Day Nine

I had intended to go back to Magicka today, but got sucked in SpaceChem again. At twenty hours booked so far, I'm about half way through the main game. After that there's a few free levels from a cross promotion with Team Fortress 2, the free DLC pack that I picked up with some Steam Summer Camp tickets and the Research Net levels which I think are user submitted. Not too shabby for $5.09.

SpaceChem does a pretty cool summary of how you did after you complete most of the levels (boss fights aren't graded for some reason). It records three core metrics that basically boil down to either how long your solution took to complete the level (cycles) or how simple or complicated your solution (reactors and symbols). These are presented as bar graphs that compare you to the average completion stats based on user submissions. Improving the score of one metric will usually come at the expense of the other, so the player is free to play the game within the game of optimizing their working submission as they see fit.

I completed three or four levels tonight, which is a bit fast, but the solutions were coming pretty easily to me. One result tonight surprised me a bit in that both my cycles stat and my symbols stat were on the far right-hand side of the stats curve. Usually I'm at or below average on at least one of them. I didn't think the solution I came up with was very complicated or slow, but clearly it was both. This one will be ripe for the pickin' to come back later to see how I can improve it. Not that I'm upset by my slow, inefficient results. There's a truism in computer programming (yes, once again I compare SpaceChem to programming) that goes something like, "It's easier to optimize a working program than it is to debug a broken optimized program."

Games Played: 
SpaceChem

Achievements: 
Not tonight