Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle

Christopher Jarvis Developer

Cinq-Mars Media Publisher

Jul 2021 Release

IndieStrategySimulationSingleplayerMultiplayerEA Tags

Game News Posts: 24

🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse

Mixed (54 reviews)

https://cinqmarsmedia.com/copyeditor

Steam Store

Copy Editor is an intricate puzzle game that teaches you Regular Expressions (RegEx), commonly used in computer science and language theory. Build complex rules that process and sanitize text for your wacky and demanding publishers who perpetually find themselves in turmoil over comical errors that arise in a variety of old manuscripts that need to be reprinted.

Like its spiritual predecessor, The Devil's Calculator, no familiarity with advanced or even intermediate concepts is assumed, rudiments are learned through gentle tutorials but the focus is always on tactics and lateral thinking. While you will no doubt learn valuable RegEx skills, it is primarily used a pre-text for these sophisticated and rewarding logic puzzles. Game mechanics permit such playful obstructions as a limited number of rules, certain keyboard keys not working for particular levels, and an embellishment of RegEx that extends to Natural Language Processing allowing you to discriminate on criteria like sentiment analysis, stems and parts of speech.

Optimization is a big part of Copy Editor, and you can see how well you stack up to others with detailed histograms of your performance, the number of rules required to sanitize the text as well as the number of chars needed. In this way it is similar to RegEx Golf but far more elaborate and nuanced, since text replacement is of equal importance. A fully formed level editor will allow you to pose your own challenges to the community.