Videogames? In PTC Mathcad Prime? It’s more likely than you think.
The Mathcad Community Challenge Summer 2024 lasted three months, which is three times longer than they usually last. Why the lengthy time period? Because the ask was for Mathcad users to become game creators using PTC Mathcad Prime as the main game design tool, and game design is a lengthy process. Mathcad isn’t meant to be used for games, but that’s why it’s a challenge.
This challenge is made possible thanks to PTC Mathcad Prime 10 bringing Advanced Controls into the product. As discussed in our recent Advanced Controls Crash Course training event (available for free and on-demand here), Advanced Controls bring previously impossible levels of automation and user interactivity to Mathcad worksheets, which are some of the ingredients required to develop a game. The other ingredients are the designer’s creativity, both for the game’s vision and to create workarounds when you encounter limitations on implementing your original plan.
I’ll be reviewing the three games submitted for the challenge for this article, and you can download and play all them if you have Mathcad Prime 10 (or later). All three of these games are of different genres and have very different gameplay loops and implementation styles, so you’ll be able to experience a broad range of design techniques. Besides having fun, you’ll also be able to be inspired by some of those techniques and be able to apply similar principles to your day-to-day engineering work. That’s one of the beauties of game development: it pushes you to think of problems and their solutions you wouldn’t have before, and then you can see things in a new light with insights that you can use in other contexts. This is a lengthy article, so you can scroll through it in this order, or click directly to jump down to their section: MOO, Noughts & Crosses, and then Escape the Gem Tunnels.
Download MOO from this attachment on PTC Community.
MOO has been around for over five decades on significantly more primitive computers than what we have today. It’s a form of code-breaking game. The program generates a four-digit number, but it’s hidden from the player’s view. You must submit your own four-digit numbers to try to guess the hidden number, and the program provides you feedback based how close you were. If you got the correct digit in the correct place, you’ll get a Bull. If you get the correct digit in the incorrect place, you’ll get a Cow. Otherwise, you’ll get a nil. For example, if you guess 1234 and the code is actually 2354, you’ll be told “BCCn”. You aren’t told which digit corresponds to which piece of feedback; you’ll have to deductively reason that on your subsequent guesses.
This Mathcad implementation of MOO follows how it was implemented decades ago (with a handy hyperlinked citation at the end). The first page has very useful instructions of how to play, while all of the gameplay is on page two.
The first thing you’ll do is check which mode you want with an Advanced Control Checkbox: whether the randomly generated number will not have duplicates or if it could have duplicates. This changes how you approach the game and with-duplicates is a bit more difficult. The checkbox is handily labelled. Then there is a collapsed area with the native Mathcad program that actually generates the number, using the value of the Duplicates checkbox to determine which number-generation sequence to run. This is collapsed because this program also reveals what the actual answer is. Note that the original MOO did not have duplicates available, so that is a feature implemented for this rendition.
What follows is the iterative gameplay loop: Type your answer into the writable Text Box Advanced Control (this has several checks on what you type in to make sure it is a four-digit number) and then click the Button Advanced Control to “Click to Check Your Answer!” This will update the read-only Text Box located below where you submit your guess, and also make your write-in Text Box read-only. That Text Box compares the hidden number with your number digit-by-digit and then provides your Bull, Cow, and nil count. The box also changes colour based on how close you are (pure red = bad, pure green = win, and then the several gradients in-between those).
You then click the Check Your Answer button again (it is now converted to “Click to Guess Again!”), which clears the results Text Box and allows you to write into the guess Text Box again. You keep guessing (and Mathcad will keep track of how many guesses you have, as in, the number of times you click “Click to Check Your Answer”; when the Button is in the “Click to Guess Again!” state, clicking it will not add to your guess count) until you get four Bulls, and then a message pop-up box will appear congratulating you.
You may be wondering why the Button Advanced Control switches between Click to Check Your Answer and Click to Guess Again. That is because Mathcad Prime works from top-down and left-to-right, and this applies to Advanced Controls as well. There is no way for the contents of the top of the worksheet to know what happens at the bottom of the worksheet because the bottom is calculated after the top is. That’s also why the results Text Box can’t be above the user input Text Box. Mathcad’s linear format suggests that an iterative loop is impossible unless you have this workaround like MOO did where you press the button to “release” the results, and this button works based off of human input as opposed to being automated. The game design benefit of this approach is that it allows the player to think about their guesses and the feedback before doing another guess, encouraging more deliberate gameplay. It also gives the player an opportunity to use Mathcad’s text boxes to record their guesses, feedback, and logical deductions from there.
