Matthew Broderick simulator Exapunks acquired a sizeable replace yesterday, including 9 extra puzzles to the code scribbling hack ‘em up. Developers Zachtronics are calling this a bonus campaign, since it focuses not on the AI pal who features in the main story, but on the hacker pals who appear in a chatroom between levels. In short, you’ll be serving to your hackmates do dodgy stuff. “Like NthDimension getting his driver’s license,” says Zach Barth of Zachtronics, “and hydroponix looking for the truth about the Roswell UFO crash.” That one entails hacking the Department of Defense, naturally.
Other puzzles will see you constructing a wardialer or hacking a brand new MMO, we’re informed. The replace additionally options code tweaking of its personal, with fixes and modifications to the game alongside the brand new cyber misdemeanours. You can see the patch notes in this Steam post. The largest enchancment might be the opening up of the “size limit”.
Previously, for those who wrote an absurd quantity of code into your little spiderbots, you’d be unable to beat the extent as a result of there was a restrict on how a lot the game would settle for. But the builders discovered that folks have been nonetheless writing ridiculously long-winded bits of code in an try to finish the extent. Zach Barth defined this when he spoke to our man Alex Wiltshire about how Exapunks represents hacking without limits.
“The problem is that people still do bullshit cheesy stuff and there are people who are so bad that they run up to the limits and they’re emailing me and upset,” stated Barth.
Now the scale restrict has been lifted, so that you’ll have the ability to cheese your means by means of the degrees, no drawback. The draw back is that your resolution received’t seem on the web leaderboard. In different phrases: optimisers and perfectionists will nonetheless be competing for the highest spots, however idiots like myself can nonetheless write a billion strains of code and be ok with getting by means of degree 4. Barth has admitted it’s not an ideal resolution.
“If we set the limits too low,” he informed Alex, “people won’t use the leaderboards and histograms, but it allows them to be really bad without ruining it for people who are optimising.”
There’s additionally some helpful issues, like particular buttons in your in-game desktop that’ll take you straight to ПАСЬЯНС (a solitaire minigame) and the Redshift (a programmable Game Boy model console on which individuals are already programming Asteroids clones). The patch additionally consists of the delightfully cautious be aware: “Improved the game’s loading speed, hopefully.”
