revisiting EXAPUNKS part 0: intro

it has been exactly 1 week (and a few hours) since this blog's creation and i did say i would make one post a week, so here we are! ive mulled over my options for a post and i think i settled on a fun idea (that will also serve as a very easy post dump hopefully): replaying exapunks and documenting my through process here in a sort of educational but also mostly just for myself way.

"but izzy!" you ask, "what is exapunks?"

great question, dear reader, and one that i will be happy to answer in this post, both as an overview of the game itself and also a bit about what the game is to me and why i want to make Content about it.

EXAPUNKS is a 2018 indie puzzle game made by Zachtronics studios, a game studio that specializes in very difficult programming-esque puzzle games with a focus on crafting optimized solutions. in addition, these games tend to have a very strong narrative focus, often culminating in over-the-top finales and extravagant stakes. 

in exapunks' case, it takes place in a heavily sci-fi-ified version of 1997, where capitalism reigns unchecked and computer systems automate nearly every facet of your life. oh, and there's a mysterious virus called the Phage that infects people and slowly shuts down their organs without treatment, and you're infected.

luckily, you have 1 skill that may just be enough for you to survive—or even thrive—in this environment, you know how to hack. Using EXAs (tiny robots with a small handful of instructions but near unlimited potential), you can write programs to hack street signs, game consoles, government systems, and even your own body as the phage spreads further.

the story is a little absurd, but its a ton of fun, and the aesthetics are awesome (the game has a manual in the form of a printable zine an NPC gives to your character to teach them what theyre doing), but probably the part that hooked me the most are the graphs at the end of each level.

after you beat each level, the game will show a small window displaying your solution's performance compared with both the general playerbase and your steam friends in 3 metrics: cycles (time), size (lines of code), and activity (basically major actions performed in the system). I'm not normally a competitive person, but something about seeing your little red line jump all the way to the front of the bell curve is incredibly rewarding and that is what this whole project is more or less about.

in my first playthrough, i tried to optimize where i could, and did a pretty good job for the most part (in this level im just a few cycles off the top percentile, for example), but i want to go back and, starting from scratch, shave off every cycle i can until i can't think of a way to make it any better. i dont know how many levels i will do at a time, definitely more than 1 at first, but as they get harder itll be sparser for obvious reasons.

anyway, brief overview of what exapunks is and what im trying to do here done, probably first part of this will be out next sunday maybe? or i might do it right now im not totally sure.