Code Rivals: Robot Programming Battle

Really fun flowchart programming puzzle game.
Basically the highschool/college bot programming experiment but with the added fun of scrapping dangerous bots with a cannon. There are a lot of QoL stuff like custom blocks (basically loops/nested) and conditionals, so it's not just rudimentary commands and while I haven't played that much yet, it's easy to see that the developer put in a lot of thought into the flow of things since it's fairly smooth.
As for the negatives, it's the usual early access complaints, repetitive music, some weird camera angles, UX polish, but I'm pretty sure those will eventually get ironed out eventually. Other stuff would be time/distance units during play since the time in delays can be dependent even down to milliseconds and a bit of camera exploration to allow for better workflow planning.
Even in early access, it's easy to lose a couple hours figuring out some of the puzzles but at the same time, there's enough tools in the game to make an very smooth experience. As a Zachtronics fan, I highly recommend it, for two bucks, it's definitely a steal.

Nowadays, with one big release coming after the other, and critically acclaimed titles regularly going on deep sales, the biggest issue becomes your incredibly limited available time. In order to make that time worth investing, games need to stand out in one way or another, whether it's the highly cinematic experience offered, the deeply emotional storytelling, or the well thought out gameplay mechanics. You need to leave feeling that you've gotten something out of them. But truth is, the overabundance of newly released games aiming to immerse you in in their worlds can only result in an increasing difficulty for them to offer something new on the table. Code Rivals took the bold leap and chose to offer a real word practical experience first and foremost instead.
In this game, you'll be learning the basics of programming, by setting chains of commands for your robot in order to defeat enemies in various combat scenarios, with varied levels of difficulty. The programming used is similar to Lego Mindstorm's aprroach, if you have any familiarity with it. It's super fun watching a chain of commands you've been thinking through working out in the end, frustrating when it breaks for some reason, and even more rewarding when you find the issue and fix it. It's a game that makes learning fun by actively rewarding you during gameplay and serves as a neat introduction of the mindset you need to approach while programming by guiding you through it.
Code Rivals is a very interesting case of a game. It doesn't have the flashier visuals, or the fame of AAA games, or some other indies, so it's not hard for it to go under your radar at first glance. But truth is, it doesn't need to, since it sets a league of it's own, one the developer aimed for from the start. If it's concept sounds interesting, or if you're looking for a truly fresh experience, or even to learn something new, i'd suggest trying it out.

This still feels like an Early Access game and the editor could use some love as it looks cheap and can be cumbersome to work with, but overall the concept is solid. The node-based behavior editing à la Unreal Blueprints is a nice change from Scratch-like blocks or actual coding. The developer is very active in responding to feedback and making the game better.

I was told to leave a review, so I'm gonna do that, even if it's a bit harsh.
1. Graphics: Really fine now, apart from quite a lot of placeholder text
2. Logic: This game teaches early on, what you should never do: Time-based operations. Right in the first levels you are expected to turn at a specific time interval, but instead of providing that you need to figure that out by yourself. This is an awful idea. Instead the user should be able to incorporate the sensor they just aquired to detect when to turn.
3. Handling: I think this game in many ways feels a bit sloppy. The camera moves to quickly, number inputs do not make clear how to type into them, only showing that you can enter values by dragging. I would not complain if this system behaved like in GMod, but here it's just weird.
All in all, the newest changes are really promising! Price is really reasonable as well!

I found Code Rivals from the developer, Leandro, suggesting it to people who played Human Resource Machine, another programming game that I had played extensively to the point of speedrunning it, by offering keys. Considering that he stated in his post that HRM had inspired him and his game, I asked various questions about that subject matter as well his future plans of his game. I am aware that he would read this review, so I would be providing more feedback and questions with hopes that he reads it and thus responds in the perspective of taking to him.
My biggest problem is how limited the scripting language could be, particularly in the connection between blocks (Nodes? Commands?) and their inputs and outputs; when you connect an output to an input, that output connector cannot be used for other things. To put this respective, if I want to write a branch that does two different things, like running another branch if true while unconditionally doing something else, I would have to create a duplicate of that branch in order to do something like that. Here’s an example of that problem in flowcharts that I made using diagrams.net, where there’s two problems that functions similarly.
Of course, I won’t mind that Leandro would keep this limitation in either of choice or limitations, as well I’m aware that everybody can address this example problem with functions (custom events) or organization (the first activation can be placed at the start and would hilariously eliminate the example problem completely), but this is just an example that I would like to show to demonstrate such a concept. After all, I would think this would help in reducing the amount of blocks and would be better helping people new to software programming and design.
In addition, I keep noticing bugs with the blocks where I can’t place down the block or stop creating connections, which tends to fix itself once my mouse leaves the game’s environment, like pausing the game or switching windows. If you need a demonstration of these bugs, let me know and I would like to get around recording myself causing these bugs, but I cannot promise that I would be able to do that at all since they tend to happen at random. Then again, this could be fixed next week as Leandro had stated in his response to TBF.
lots of things i see in HRM that i dont see in other programming games make me change design, like use saves between levels etc,
Lastly in one of your answers, which I quoted above, I found this one quite vague, particularly in using “saves between levels.” In HRM and 7BH, you can save and load levels by copying their contents as text into your clipboard, which in turn you can paste into a text file to save it for later or to edit its contents and paste it back, but I could be reasonable and might think you never had use this feature before, or you had did and didn’t like how it was handled. Could you care to elaborate what you didn’t see in both games and how did you address it?
That’s my review of the game so far, and I might check the game back and make corrections to my review as it improves, but I cannot make promises. Leandro, I wish you the best of the luck in making Code Rivals and I hope you can maintain a modest fanbase in the process!! If you wish to learn more about visual scripting languages, you can read this English Wikipedia article, and I recommend checking out Flowgorithm, a scripting tool that allows you to create code for multiple programming languages by using flowcharts, similar to your game.

I appreciate the dev for providing me a code to try it out.
I love the tutorial explaining everything. You need to work harder on the levels after without the tips tho.
Too bad i didnt get to try multiplayer but i enjoyed it so far :)

Its a Fun Game with a Cool premise, but there are a few bugs and problems I found while playing that I will list off here :
1. the UI doesn't cover all of the bottom of the screen
2. the camera sometimes clips through walls and the robots head

Other than the few Bugs and Problems I Found Its Pretty Good 7.8/10