This is a game that uses the MineTest engine to teach programming and other technical skills.
You are in a spaceship that has been damaged by asteroid impact. You're trying to get home by repairing and operating vital ship systems. There is a repair robot, but its programming has been destroyed in the accident, so you need to reprogram it, among other things.
Some samples of the challenges:
- Restore power to a door
- Fix the robot (needs a power cell?)
- Bring main power back online
- Repair the hull (otherwise the oxygen will leak out)
- Fix life support (otherwise parts of the ship have no oxygen)
Some of these will involve simply placing blocks; some of them will involve simply using the OS on the computer; some of them can't be done without programming the main computer; some require programming the robot.
The ship should have an onboard computer. (or three? command/engineering/science?) The computers need an operating system. It should be roughly Unix, supporting multiple users and a filesystem, but with metric time (a la Vinge).
You start out with access to your own user on a single computer via a keypair. You only have access to a handful of diagnostic utilities. As you progress, you can be added to new groups and gain private keys for other users' accounts. You may start with access to the science computer and need to gain access to engineering and command separately.
Some areas of the ship have oxygen, but some are depressurized. The robot can repair the hull breaches, and the oxygen system can pump atmosphere into the breached rooms.
A bunch of systems, including the robot, have been damaged. Some of them you will need to get power to. When the game begins, the ship will be running on auxiliary power, which doesn't have enough power to activate all the ship's systems. Bringing main power online is a significant goal. Power mechanics are inspired by FTL, but controlled via a unixlike system.
The OS should have an email setup as well as lots of man pages.
- Doors
- Reactor
- Shields
- Navigation
- Sensors
- Gravity
- Oxygen
- Communication
- ls
- cd
- mkdir
- cp
- mv
- rm
- smash (bash-like)
- an editor (hoooo boy this is gonna be fun!)
- chmod
- chown
- man
- ssh
- scp
- sudo
- kill?
- more
- Steel blocks
- Glass
- Computers
- Drives? (or the computer has an inventory)
- Switches, buttons
- Wires
- Doors
- Corridor arches
- Light panels
- Debris
- Elevators
- Damaged circuits
- Power conduit/receptacle
- Private key
- Public key
- Power cells
- Sonic screwdriver
Textures: CC BY-SA 4.0 Sky textures from Moontest.
Code: GPLv3