![]() The very first level in Opus Magnum simply asks you to assemble a water molecule, but once solutions started being shared it became a race to see who could make a water-machine that ran faster than anyone else’s. Opus Magnum’s awesome GIF exporter makes it extremely easy to share solutions with friends, though they’re often taken as challenges. One of the most incredible examples of this was a “water fight” that broke out with a few people I know on Twitter. Seeing that I hit the average on my size and cost, but was a bit slower than average on speed nearly always sent me right back into the puzzle I’d just completed to try and shave a few cycles off of my design. This open information motivated me in a way I wasn’t expecting. You can see the rough averages of what most people managed to hit for that puzzle in the form of a set of bar graphs, as well as specific bests for anyone on your friends list – there’s also an option to turn on the top scores in the world once you’ve beaten the campaign. Sure, I could half-heartedly slap together a big and ugly answer to most levels without too much challenge, but that wouldn’t earn me the satisfaction that a finely tuned piece of machinery generates.Īfter completing a level, you are presented with leaderboards based on the three criteria of speed, size, and cost. ![]() Through all the testing and refining and retesting, the main thing pushing me to find better solutions was my own genuine desire to do so – a desire created by the very natural way Opus Magnum promotes a sense of competition. Anything You Can Build I Can Build Better It generally didn’t take too much massaging to get a machine to behave how I wanted when it began acting up, but I still found myself wishing these interactions were better explained. Sometimes pieces will repeat their commands while others are still going, but other times empty placeholders will be automatically added to keep each piece in sync. There are some handy keyboard shortcuts that speed up the programming once you get the hang of them, but the command timeline didn’t always behave how I expected it to. Placing and positioning each machine piece is only half of building a working assembly line, with the other half taking the form of programming those pieces to take set actions in perfect harmony with one another – moving, then letting go of an ingredient just as another arm gets ready to grab, and then move it somewhere else. Despite the relatively straightforward goal of each level, Opus Magnum has a lot of different moving parts I had to learn to control.
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