PyWeek - Team R.E.X. - feedback

i can't imagine non-geeks would enjoy this game. however, having spent the dot-com years hacking up the back-end infrastructure of various ISPs using perl, i think it's fabulous. might have even learned a few new regex tricks along the way. i may actually use this to teach my junior programmers how to use regexps. the opengl curses engine is pretty awesome too.

If I had had this "game" when I was trying to learn regexes, it would have been so helpful! Please polish and finish and post this to the world. The world needs it.

im giving good points in production for the concept. loved the toturial. the levels were a bit dull.

nice.

The idea is without a doubt very clever. I really like how you made a puzzle game out of regular expressions. I think this game would work better if puzzles were hand designed instead of generated, because in the normal puzzles you don't get to use much of the available syntax, and by having a person creating puzzles you can tailor them to be more interesting. Maybe you know that but you didn't have the time to do it. Anyway, the game itself is nicely executed too (I like that train :)), and great work especially with the idea. (Not to mention it's a good way of learning or practicing regular expressions. :))

I totally dig this game!

<p>I liked this game, even knowing how to use regexes. The tutorial was good, I would have loved some extra predesigned (but hard) levels. Perhaps I use it as a regex tutorial for other people.

<p>Is there a way to use pure curses? in particular, I was unable to enter the "^" character

Yay! Edutainment!

Very creative concept, although I'm not sure that it's actually that much fun to deduce the regex :-\. It might help if there were some kind of "right answer" or shortest regex necessary, since any puzzle can be solved in a very boring way using a long regex of alternation.

Retro ASCII graphics rules

Neat idea. It seems like it needs some more elements to make it into a game. Otherwise, it's a good learning tool. Personally I "cheated" quite often by taking each item in the list (w1, w2, ... , wn) and entered w1|w2|...|wn in the expression box. Some restrictions on the allowed length of the solution should be able to help you around that. You guys took a risk and innovated, I really respect that.

Interesting concept of the theme. Game was not very entertaining though.

Neat idea, but I played several times and I never had to use anything except a single letter or a pair of letters. Even at level 10 the winning regex I found "v". Should be more challenging than that, but as I said, neat idea.

I do regexes for work, so not as much fun as it might've been. Extra point of production 'cos of the train :)

Good entry. Should be a fun tutorial on regex's

Neat idea!

Brilliant take on the theme. Interesting way to learn about regular expressions.

Nice idea!

Great, fun, every 1st year CS student should be allowed to play this game for an hour instead of some boring lecture on NAND gates.

Unless next time you come up with a cool game about NAND gates.

Very nice concept, although I found the actual game not so fun, I guess reg-ex maybe isn't that
fun. nice work though!

Just Exceptional consept :)

I liked it, but if my I sugest: Change the pass - no pass headers to match - not match headers If
fail, dont erase the regex candidate Add on another F key a quick reference chart for the
special characters. Allow remap certain characters: in keyboards where '^' is a dead key,
like spanish and probably other europeans, you cant type '^' Allow cursor keys (left - right)
Super extra bounus points: on win condition show a small ascii art, not need to be animated.
Minor sugestions: for tutorial, level A: mention that '|' work as 'or' operation, and that
spaces are significative. tutorial, level outlaws the strings dont look like a good example,
the current is more natural to describe as bra[gst]s; A better strings can be . to match:
drinks, drunks, dranks . to not match: drinkz, drunkz, drankz

I really like having a game sharpen my regex skills. The tutorial started out fun, but the randomly generated puzzles were a letdown. Having some more non-random puzzles would be great. (Stuff like trying to parse a phone numbers given in different formats, or validating email addresses, or validating that every other sentence contains the word "monkey"...)

Excellent teaching tool!

I'd been looking forward to this. I wasn't disappointed. The last few levels were too easy, though.

I loved the concept of this game, and I loved the curses emulation. Bravo! :) Can't say that writing regexs are amazingly fun, but I got a kick out it anyway.

ok. awesome. totally awesome. :)

Although I'm a big fan of regular expressions I found it a bit boring after a while. The basic concept is good (aim the programmer kind) but a little more graphics and more dymamic gameplay (for example catching as many flying words as you can with a single regexp) would have been nice.

Finally I can learn more about regular expressions! *g*

Interesting idea, but the random generator didn't really throw up anything interesting, and the predefined levels were all too easy.

RegEx Express isn't my cup of tea for game.

A funny way to learn regexps. Congratulations for the idea!

Who the heck wants to play with regex?

It needs to be more challenging, ultimately its a clever word game, but if the word lists were more varied then optimising levels would be genuinely difficult.

Nice. I always despised regexp, so I can't give this a high "Fun" rating, but the idea for this theme is great. If there was a category "best use of theme" this would be the winner for me :)

regex is not fun! although the tutorial is a nice way to learn it. nice ascii art :D

Woah! Wonderful little "serious game" that's actually pretty fun while it teaches. Wouldn't mind learning regexps this way!

It was fun. I found the tutorial useful on this one :)