“TASball” by Amos Wenger.
“[A] tool-assisted pinball[,] […] clicker [and] […] programming game hybrid. […] Wash windows and mow lawns to afford [to attend] Pinball tournaments. Write [artificial intelligences] for Pinball tournaments to earn more money. Buy faster [central processing units] and more [read-only memory] with your money. Code golf your way to the fastest possible solution to earn the most money!”
“TASball” is the love child of programming games and a pinball machine, as you cannot only control the movements of the left and right flipper in your own ‘algorithm’ on several pinball courses, but also change the movement frequency. This basic programming gameplay gets combined with the incremental clicker game genre, because whenever you played through a course in an efficient and fast manner, you gain some money. This money can be used to upgrade your central processing units and read-only memory, which will allow you to accelerate the flipper movements and to add more code parts to your algorithm. But if you are too lazy for that and want to get right into the gain, then you can also just wash windows or steal a car to collect some money in the beginning.
I see a huge potential in this game, even though the user interface is not easy to use right now. Many hours have I programmed pinball machine algorithms inside of “TASball”, because I always wanted to get an even more efficient algorithm to reach all special objects of a course. What is also interesting is the fact that the game gives its players the freedom to either alter an algorithm step by step, even when the ball is already flying around – which could be described as the tool-assisted speedrun part of the game -, or to create it completely before, just to see how it will go. >>PLAY