I know that there couldn’t be a 2 or else the second guess couldn’t have a nil in it. That also means there had to be a 1. Similarly, if there is a 1, the third guess of 1334 having Cnnn means 3 and 4 aren’t possible either, and 1 had to be in slots two or three. (It couldn’t be 4 because the second guess had a Bull.) The fourth guess, 5166, means there couldn’t be a 5 or else there wouldn’t be a nil, and it also excluded slot two from being valid for the 1 digit because there was no Bull, leaving only slot three for 1. It also ensured there was a 6 digit, but not in slots three or four or else they’d have a Bull. 6718 being the correct answer on the next guess was a matter of educated luck; it could’ve easily been something like 9617.
There is a copy-pastable example in Mathcad Prime 10’s Help Center about making a “Recalculate” Button control, which in this context, would function as a “New Game” button. (You need to recalculate the worksheet to generate a new random number.) Currently, the in-game instructions says to press Ctrl+F5 or use the Calculate button in Mathcad’s ribbon to start a new game. This is quite easy to do, but since everything else in the game can be accessed by clicking on buttons in the main area, or by typing in the box, it’s more consistent design-wise to have a button for a new game.
The bigger thing that I tried to do with MOO, but I couldn’t make happen, was have Mathcad Prime automatically record your guesses and feedback during a game, as opposed to the suggested way of the player manually typing it into a text region. Essentially, can Mathcad store a list and keep adding new entries to the list without overwriting the existing entries, and do this action an arbitrary amount of times (where each entry has the same variable name because you don’t know ahead of time how many times it’ll be iterated) as opposed to a single-use program? I don’t think Mathcad can, at least not by itself, and I’m unwilling to try to learn the Mathcad API for this purpose. And it would be a strange user experience to call another program just for this.
Still, there is something to be said about the immersion benefits of having the player focus on recording their own answers. (Or memorise them if you think you can do that.)
Download Noughts & Crosses from this PTC Community post’s attachment.
Some people in the world know this as Tic-tac-toe. This is a very famous and easy-to-play two-player game where you have to get three of your symbols in a row, column, or diagonal on a 3x3 board (this leaves eight possible win states; three columns, three rows, and two diagonals). That means the first player (X) not only gets first-turn advantage, but also gets to place 5 symbols while the second player (O) only gets to place 4. As a result, O can’t win in a normal situation, and at best, can tie with X. Game ties are the most common outcome against an opponent who is awake.
Given what we just discussed about the particular challenges of an iterative game loop like in MOO, I was challenged by Werner on PTC Community to come up with a way to implement a game as simple as Tic-tac-toe in Mathcad Prime. He didn’t think it could be done in a satisfying way, and concluded that Mathcad Prime isn’t at the level that could “create reasonably good and user-friendly games.” Obviously, I disagree with this conclusion, or else I wouldn’t have made a game-themed Mathcad Community Challenge to begin with.
I made Noughts & Crosses in about a week’s time, implemented entirely with Advanced Controls. Tic-tac-toe in particular is actually quite possible to implement because there is a set number of turns (nine), as opposed to other games where the number of iterations is unknown. Because of that, I came up with a workaround to bypass Mathcad’s linear processing structure: prebuild the nine turns into the worksheet, and show the game board nine times. This wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t know how many turns the game would be before the game started, like Three Men’s Morris or Checkers.
Each turn begins with a Radio Button group. The first one, X1 (X player’s first move), has ten selections: N/A (by default) and then nine positions for the nine places on the game board. Below that are nine read-only Text Box controls, and each of these takes the X1 Radio Button selection as an input. If player X selects a given button, such as “TopRight”, the top right Text Box will highlight yellow and an X will appear. The colour highlight is important to emphasise the impact of the player’s move; basic game design principles say the player should always get feedback on their actions, and since Mathcad Prime doesn’t support aural feedback, then we must rely on visual feedback like eye-catching colour changes.
The next turn, O1 (for the O player’s first move), has a similar Radio Button group, but it also takes X1 as an input. There are also nine Text Box controls beneath O1. O1 will have nine selections: N/A and eight positions; the position marked in X1 will not appear as an option for player O. O picks their position and the appropriate Text Box below it will highlight in yellow with O. The selection that X picked a turn earlier will also be already filled in (but with a white background) with the X, because each game board Text Box will continue to take each Radio Button group up to that point as an input.
