As the game gets harder with higher utilization you should be able to "buy" upgrades with tokens that you "earn" for hitting milestones or performance targets that automate small mundane tasks. Kinda like the universal paperclips game. Then you throw pathological workloads at the user that thwart the simple automations so you have to unstick it manually. So the user buys upgrades to slightly better automations, thwarted again by slightly more pathological workloads... Boom game progression loop.
A video game where you are an operating system
61–70 of 126 posts
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#62Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#63It needs ways to upgrade your computer to live longer.
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#64You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks. I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.
https://defrag.lolalabs.com/
Cool proof of concept... not a fun game
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might make a good career then.
> Might make a good career then. Is it, though? As much as the autorouters "known" to not work, I expect that a working one is less than 10 years away. Even for PCIe-level complexity.
Highly doubt that, and routing is only part of the puzzle.
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#66Fun, I wonder if anyone has done a garbage collection game. I'm imagining an isometric view, like Zaxxon, where you drive a garbage truck around and collect dead references.
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#67In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#68This is pretty nerdy but c'mon, it's like Cookie Clicker or some other idle game when compared to Zachtronics titles.
It fits very comfortably into the category of "time management" game, which was a fairly popular casual genre 10-15 years ago. Cook Serve Delicious is probably the one notable example which is still going strong. Definitely distinct from idle games.
Wilmot's Warehouse is the one it most reminds me of (maybe the graphics), which is quite fun (except for the random crashing :( that seems to get worse after it starts happening). This one needs a lot of work, though. I did it wrong it seems looking at the other comments here but nothing about this one makes me want to try again. Wilmot's Warehouse has excellent pacing. The theme of this one could be made to work well but throwing everything at the player right away and see how long they can keep going is not my idea of fun. I'd suggest automation options combined with changing the use pattern of the system over time. Plus something to give the player more customization options so it isn't just "do this repetitive task as quickly as you can". Maybe a choice of cute loading icons that you can display in certain circumstances?
Mini Metro is another well known game in the time management genera. I've seen some recent games with this design and played a demo of a not yet released game. It seems like a common small indie game genera since larger developers don't seem to touch it that I can think of (except possibly some mini games? I can't think of anything off hand but there must be some). I guess the larger developers go for RTS games instead.
Possibly the OS theme could be turned into a kind of "bot combat" game (at least I think that would be the general genera I'm thinking of, but without direct combat in this case) if the internals are automated and then compared to the market as a whole, with established OSes that are fairly good at everything but not great at anything. These established OSes could then take various anti-competitive actions along the way that force you to get better at a different specialty than you previously targeted.
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#69[deleted]
Re: A video game where you are an operating system
#70You know what would be cool? A defragmentation game. It's basically Tetris but in a circular layout, and you get more points the better optimized it is - with frequently used data blocks towards the outer tracks and old/archive file types towards the inner tracks. I always enjoyed watching graphical defragmenters do their magic back in the day and would unironically love to play a defragging game.
it's not really related in concept, but I feel like playing various puzzles with pentominoes would feel a bit similar to this, as it's spatial reasoning puzzles. I adore pentominoes and spent a large portion of my childhood playing with them, recently rediscovered them as an adult.
For me it was Tangrams, which I've only seen one somewhat odd (in a "feels outsourced" kind of way) computer game (not that you can really improve on the physical version). I first thought you said pantomimes, which could also be interesting :).