I Made Myself An AI

I Made Myself An AI is a pretty solid puzzle game with a rather unique concept. The objective in every level is to charge a power source (socket) by placing generators on the given grid and connecting them to the power source through conductors. The generators overheat unless cooled down with fans, which have to be placed either immediately next to a generator, or connected to a generator through heat conductors to disperse the heat. Essentially I Made Myself An AI is a game about building electrical circuits, while also managing the thermodynamics of your configuration.

Placing each element on the grid costs you a certain amount of coins and while you’re not limited in what elements you use or how you arrange them, your configuration will be restricted by the maximum amount of coins that you can spend in a level. There are a few other additional mechanics that slightly change the gameplay by adding placement rules for some elements. For instance, fans can be placed only at the outside edge of the grid, which means that you will have to take into consideration the length of the conductors that link a generator to the power source or its fans. Later on, new elements with specific requirements will be introduced, making the levels more complex.

One thing that I liked about the game (aside from the innovative concept) was the fact that it’s not very restrictive in how you need to build your configuration to reach a solution. It’s not one of those “find the developer’s solution” games. It allows you a certain amount of flexibility in placing the elements by giving you a few more coins than what a strict optimal solution would otherwise require. That doesn’t mean that you should not optimize your configurations – on the contrary, part of the gameplay is adjusting your current configuration and improving it to save a few coins so you can use them to build one extra fan for example, for better cooling of your circuits.

This is encountered especially in later levels, which contain multiple stages (2-4 stages). Some of these levels can seem quite big, but they’re approached step by step, and sequentially solved. They’re split into separate stages, each having a limited amount of coins allocated to it but also with a limited amount of generators required to be built. Completing one stage will give you the coins needed to complete the next stage. Even if you know from the start how many generators you will have to eventually build to complete all the stages of a level, you won’t be able to initially place on the grid all the elements needed to support all these generators simply because the allocated coins will not suffice. For those that do like a more restrictive approach, some levels offer a bonus star for completing them with an optimal solution and by placing one extra generator than the amount required by the level.

Aside from the main game (which contains dozens of levels), I Made Myself An AI also offers a sandbox mode that has you start on a small board and expand it as you add more and more generators while keeping the entire construction thermo-stable. The sandbox game can be configured through a set of parameters such as the size of the grid and the amount of coins you can spend.

I Made Myself An AI is a really neat game, with neither too challenging nor too easy difficulty. The levels from the main game will keep you busy for several hours, and the sandbox mode can easily add a few more hours on top of that. The game is highly replayable, both in the main part (you can retry levels to reach different solutions, or for the bonus star that can be earned in some of them), as well as in the sandbox mode.