This cycle repeats until X3, the game’s fifth turn, because that is the first turn where it’s possible for the game to end. At this point, there is a read-only WinCheck Text Box control below the nine Text Box control game board. This Text Box takes the nine Text Box controls immediately above it as inputs and will go through the eight possible win conditions (three rows, three columns, two diagonals). If those eight conditions have Text Boxes that all have Xs or all have Os, then WinCheck declares a winner. Otherwise, it will say there is not a winner yet. Each of these three states (X wins, O wins, no winner yet) has its own unique text message and background colour.
Starting with O3, the Radio Button group will also take WinCheck as an input. If the game is already over because one of the players have won, the Radio Button group selections will only be “N/A” by default and a second message, “The game is over.” Selecting this impacts nothing, but it does serve as player feedback that subsequent actions won’t change the outcome of the game because it’s been decided. In a world where Mathcad Prime can handle an arbitrary number of turns and automatically generate new control definitions if the game isn’t over yet, this wouldn’t be necessary, but in our world where I’ve predefined all nine turns in the worksheet, it’s important for the integrity of the game to have this check.
Nothing else is different in the worksheet flow until the last turn, X5, where WinCheck’s region is bigger and will declare “The game ends in a draw.” if there is no winner after X5 has made their move. There is also a special message if O somehow won as a fun little developer’s bonus (or “easter egg”). We made a point to show that off in the above embedded video.
By the time the game is over, the twin design decisions of displaying the state of the game board after every turn, along with the colour highlight of how the game board changed on that specific turn, allows the game players to scroll through the worksheet and absorb a sense of satisfaction of their game’s unique evolutionary history. This is made possible by Mathcad Prime’s documentation-oriented approach. This closure (and opportunities for learning and reviewing your strategy by effectively dissecting a ”replay” of your match) wouldn’t be possible if I implemented the game in an alternate universe where Mathcad could, for example, implement Noughts & Crosses like you would with pen and paper, all on one game board and not have a separate (but connected) board for each turn.
Even with a zoomed out view of the worksheet like this, the colour-coding makes it easy to tell what happens every turn. By the way, WinCheck’s region has more height after the first one because the message declaring that O won, which is only possible starting with WinCheck’s second appearance, is longer.
There are a lot of things that could’ve been added to my implementation of the game, but more fundamentally, it didn’t have to have 95 Advanced Controls in one worksheet. Depending on your computer’s processing prowess and how many other programs you have open (for example, the game runs a lot faster when I don’t have screen-recording software running on the computer!), the game can have unsatisfactory loading times, since any selection made with a Radio Button group is used as an input for every subsequent Text Box and Radio Button after, so your first turn might have Mathcad loading for a while as it updates nine different game boards (made of nine Text Boxes each) and the eight different Radio Button groups after the first one to exclude the selection you just made as an option. There are other ways of implementing this so not every spot on the game board is its own control. I chose to do it that way because it’s the simplest to implement (and as a bonus, the highlighting on a specific square for a specific selection is only possible in my method); adding extra turns to the game board was a matter of copy-pasting the previous turn, changing the variable definitions, changing and adding the input variables to the correct turn, and changing the code to take into account the extra input conditions. A lot of those changes were very rote and easy. But, again, it does mean the game has relatively lengthy loading times.
As for additional features, sometimes people are really attached to the identity of being an “X” or an “O”, and have asked for an option where O goes first. So rather than X1 and O1, we might represent player turns as P1.1 and P2.1 (Player 1 turn 1, Player 2 turn 1) and you could let Player 1 be “O” with a mere Checkbox control to toggle that setting.
A much more complicated feature would be to give players the option to have a computer-player opponent rather than another person or with yourself. Conceptually, this probably isn’t hard; for the computer-designed turns (and I’d probably have to have another option to set if the CPU is X or O, so maybe this would be another Radio Button group of CPU X, CPU O, or No CPU), have an algorithm that, based on the previous turns, picks a selection for which game board square to take that turn. The problem is that I don’t know what kind of Tic-tac-toe algorithms exist (people who do know use the minimax algorithm) or what algorithms I would want to put in, since maybe it’s less fun for the player to fight a perfect robot (or if I should just have the computer pick a square at random!), and I wasn’t interested in taking the time to research that for the purpose of the Mathcad Community Challenge. (Would I want my Radio Button group toggling the CPU’s existence to include difficulty modes?) This was more of a proof-of-concept that Mathcad could handle this type of game. Maybe I could iterate on it if there is ever another Game Gallery challenge… Or perhaps a Community member could take on that task!
