had your game design ripped off and executed by someone with more resources in a tighter timeframe... Then you either haven't made anything popular yet, or you're really fucking lucky (or your games suck.... Just sayin').

Build chips out of silicon and metal. Also, Ruckingenur II, where you reverse-engineer things. Both by ZachTronics. http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/play-kohctpyktop/ Neither of them are very long games, but the early levels of Engineer of the People could easily accompany a couple days in a high school science course.

I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?

While Free Software isn't exactly innovative, even TuxRacer was inspired by the N64 game 1080, lets not forget that Minecraft didn't exactly spring out of thin air either, it's heavily based on ideas from Infiniminer. True innovation is rather rare and while there do exist some original games, like Liquid War, there aren't many of them.

The reason for that are two fold: First of the "Ideas are cheap" mantra really isn't true, original ideas are rare, original ideas that are actually implementable are really rare and then even having that idea, doesn't give you the ability to communicate it properly. Which brings the second main issue: communication. It's much easier to say "Lets do a Civ clone" and find contributors, then to get contributors on something completely original, especially when it is nowhere near completion, nobody has a clear idea of what it should be like and there isn't something tangible to point at. Establishing a shared vision is hard if all you have is IRC and mailing lists.

I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.

I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).

The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.

There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.

A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.

Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.

The guy who made SpaceChem released several other free games, mostly flash games. He calls the series "games for engineers". Very geeky cool.

The codex of alchemical engineering where you program robotic arms to assemble molecules.

The sequel: The codex of alchemical engineering magnum opus challenge

Bureau of steam engineering where you use steam valves and pipes to build control logic for steampunk battle robots.

A downloadable EXE game Ruckingenur II (requires Microsoft's DotNET 2.0 to be installed). The idea is that you use logic probes and stuff to hack electronic circuits. It's kinda cool and it's pretty realistic, but your options are fairly limited. It's more of a puzzle game than a simulator.

And then there's my favorite:
Kohctpyktop engineer of the people.
This one is definitely the geekiest and most intellectually sophisticated of them all. The idea of the game is that you have to build transistor circuits. You are given a blank playfield to draw circuitry, and the game does a full electric/logic simulation of your circuit. If the game board were arbitrarily large you could literally build an entire working CPU in there! If you manage complete the game you will have a very deep understanding of how computers work at the transistor level.

Unfortunately Kohctpyktop has almost no instructions, the help tab is a link to a tutorial video that is only marginally helpful, and it has a seriously steep learning curve. If anyone wants to give it a try be sure to use pause during the help video, it goes by really fast. You also need to know that you need to hold shift to switch from red to yellow silicon, and in delete mode hold shift to delete metal. For further help look for me in the Echo Hall chatroom on Kongregate. If I'm not there you can try asking for Kohctpyktop help in general chat - there are several Echo Hall regulars who know the game.

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Check out http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/. Those games take the essence of what makes programming fun and turn it into a game. Spacechem is not free but the other games are. They do get fiendishly difficult though.

Though it doesn't serve a useful purpose (other than entertainment)

http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/pivot/entry.php?id=79