I liked the idea of these games but I was the opposite. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was just work. I found myself procrastinating them. Wish I could enjoy the puzzles more.
Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.
On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.
Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.
Though I already have weekend programming projects that are more fulfilling and work towards something more concrete than "yay, solved a puzzle", and the games just made me wonder why I wasn't putting this time into those hobby projects. Factorio made me feel this way too.
On the other hand, I've been playing Morrowind lately (OpenMW) which gives me a nice mental break from programming. Apart from the fact that I couldn't help but write a parser for its game files once I saw how simple and documented the format was. Bit more fulfilling to have a `tes3_parser.go` at the end of my puzzle-solving session than to have solved some contrived TIS-100 puzzles for a fantasy computer.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Mod_File_Format
Factorio was fun at first, but then it quickly felt like a pencil and paper optimization problem for something that doesn't even exist. Whether that tickles your fancy or not is probably like whether cilantro tastes like soap to you or not.