Download the Escape the Gem Tunnels .zip file from this PTC Community post’s attachment, and then unzip the contents to your computer into the same directory. The only files you should then open from your file system are 0-read-me-first-ptc-escape-room.txt and 1-PTC-Escape-Room-main-corridor.mcdx.
Escape the Gem Tunnels is an escape room-style single-player game. Unlike the previous two games described in this blog, Escape the Gem Tunnels’s game design is original and is not trying to be a recreation of an existing game. It is trying to be an entry into the already-existing escape room game genre, although as far as I know, it’s the first escape room ever made for PTC Mathcad Prime.
Escape room games are based around being put in a room, and through a sequence of solving puzzles (which are often scattered around the room to be solved in an ambiguous sequence, and it’s sometimes not immediately obvious what objects in the room are even meant to be puzzles), be able to get the key(s) to leave the room. Escape rooms tend to be obsessed over having many locks and keys, which can come in many different forms. Solving a puzzle gives you a key to use in a lock, which will open a box (might not literally be a box) to reveal a necessary part to solving another puzzle. You might get keys or passwords without having locks to put them in. Or maybe you’ll have the locks first but need to get the keys. Real-life escape rooms run by businesses tend to have time limits in order to increase the tension, add a story element, and also get the customers (these are often team efforts) out of there if they’re taking too long so they can start the next session with the next group. Puzzles test the participants’ mental abilities, like being able to think logically or out of the box, as opposed to things like physical prowess or outside domain knowledge.
There is more than one room in Escape the Gem Tunnels, as the name implies: there are three rooms, or themed tunnels, connected by the “main corridor”. Once again, Advanced Controls play an important role in making this game genre possible, but they’re actually not the most important feature, unlike the previous two games that make exclusive use of them. The real most important feature are Mathcad Prime’s areas, which may be expanded or collapsed, and may be password protected or not have protection. Passwords are, for the most part, the “keys” while the password-protected areas are the “locks”, and the contents inside you get to interact with are the “boxes”. That said, how those passwords are provided varies; a lot of times they are provided by an Advanced Control, like a Text Box, in an expanded-but-password-protected area that takes certain things as inputs. Once you solve a puzzle by manipulating those inputs (but you might not necessarily know what those inputs are), the Control recognises that and the Text Box will change its displayed to the password value needed to unlock its area or another area.
As I’ve discussed already, Mathcad Prime worksheets have to be linear because of how the program processes information (top to bottom, left to right). This makes Escape the Gem Tunnels far easier than a physical escape room or even other digital escape room videogames, where you have a 3D space or a 2D space where information is presented all on the same “level”, as opposed to information at the top having to be resolved before the information below it. Other escape rooms tend to be linear in terms of the solution flowchart, but the information is presented with many possibilities, clues, and leads simultaneously, so it’s more difficult.
Escape the Gem Tunnels, in keeping with how other escape rooms set up puzzles, never requires you to be an expert in a certain math or engineering knowledge domain. The game’s creator (me) isn’t an expert in those things, either. Much like you might some objects to be suspicious or out-of-place in a physical escape room, you might find the Mathcad-equivalent of that represented in the Mathcad worksheets. Some things you’ll figure out a lot faster if you’re already familiar with the Mathcad Prime user interface and peculiarities. If you lack that kind of knowledge and still want to play, there is an in-game “Hints?” Checkbox (unchecked by default) in each of the tunnels, that once turned on, will activate hint text in Advanced Controls Text Boxes that will provide information making up for that lack of knowledge if the player isn’t as familiar or otherwise gets stuck somewhere.
There are a few interesting tricks on the Main Corridor worksheet. From a Mathcad point of view, the time() function will return the current system time with any expression, such as a number (like time(1), or even time(NaN) would work) or a string (such as time(“…”)), and the expression used is arbitrary. The time updates upon recalculating the worksheet. I didn’t want to have the time begin until the player pressed the Button control at the top (defined as StartButton; the worksheet is set to use “time(StartButton)” minus “time(EndButton)”, which is defined similarly), so I set the default value before the button is clicked to “false”. JScript has a Boolean data type, but Mathcad Prime doesn’t represent “false” as an expression because Mathcad lacks a Boolean data type. This means that the Button can just be an error message by default, meaning there is no value of time(StartButton) or time(EndButton) until the user presses on the button. These time() calculations happen in Draft view.
