I wanted to quickly highlight a little game I’ve been enjoying called Replicube because I think there’s a good chance some people reading here will enjoy it.

The gist is that you’re given a 3D model made out of colored voxels (blocks), and your goal is to recreate the model in code. The code you write will be run once for every voxel and needs to determine the correct value to display given an XYZ position. If you’re at all familiar with shader programming, it’s a similar concept.

I never thought I’d really enjoy a programming game but one of the reasons I’ve gotten invested in Replicube is the community. After you complete each puzzle, your solution is scored separately on both code size and performance then ranked in a global leaderboard so you can get an idea for how it compares to others. There’s even a built-in forum where you can ask questions or share your own models for others to solve.

Since playing, I’ve caught myself a few times looking at real world objects and thinking about ways I could create them using code.

There’s a pretty good-sized demo available on Steam if you want to try it out for yourself. Let me know if you end up getting into it and I’ll keep an eye out for you on the forum!

— JP