8 Video Games for Web Developers

hey this is Devin and today I'm gonna tell you about eight video games that will make you a better web developer [Applause] there's this whole sub-genre of games that's popped up in the last few years that's basically around creating algorithms to do various things and the one I played most recently is called autonomous chef it's a really cool game where you're sort of setting up this automated kitchen in a restaurant you start the level and the game gives you a food that you're going to be making and then tells you how you need to make it the ingredients you need and the different processing you'll have to do on the ingredients to get the final dish and you take these components that each do different things and you have conveyor belts that move food through your machine and you piece them all together and build something some sort of contraption that will make the food that the game is asking you to make and these are really just algorithms it's the same sort of thing you do to solve problems in programming except whereas in programming the syntax of the language you're using makes up the components of your machine in these games you have a more visual representation of that with actual parts that you're piecing together to create the machines you need to make to to build whatever it is you're making and there are a bunch of games like this autonomous chef is not the only one or even the best one as as far as I know there's also infinite factory there's factorio and if you need something that's hitting on almost every platform there's one called human resource machine that's a lot of fun it's on mobile devices so if you have an iOS or Android device a tablet or a phone you can play human resource machine on that autonomous chef is a great game in this genre and it is available on Steam for $15 the first thing you're going to notice about return of the obrah den is that as a really striking look about it it's it's made to emulate really old computer graphics and you can actually pick which computer system you want to emulate with the graphics and it'll apply different shaders to the game but that's not really what the game is about the game is about being an insurance adjustor fun right well but actually it's pretty fun because what you're doing is an insurance adjustor is you're you're sort of investigating this mystery the ship the overburden it's set sail with some trade cargo never actually arrived at its destination and now five years later it's drifted back ashore completely empty so it's up to you as the insurance adjuster to go on the ship and investigate and find out what happened to the people who set sail five years ago and to do that you're given this like super powered pocket watch the lets you turn back time and watch the events when you come across someone's remains and your job is to go through this book and fill in the name of the person that died how they died and and where applicable who killed them it reminded me a lot of debugging or coming into a legacy code base that you're not familiar with because you're sort of you don't really have a frame of reference you don't know what's going on or how so you just kind of pick a spot that seems relevant and you start investigating from there and trying to understand how the pieces fit together and in the case of your code base when you're debugging where it's breaking where it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing and I think the return of the ever den does a great job of capturing that and wraps an interesting story around it and some really cool graphics to return of the overdone is $20 and you can get it on steam switch PlayStation 4 or Xbox one hack net is a game about backing and it's not the first game about hacking but it is one of the more authentic games about hacking and what's authentic about it is that it uses actual unix commands to do the hacking so you're going to be using LS to list the content contents of the directory you're going to be using RM to delete files you'll use SCP to copy files across servers if you're not comfortable with the command-line this is a great low pressure way to get some comfort using the command-line and doing things and understanding sort of how you get a sense of where you are on the computer and and what you're able to do when you're using the the terminal when you're using a UNIX terminal specifically and if you're running Linux or Mac OS you have access to this by default it's a really powerful tool for developers and if you're using Windows I think newer versions of Windows have the Linux subsystem that lets you access sort of Linux inside of Windows and so you would have access to a terminal too it gives you a fun story to explore too there is a well-known hacker who's been killed and you're trying to understand what happened and so you're working through this story and unraveling the mystery as you're actually using real terminal commands hack net is available for $10 on Steam in Wilmots warehouse you play as this little square with a face and you're actually managing a warehouse you'll get deliveries and the deliveries are also little squares with icons on them and you don't know exactly what the icons mean but you're tasked with arranging the warehouse and organizing it despite that at certain points throughout the game people will come in and give you orders and you'll have to go fetch the items out of your warehouse and bring them to them and you have it you have a time limit in which to do that so hopefully you've organized your warehouse in a manner that's at least efficient enough that you can go and find the stuff but without a doubt you you haven't and you'll discover that as you're trying to fulfill these orders so the next time you're between orders you're gonna want to go back and reorganize and this is basically a game about refactoring and and I do this all the time when I'm writing code I'm I'm actually trying to maintain code I've written months back that seemed okay at the time or maybe I wrote something before that didn't quite work exactly the way I wanted it to and now I want to go back and fix it and I've always got a limited amount of time and I'm left with a decision about whether it's worth it to go back and refactor the code or if I just run with it and womans warehouse does a great job at capturing that and creating that same decision for you and giving you lots of opportunities to practice making that decision in the low stakes context of this game that's actually really fun to wellnitz warehouse is $15 on Steam and on Nintendo switch and keep talking and nobody explodes you and another player are tasked with defusing a bomb the catch is that one of you can only see the bomb and cannot see the bomb defusal manual and the other player has the manual but cannot see the bomb so the game is about communicating back and forth the player with the bomb is describing what they see and it's not always very straightforward it's not always easy to describe some of the markings or abstract and and it's just difficult to get across what you're looking at and then the player with the manual is having to describe first having to understand what bomb the person is actually looking at so that they know they're looking at the right section of the manual and then describe how to defuse that that piece of bomb as a developer you're often working on or with the team and communication is critical so this is good practice for that but also even if you're not working with a team live in real time you're hopefully at least documenting what you're building and that documentation is just an asynchronous form of communication so what keep talking does for you as a web developer is that lets you practice really quickly and figure out what works and what doesn't and you can incorporate some of what you learn there into your real time communication