The idea of having the three tunnels hidden behind a very easy password-protected area in the Main Corridor was to introduce a tutorial to the game. Being able to recognise and open password-protected Areas is the core activity of the game, and if you don’t know how to do that, you won’t be able to ever progress. This would also be the only time I could put a tutorial in the game, since the ensuing three tunnels can be done in any order. And the reason there is a lot of upfront text is to benefit people who are lesser experienced with Mathcad.
There are some fun puzzles here implemented in unconventional ways. You get to interact with an OLE Microsoft Word file with a hint contained within. There is a Slider puzzle that controls a minute hand and an hour hand of an XY Plot clock below. (Not a realistic depiction of a clock in terms of the length of the hands not being consistent as it goes, but that’s too much effort to implement.) It’s supposed to correspond to the timestamp on the protected area beneath it, which is a cool application of timestamps.
My favourite puzzle is one that people might not even notice. The prize inside the first password-protected area (and being able to get into that is a puzzle itself) is a Check Box which turns a later Text Box from read-only to writable, which I think is really cool. It also is an admittedly rare example of a not-completely-linear puzzle flow, since that Text Box isn’t immediately after that Check Box. If you do everything in order, you might even notice that the Text Box was read-only, but it makes a lot of sense in-universe and parallels an escape room trope involving physically carrying some kind of equipment from one part of the room to the other. It helps with the gameplay-story immersion.
The defining puzzle here is the eight-question “Quiz Time!” But there are other notable things here. The very first puzzle, without spoiling the solution, may or may not have the player enter Draft View unintentionally. Through player testing, I put in a help text message in Draft View near the first puzzle instructing players on how to get out of it.
Outside of that, pretty much everything is hidden in collapsed areas, besides an enticing Button that says pressing it won’t do anything if you don’t unlock the password protected area above it. That’s where the quiz is, which is a series of eight List Boxes of multiple-choice questions. If all eight List Boxes have the correct selection, the Text Box placed in the expanded-but-password-protected area will reveal the password to the final area of the worksheet. The questions all involve interacting with the OLE PDF file of four oil paintings, such as counting the number of objects or performing an easy arithmetic operation with the object counts. It’s the one time in this game where math is involved, but the level of math isn’t anything more than the occasional simple math problem you might find in another escape room.
Why doesn’t the OLE object embed the first page of the PDF like I said it would in my blog about the methods of inserting images into Mathcad Prime worksheets, instead presenting a generic box with the file name? It turns out that in Mathcad Prime 10.0.0.0, it will only embed the first page of the PDF when the worksheet creator has Adobe Acrobat (or Adobe Acrobat Reader) as the default app for .pdf files, and the computer I was using when I inserted ruby-tunnel-oil-pantings.pdf into the Ruby Tunnel worksheet had another program as the default reader. Honestly, this wasn’t my intended outcome, and I wanted the Ruby Tunnel to be like the other two tunnels in having an embedded object with a misleading preview that you have to double-click to see its true meaning. In any case, I think it’s better to have the file box than an embed of just Harvesting with Grain Cradles. By the way, in Mathcad Prime 10.0.1.0, one of the things that was fixed was this unequal treatment of Adobe Acrobat versus using another reader program.
The top half of this image shows what actually went into the game (a generic OLE file box for the oil paintings PDF) versus how the OLE object could have been implemented (showing the first page of the PDF file and trusting the reader to click on it and recognise it is a PDF and not an image file). The top action is no longer replicable using PTC Mathcad Prime 10.0.1.0; all PDFs should now show the first page.
The Emerald Tunnel revolves around data (and figuring out what data is relevant and what data is junk), so it shows off Mathcad’s integration with Excel by using the READEXCEL() function (the .zip contains an Excel sheet that the player is never meant to open from the file directory and only meant to look at from READEXCEL(); but trying to cheat by opening the file from the directory still won’t give them any hints) and the Excel Component, as well as tables and matrices. You will never have to write out the READEXCEL() function by scratch, but you will have to fill in one of the arguments as a clue asks. This turns the form of a Mathcad function’s syntax itself into a puzzle, which is of varying level of difficulty depending on the player’s existing Mathcad familiarity.
The Emerald Tunnel also is the only one with an additional external worksheet linking off of it, being the “sidepaths”. The gimmick of the sidepaths revolves around Mathcad Prime’s region tagging and internal hyperlinks, as well as code/decoder tables that is a classic escape room puzzle. There are fifteen tables in the sidepaths, and main goal of the Emerald Tunnel is to find out which sidepath is the correct one, which also will determine which word is the correct code to decode.
