Magic Shepherd by Kevin Prehn

[raw]
made by Kevin Prehn for Ludum Dare 45 (JAM)

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Magic Shepherd is an educational game for visualizing and understanding functional programming.

Complete Guide

Made with Godot 3.1

EDIT: Thank you all for the feedback! I have updated the guide with an example and more in depth explanations. After looking at the game after not working on it for a few days, I agree that it isn't very intuitive but I hope the examples will help you get the hang of it!

I updated the link to the guide to allows comments, so please feel free to mark anything that is especially confusing in the guide or anything you would like more clarification on. Thank you all for taking the time to check out my nerd game :)

Ratings

Given 9🗳️ 5🗨️

Feedback

Grhyll
07. Oct 2019 · 11:57 UTC
This is, like, very hard ^^' I somehow managed to complete the 2 first stages, but I'm stuck at the third. There seems to be a lot of potential for fun, but a tutorial or some examples or the possibility to see the solution would be awesome!
Joe Bustamante
11. Oct 2019 · 02:03 UTC
This is really interesting. As a full-time developer who does functional programming every day, i thought the way that you were able to codify that into a game was actually pretty helpful and well done. I agree with the above comment - it's a lot to have to take in and learn just from reading the game guide, and not having a built-in tutorial or examples makes it a bit more difficult. Even being familiar with FP, it still took me awhile to figure out what I needed to do. I think this has a ton of potential and could be expanded into a really cool learning mechanism for FP, though, and am really impressed at how you took this idea and ran with it for LD.
xart2012
11. Oct 2019 · 02:39 UTC
too hard to start, need some working examples.
Nisovin
11. Oct 2019 · 02:47 UTC
This is a really cool idea, but man I was struggling to figure out how to connect the pieces in the way the game wanted me to. I felt I knew what I needed to do, I just couldn't figure out how to get there.
JUSTCAMH
11. Oct 2019 · 02:49 UTC
This looks interesting, and as a programmer, I am intrigued, but I'd need more / better documentation (preferrably in-game) to make any progress. I was frequently getting unhelpful error messages, and it would be nice if they perhaps linked you to relevent documentation to help you out.
AP Thomson
11. Oct 2019 · 03:50 UTC
Biggest road block was definitely figuring out the controls for grouping stuff in the same list. Took me several trips to the instructions before I figured out what to do, but after that things felt a bit smoother.
coffeecup.winner
11. Oct 2019 · 06:20 UTC
Same as for other commenters, controls were the hardest for me. I know FP well, but it was rather difficult to map each solution I had in my head into the game. Despite that, I think this is a great attempt and has a worthy goal - you have my respect!
Chaos
13. Oct 2019 · 21:58 UTC
I thought this was a brilliant idea from the moment i saw it. I'ts unfortunate that I, someone that has no idea of how funcional programming works, wanted to give you a full insight of my experience and how it was and if i actually learned something and I couldn't figure out even with with the instructions, how i was supposed to do to achieve what i was asked. the thing i got as far as doing was Do spell and it was invalid, so i don't know what i actually did wrong there. And having to restart from scratch with no hints, made me feel a bit frustrated. But maybe a little show of how you can do it in the first place, a little showcase tutorial would help. As for idea A, as for the graphics I can see why each spell has that icon to them. I really hope you can make this work out cause I see so much potential in your idea.
BrokenMirrorMedia
19. Oct 2019 · 05:43 UTC
Uh I am familiar with programming (I'm a computer engineering student lol), but to be honest I just couldn't wrap my head around this game. I guess I haven't used lisp very often (I saw in the guide it was referenced) but while I couldn't understand this game, I can appreciate the idea behind it. If it had more explanation or some sort of tutorial I could see this being the kind of game I actually enjoy quite a bit, but the barrier to entry is quite high as is, even with the guide.