
A playable XCOM game in Excel - OopsCriticality
http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/2/9834932/xcom-microsoft-excel-game
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CWuestefeld
About 25 years ago I did QA on the spreadsheet module of now-defunct office
software maker Enable. On a lark, each of us on the spreadsheet testing team
implemented a different casino game using spreadsheet macros. This was the old
macro system similar to Lotus 1-2-3, with "/" invoking the menu and then using
letters representing the hotkeys for each menu command, etc.

I took on blackjack, and built a whole Vegas-style game including insurance,
doubling down, a configurable number of decks, etc. I was pretty proud of
that, what with the self-imposed constraints. But that seems to be small beans
compared to this project.

The number of bugs that we uncovered during this effort was pretty
substantial. For example, we discovered that the PRNG implementation was a lot
more P than it was R. We found that when the guy who'd written the craps game
set it up to play automatically overnight, based on some simple heuristics.
When we came back the next morning, his robo-player was rich, and we all know
that's not supposed to happen in a casino. We re-ran the same test the next
night, with the same result. It turned out that a quirk had rolls of 11 coming
up more often than they should, which is a real problem for craps.

Anyway, trying to implement something non-trivial with self-imposed
constraints sure isn't the most efficient way to accomplish the task, but it's
a great way to stretch your understanding of a platform.

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Romanulus
I'll stick to Dwarf Fortress...

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em3rgent0rdr
with GPU-accelerated spreadsheets (google: AMD LibreOffice Calc) it would be
interesting to see more games use the spreadsheet as the engine for games with
massively-complex 2D worlds with easily parallizable local interactions.

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alvern
Is this written in VBA?

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CrimsnBlade
>As a test of Visual Basic skills

I would assume it's VBA. I would love to see that code.

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Kikawala
Author links the Excel file in this reddit thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/3umiec/i_made_an_xcom...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/3umiec/i_made_an_xcom_game_in_excel/cxlt2k8)