The Emerald Sidepaths have two quirks to it that are spelled out with the only Hint in the worksheet, but if it was displayed as help text and not an optional hint, it would spoil the puzzle. Sometimes there was a bug where hovering your mouse cursor over the hyperlink would not display the region tag name that clicking the link would lead you to. I don’t know why this bug occurred, how to replicate it, or if it still exists in Mathcad Prime 10.0.1.0. The second quirk is that internal hyperlinks in Mathcad Prime brings you to the part of the document where the tagged region is at the bottom of the screen, as opposed to the top of the screen that most other applications will show. There isn’t a way to get around this issue. People who use Mathcad Prime somewhat extensively are aware of this; others who aren’t used to this quirk may be confused and may scroll up instead of scrolling down, ending up on the wrong sidepath and therefore the wrong decoder table. You can confirm what sidepath you’re on by clicking on the region heading and clicking on the Tag button (Text Formatting > Links > Tag in the ribbon interface).
Escape rooms aren’t supposed to have replay value; that is, you’re not supposed to be able to play them again and get a meaningfully different experience. If you go to your local physical escape room and play it, and then go back there a month later and try the same room, nothing about the room will change. Your knowledge of how to get through it will change since you can just repeat the successful steps you already took last time. That’s why all of the Escape the Gem Tunnels YouTube videos have spoiler warnings at the beginning. That said, there were possibilities for the digital game to have semi-randomised experiences. For example, the multiple choice quiz answers in the Ruby Tunnel could have been presented in a randomly sorted order. Also in the Ruby Tunnel, a random number could have been generated behind the scenes to present different graphic puzzles in the XY Plot / slider section. The Emerald Tunnel could have randomly picked what the correct codeword to break was, although that might require some complicated choreography of the READEXCEL() sheet by using WRITEEXCEL() to change what the correct sidepath would be. By contrast, I don’t think anything in the Sapphire Tunnel could have been randomised. Everything there is hard-coded because it’s all based on words or text. The clock puzzle can’t be randomised because I can only set a single area protection timestamp. I could have made it so there would be multiple to choose from and it would be a different puzzle to figure out which is the correct timestamp (and it would be different each time), but that might be too complicated for the sake of adding replay value.
More puzzle varieties could have been employed, of course. One that I had to not implement was anything related to 3D Plots. I imagine there are several interesting puzzles you could do with exploring a 3D Plot space, similar in nature to our Easter Egg worksheet where there is a hidden message if you peel back certain layers. The problem with implementing that is that it requires some… very advanced knowledge on the math of actually making those, and I don’t have that knowledge, nor did I want to be a burden on people who do have that knowledge.
I could have added down arrow imagery in the Emerald sidepaths to make it more obvious that people needed to scroll down upon clicking, since they are brought to the top of the page since the Sidepaths start at the middle of each page.
The last thing that could’ve been done differently, and this one is a slight regret, is that I only have two endings for the game. One ending is the normal one for completing it; the other ending you get is for cheating by only pressing the Escape button and never pressing the begin Button in the Main Corridor, so the time taken to complete the game is negative. I could have made different endings for completing the game in under an hour versus over an hour, as a homage to how physical escape rooms tend to have a one-hour time limit, and also to a homage to how some popular videogames give better endings for finishing them faster. (Of course, those games are meant to be replayed over and over, while an escape room is not.)
Now you know that it’s possible to make three very different games in PTC Mathcad Prime. There are far more experiences that you could make than just these. I already have ideas for other games if we ever do a Game Gallery challenge again, and I hope you play the games available now!
But even if you’re not a gamer or don’t feel like a designer, there are still some important lessons on how you can make your PTC Mathcad Prime worksheets more user-friendly and more interactive for your end-user, whether that is a client, others tasked with reviewing your work, or yourself in the future when you must revisit an old project. There are several commonalities between a good game’s user experience and the engineering documentation capabilities that Mathcad has always been an industry leader at providing. Even if you are just putting together a run-of-the-mill report with calculations, you're still designing an experience for someone whether you know it or not.
The next Mathcad Community Challenge is already available, and it’s a far more traditional challenge around 3D shapes, specifically frustums and pyramids. Check it out here and share your solutions by logging in with your PTC account on the PTC Community and attaching your Mathcad Prime worksheet(s)! And check out the archive of all of the previous challenges we’ve had; you will learn a lot about Mathcad Prime techniques and different engineering domains by reading through these.
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