with your team or into your documentation of your code and your software and your libraries keep talking and nobody explodes is available on just about every platform you can possibly imagine it's ten dollars on mobile platforms Android and iOS and then it's 15 dollars on Steam switch Xbox one and PlayStation 4 and just about any virtual reality platform you could have so if you have a virtual reality headset that's a really fun way to play this game because it enforces that separation between the player that can see the bomb and the player they can see the manual them Adventures is the most directly applicable game on this list it is actually teaching you how to use a code editor called them vim is a really interesting editor it's almost game-like itself I use it on a regular basis and it sort of makes me feel like I'm playing a game when I'm when I'm writing code but it's not just for fun it's also really useful it lets you do some things that typical code editors do not so if you think about Visual Studio code or sublime text or atom those text editors are always in insert mode so that means when you open one of those applications and start typing whatever Keys you press those letters are going to start coming out in your code and then that's not the default mode you're not inserting by default so when you launch for them each of your keys have some sort of function that that they will do to your code and one of those functions is to change to an insert mode and then you can start typing just like any code editor but when you're not in insert mode you have some really powerful features you can use like you can replace words or you can do selections you can navigate through your code in various ways the best way I've heard it described the the benefit of coding in this way is that you wouldn't paint a picture by taking the brush and holding it down on the canvas and keeping it down on the canvas the entire time until the painting is finished that most of the time you're gonna have the brush off the canvas and you're gonna be doing other things maybe it's thinking about where to place the brush or blending colors together or something along those lines and code is really the same way most of your time spent coding is not entering characters into your editor where it shouldn't well probably shouldn't be at least but most editors sort of enforce that mode of working on you because they're always in that mode by default vim breaks with that and gives you some other options for ways to manipulate your code then adventures is a game that teaches you how to use them the biggest downside of them is that it's extremely difficult to learn because there's not a good way to discover what each of the let the keys do in the application so you sort of just have to memorize what they do and I don't think anybody really memorizes them also you just memorize the ones you use but then adventures does a great job of teaching you that by using VIMS keys to navigate through an adventure game and it's actually a pretty fun little game the way you buy this one is a little bit different from all the others most of the games or actually every other game on this list you pay for it once and then you own it you can play at any time them adventures you pay $25 for a six month license and you just access it through your web browser so you don't as long as you have access to a web browser hooked up to something that has a keyboard and you can play but the $25 only gives you six months so you can't you can't go to it in three or four years and pick up and start playing again the good news is that six months is probably all you would need to clear all of the content of the game and by the time you do that you'll have a pretty good grasp of them and the game is not really it's probably not compelling enough to go back to after you've finished it and really the goal of it is to learn them so once you've done that you you won't really need it anymore so effectively twenty-five dollars gets you this game the next game on the list is a little different from most of the others the game is called kind words and what it is is it's really like I don't know it's like a forum it's like an internet forum wrapped up in a game but when you launch the game you see a little person in a room sort of from an isometric point of view and you see that person sitting down at a desk and they're these paper airplanes flying through the screen and you can click on them and each one has a motivational message from a real person who's also playing the game you can also write your own motivational messages and those get sent to other people's games as little paper airplanes that they can read the other thing you do in this game is you can make and fulfill requests what the requests are you will type a problem you're having and other people can receive that and it's anonymous that they see your problem and they can respond directly to your problem so it's sort of a more direct way to get help than the generic motivational messages that are flying through those paper airplanes you can also look at other people's requests and try to type messages to help them this game is really something different and I it's a great way one to get your head out of code for a little bit which is really important you don't want to get burned out and this is a way to sort of break out of that and also give you some strengths that you may need especially if you're suffering maybe with imposter syndrome that's a good opportunity for you to get in and make a request and while you're waiting for people to answer your request jump in and look at some other people's requests and try to see what you can do to help other people feel better or help people other people will move through their days and get over the problems they're having kind words is $5.

00 and it is available on Steam if you've been around the internet long enough you probably remember Geocities it's a place where anyone could go and build a website and they would host it and they had these I think they called them neighborhoods and they were just basically sections of geo cities around different themes so if you had a sports website you would be in a particular neighborhood with other sports websites videogame websites all shared a neighborhood movie websites music websites but it was really the first place that I'm aware of the democratized access to publishing on the Internet it closed down a few years back some people kept archives of it but it's just not what it was before if you want to get a little taste of that there's a game I discovered called hip no space outlaw that really captures the feel of geo cities in hypno space outlaw you are essentially a moderator on the internet over a community very much like geo cities and you're given these tasks and you have to go through and moderate the geo cities like websites it's got a really fun quirky sense of humor it's fun to read the pages they all have music blaring in the background and and they're just tacky and and pretty gross but fun to look at and they'll remind you of that time if you experienced it if you didn't experience it they'll give you a taste of what the web was like in the late 90s and maybe into the early 2000s and all of its wrapped in this an interesting game with a fun story and lots of cool things to discover Hypnose bass outlaw is available on Steam and it is $20 those are eight games to help you become a better web developer I'm sure probably missed a few games that could belong on this list so if you have ideas for those post them in the comments below I'll have links in the description to all of the games I mentioned and if you're working to become a web developer head over to my website rad devin calm i've got lots of resources there that will help you transition into a new career and change your life i'll see you in the next video [Music] you.