Code My Robot Vacuum comes from solo developer Umit Canbolat at BoostedSquad Games, a coding and logic game where players program a robot vacuum to clean rooms on Steam.
The setup is straightforward. You've unboxed a new smart vacuum and it can't do anything on its own. Every movement, every turn, every decision about where to go next has to come from you in the form of written commands. The vacuum is only as capable as the instructions you give it, so the game becomes a loop of writing code, watching your vacuum attempt to follow it, figuring out why it got stuck on a chair leg or wandered into a corner, then rewriting until the room is clean. Each room functions as its own puzzle with its own layout of furniture, obstacles, pets, and stray socks scattered across the floor. You can brute-force a solution that technically works or you can chase tighter, more efficient routines that clear the room in fewer steps.
That testing and debugging cycle is where the game lives. Writing a set of instructions and hitting run is only the beginning. Watching the vacuum bump into walls or loop endlessly around a table leg is the feedback that tells you what your logic actually does versus what you thought it would do. The challenge scales as rooms grow more complex, introducing pets that move on their own, tighter spaces with less room for error, and layouts that demand more sophisticated thinking about pathing and conditionals. Optional challenge settings layer extra difficulty on top for players who want it, and each level carries additional goals like collecting dust bunnies in the fewest moves possible or completing a room without hitting a single wall. A sandbox mode sits alongside the structured puzzles for open experimentation.
The vacuum itself is the only character that matters here, and its personality comes entirely from its limitations. It does exactly what you tell it to, nothing more. Tell it to go forward and it goes forward, straight into a wall if that's where forward leads. The comedy of watching it fail is baked into the design. The game treats mistakes as part of the process rather than punishment. As you teach it more complex behaviours, it graduates from bumbling appliance to something that can navigate a cluttered living room with purpose. That arc from incompetent machine to capable cleaner is the progression, driven entirely by how much better your code gets.
BoostedSquad Games cites The Farmer Was Replaced and Human Resource Machine as direct inspirations, and Code My Robot Vacuum occupies the same space where programming is the gameplay rather than a layer on top of it. The household setting gives it a lighter tone than most games in this niche. There are no existential stakes or abstract logic puzzles here, just a vacuum that needs to learn how to deal with a sock on the floor. The mood stays playful throughout, with the satisfaction coming from that moment when a routine you've been tweaking finally runs clean.
The game is available now on Steam in Early Access. Players who want to support development through bug testing can request keys directly from BoostedSquad Games. Each room offers multiple valid solutions, so the replayability comes from returning to earlier puzzles with better coding knowledge and finding cleaner paths through the mess.