Cube Composer — a puzzle for map and filter lovers
Cube Composer
Some games teach shooting. Some teach building. This one teaches thinking in functions: take a stack of colored cubes, apply a pipeline of transforms, get exactly what was ordered. Off by one cube — rearrange.
How it works
Source stack on the left, goal on the right. The palette holds functions: map repaints, filter drops, others do trickier things. Drag the needed ones into the program area, order them — the pipeline runs top to bottom.
The first level is honest: "map yellow→red" — one function, one result. By the tenth you need chains: filter, transform, filter again. Order matters — like in real code.
What each level teaches
Levels group into chapters, each chapter one idea: replace, reject, compose. Twenty-five total from easy to sit-and-think ones. No hints, but a reset button (R) — and move on (N) once solved.
The beauty: mistakes are safe, the pipeline shows results instantly, you see exactly where it went wrong. Debugging as gameplay.
Who will enjoy it
Programmers — as warm-up and nostalgia for first maps and filters. Non-programmers — as a very honest logic puzzle: simple rules, real depth. If elevator-saga clicked, this is the next step: there you wrote code, here you think it.