I’ve always enjoyed games about coding – or the games that let your program genre if you will. Started keeping a list that someone else might enjoy. If you know of any games that belong on the list please feel free to reach out via email or Mastodon.


SOFTWARE LOGIC GAMES

Either by abstract logic layers, or by direct code language input, there are a fair few games that let you play around with programming concepts and logic puzzles without having to go the full hog and learn a real real full-fledged coding language (or they do, in some cases…).

BOX-256

else Heart.Break()

Shenzhen I/O

Human Resouce Machine and 7 Billion Humans

Exapunks

Quadrilateral Cowboy

TIS-100

Core war

Hackmud (Highly recommend Brendan Caldwell’s piece Lizard Games: My sordid double life among Hackmud’s failing newspapers and rigged casinos (i)

Screeps

Colobot

Bitburner


HARDWARE LOGIC GAMES

Some times there is that itch for something a little closer to the metal than a GO compiler, some times there is that want to get your hands dirty and wire up some contraption. If that is more your speed, then these hardware focused games are for you.

SILICON ZEROES

MHRD

ROBOT ODYSSEY

KPHCTPYKTOP ENGINEER OF THE PEOPLE


FANTASY CONSOLES

There is a growing number of fantasy consoles — emulators emulating 8-bit-esq consoles that never existed.

Essentially these emulated consoles, with their often quite strict limitations on resources, are for those that want to try their hand at making retro games without having to dive into the arcane assembly coding magix of yore and perhaps even have to track down a hardware developer kit to get their project off the ground.

PICO-8 - programmed using LUA

TIC-80

LIKO-12 (it’s FOSS)

PIXEL VISION 8