#Opus magnum twitter how to#
Because its solutions are so open-ended, to the point where there’s literally no way to even optimize to a “correct” answer, getting stumped on how to make something better always felt like my own fault. The wonderful thing about the way Opus Magnum challenged me is that it never ended up feeling frustrating. I started developing smaller machines I could plug into larger ones to build familiar patterns, but the endgame puzzles often cleverly pushed me out of those same comfort zones.
#Opus magnum twitter trial#
I’m not sure it’s possible to go faster than 15 on water, but what about making it cheaper, or smaller? I would genuinely lay in bed at night building more efficient water machines in my head, then spring up early in the morning to test them.Īnd while just passing a level isn’t too difficult with enough trial and error (the massive exception being the post-game bonus levels that restrict your workspace, which are incredibly hard) finding tricks to refine my solutions and compete on the leaderboards can be seriously challenging – especially as Opus Magnum’s later levels ramp up in complexity and scale. There were so many different solutions to the same problem, and in the eyes of Opus Magnum not a single one of them was wrong. It was competitive puzzle solving in a way I’ve never seen before. I spent nearly an hour tinkering with my water machine before I managed to hit 16 cycles, only to proudly return to Twitter to see someone else had hit 15 with an inspired design I hadn’t even begun to consider. I started at over 40 cycles cycles, then dropped down to 28, then 21. We pushed the bounds of the simplest level to their absolute limit. 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. 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.Īnything You Can Build I Can Build Better
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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