Lightbot

2008-09-17T21:47:00.007+01:00

I played an interesting game on kongregate today; "Lightbot". This is a typical grid based puzzler, walk around lighting every tile. Except it isn't. At all.

No, lightbot is actually a game about programming. I've seen a few games where you "program" a robot to do a task, such as light all the lights in a grid. They usually become boring and repetitive after not long, to be honest. Lightbot, however, contains some ingenius elements, which demonstrate the practical applications of reusable functions in programming.

Your main "program" is limited to a certain number of spaces, often not enough to complete the level. To overcome this, you must create new functions which you can use multiple times, effectively compressing 8 commands into 1.

So: where am I going with this? No idea. But play lightbot if you're a very novice programmer and don't understand how or why you would use functions. It was interesting to me.

lightbot=str(raw_input('What is lightbot?'))
if lightbot=='awesome':
print 'correct'
else:
print 'fail'

P.S. Tioga wins for bothering me.

Things are changing around here

2008-08-27T18:50:00.000+01:00

It seems like I picked a dodgy time to go on holiday. I got back a week ago, to find that Kongregate had changed significantly; at least for me. The dates are not very accurate, and it's not helped by my natural ability to be uninformed.

Kongai is out
Chat seems a lot better and more reliable (This is more long term.)
AlisonClaire now works for Kongregate
Points challenges
Raffles and such

This caused me to reflect on my time at Kongregate. I've been coming to this humble flash portal site for a year and two months (Sense of scale; go and find the Ring Pass Nott badges). That's a long time, both on the internet, and for me. More than 1/16th of my life. I've become a mod and, I hope, matured somewhat into this role. I've seen trolls, users and mods come and go, although it must be said that a good number are still with us today. Kongregate's (community at least, who knows about those programmers) staff has increased dramatically too. When I began there was but Damijin, Greg and the Greers in the public eye. The number of chat rooms has gone up by a lot, including several in foreign languages, and rooms specific to multiplayer games, and moderator room owners are more common.

Today, we are visited by another change for the better. Moderators can now silence users, in adition to baning them. If you don't know, silencing stops users from chatting but allows them to continue in other aspects of the site. This is a useful feature, however I have to wonder what situations you apply it to. Do you silence a user who is simply there to troll/spam/whatever? If they're not doing anything else on the site, then it's better to ban them with more permanance. But how do you know? Tricky. This raises another point I'd like to make.

Moderating is no fun at all.

You're face with tricky questions like that all the time. If you think moderating will be cool because you get to ban people, then I'm afraid you're most likely not the right kind of person for the job. Moderating is about knowing when not to ban more than anything else I feel. It's no fun, just hard work.

Sorry, this turned out far longer than I was expecting. It turned into a long rant about everything, and a bit of a nostalgia trip. Please leave comments on what I've been saying. I'm interested to know what you think.

Edit: Blame Feed the Ducks for inspiring me to start this blog.

Kongregating for Pies

Lightbot

Things are changing around here