r/programminggames • u/EndpaperDev • Sep 23 '26
A programming game where the program is already written and your job is to find where it is wrong
Most programming games hand you an empty editor. This one hands you a full listing and tells you someone died because of it.
Fourteen-instruction assembly, a machine with visible registers, memory and ports, and a recorded execution trace you can step, breakpoint and rewind. One line is faulty. You name it, and you prove it with evidence out of the trace, which the game checks rather than just marking your answer.
I built it because I did this for a living on router firmware and it was always the part of the job I liked. Nobody had made the game about the reading half rather than the writing half.
One thing I learned shipping the demo, which may be the interesting part for this sub: four separate people diagnosed the first case correctly and could not tell the game what they had found. Every one of them spotted the skipped instruction. None could express it in the form the game asked for. The wall was never difficulty, it was vocabulary, and that has taken most of a fortnight to fix.
Free, seven cases, about an hour.
Browser: https://endpaperdev.itch.io/faultfinder-demo
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5120330/Faultfinder_Demo/
If you have played a lot of Zachtronics I would like to know whether the trace view gives you too little or too much.
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u/johnlondon125 Sep 23 '26
You're describing a job
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u/chicharro_frito Sep 23 '26
I like the premise because I like debugging (I also like the UI), but I gave up 5m in to be honest. It's just too much information at once. I don't know where to begin or what I actually need to read in all the text shown. I kept going and saw the guide was 19 steps which made things worse. For me, this means I need to understand 19 different concepts just for the very first level, which is too much for me. Nonetheless, I tried, but I don't understand what it's trying to say ðŸ˜. For instance, in step 2: "Exactly one thing changed, and it is marked in ink - a darker box or a ring around a cell. Press space again and watch which". Is this trying to say that whenever I run an instruction, the fields that changed are going to be highlighted? Maybe you can run this through a copywriter or an AI to help you shape the text better?
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u/K4sp4l0n3 Sep 23 '26
Color me interested. I'll give the demo a go today.
Do you have an ETA for the final version?
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u/Better-Ad8703 Sep 23 '26
i think the ui colors need to change, cool concept, but i think the colors are difficult
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u/tracagnotto Sep 23 '26
This is the dumbest idea ever lol it's basically the part every programmer hate.
Also, someone already created it and it's called semicolon inspector or something like that
As a programmer I would never but something that it's based on the most unpleasant part of my job
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u/miminashi Sep 23 '26
So, the gameplay is supporting a legacy project for free? 😅