Bitburner — A programming RPG
Role playing games meets coding
I have never heard of such games that involve coding in their gameplay, the thought just didn’t cross my mind. Until one day, my friend, who codes too, starts mentioning one such game:
As a computer science major, that got me interested. And after sinking almost 19 hours into this game, I have to say Bitburner is really suitable for people with little to no programming knowledge to learn programming.
What is Bitburner?
Bitburner is an idle, text-based, role playing game released on 18th December 2021 (Steam). You play as a hacker in a cyberpunk dystopian world, and this game has elements for you to interact with using code. A programming background is recommended, but no knowledge is required to play this game.
Gameplay
The basic gameplay mainly consists of hacking servers and grabbing files, which can be automated with code. You can use NetScript, a language made just for this game, or JavaScript, which is an actual language people use.
To navigate between servers and files, mainly the command line is used. Most of the commands are similar to Linux terminal commands, which was very helpful when I switched to Linux for my job.
Apart from that, you can also solve contracts (coding problems) that can be found in servers you hack. This is very helpful for beginners as they learn to code solutions for the contracts.
Also, don’t forget you’re in a world, which means you can get a job, train your stats at a gym, and even infiltrate businesses.
As you play this game, you will also encounter factions who will invite you, and once you join a faction you can unlock Augmentations which will allow you to speed up your processes.
My Experience
This game will seem overwhelming at first, but after some time messing around in the editor and reading the documentation, I got used to this game over time. It is just a normal idle role playing game, with coding as a tool to solve problems and automate gameplay. And the amount of coding I did in this game is a lot, because I would be busy trying to improve my hacking program to make it more efficient, or writing a script to interact with certain APIs available in the game.
Conclusion
Playing Bitburner was really helpful to me during my college break, and allowed me to practice coding in a fun environment. I would definitely recommend this game to everyone with an interest, or a background in programming.
Bitburner can be played in the browser or downloaded from Steam for free.
