What is a good game involving coding?

Question

I remember the days of Shadowrun that got me excited about hacking. There is CodeWar and LightBot which are both fun (though CoreWar is a little dated). What other games are there involving coding that are fun and challenging that can be used to get someone excited about coding or flex their chops or even learn the basics?

Answer 1

Project Euler

Answer 2

When I was a kid I played "Rocky's Boots", where you had to hook up logic gates to solve puzzles. That had a big impact on my thinking.

Answer 3

Not sure if it's considered a "game", but the TopCoder Competitions are fun, and come in various sizes and commitment levels. You can also work on puzzles from the archives for some good programming practice.

Answer 4

Here's something that allows you to make games and animations: Alice

Answer 5

The Python Challenge is like those "look at the html source" riddles, but requires a bit of programming to get the answers.

Answer 6

If you're looking for a board game, you might want to have a look at Robo Rally. In this game 2-8 people are trying to maneuver their robots over the board as quickly as possible, dodging deadly obstacles and trying to shove other people robots into obstacles on the way.

Each game round all players have to "code" the program the robot is going to execute in the next round and then the robots just follow their program. The programs are just five instructions long, but still creating an optimal program can be quite tricky. There usually is very little luck involved, which is why I really like this game.

Answer 7

Uplink isn't so much a coding game, but it is a great game that makes you feel like a hacker.

Answer 8

Core Wars.

Answer 9

There's a whole bunch of "drag-and-drop" coding games, where you make a little thing (usually a robot) solve some puzzle by giving it a list of instructions. They're only vaguely similar to actual coding, but they are still pretty fun.

RoboZZle

The Codex of Alchemical Engineering

light-Bot

Answer 10

Similar to Uplink is HackWars. Instead of point and click hacking though, it's multiplayer and you can write your own attack scripts. There's actually an included runtime for writing 2d/3d games and there's a bunch of different places to hook in scripts (for defense, banking, in game website, etc).

Scripting language looks similar to Java.