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Building Games at Zachtronics with Zach Barth
01:27:03
Zachtronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate, engineering-focused puzzle games that merge logic, creativity, and code. The studio was founded by Zach Barth in 2011, and it has become a cult favorite among programmers ...
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Zachtronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate engineering focused puzzle games that merge logic, creativity and code. This studio was founded by Zach Barth.
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In 2011 and it has become a cult favorite among programmers and tinkerers alike.
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With titles such as Spacechem, InfiniFactory, TIS100 and Shenzen IO. Most recently, Zachtronics released Kaizen, a factory story in which players take on the role of an American engineer hired by a Japanese manufacturing company in the 1980s to design assembly processes for various products. Zach Barth joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk about the games he makes. Joe Nash is a developer, educator and.
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Award winning community builder who has worked.
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At companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
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B
Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash. And today I'm joined by Zach Barth who has in the past created beloved puzzle games such as Opus Magnum, Shenzhen I ao Exapunks under the label of Zachtronics and the recently released Kaizen under Coincidence Games. Zach, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
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A
I'm great. It's kind of early to be honest, but I'm ready to go. Let's talk about software.
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B
Yes, absolutely. Sorry, the joys of cross continental podcast scheduling. But thank you for making it. So I guess we mentioned a bunch of games there in the intro, but for folks who are unfamiliar with your games, can you explain, I guess, what your whole deal is as a genre named after you? What is is that like. Let's start there.
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A
Oh God, yeah. There is a genre named after me, so I did not coin the term. I need to point out I'm not crazy. I feel like it'd be really weird to name a genre after yourself. I actually pushed back on it really hard so. But I also named our studio Zachtronics, which is kind of damning. So Zach, like is. I still hate that term.
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B
I love it.
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A
I think it's great. Oh God. And somebody from Rock Paper Shotgun who did it. I swear, not me. It's an open ended puzzle game where you're given a set of tools and you're given a usually criteria. So not like a thing you have to build but like criteria for what an acceptable thing would look like. You know, like in the example. I think the overt programming Games like Shinjin I.O. are a lot more obvious about this where it gives you like a test spec and so you have to write software that satisfies a test spec. And in fact there's like 100 different random variations. So it's almost more like elite code or something. But I think to a programmer they're very recognizable in that they're like programming puzzles. Basically. You can write any code you want as long as it solves the problem and meets the spec. They're not all literally about programming, although some of them are, but they all take the form of that. So they're these open ended puzzles where every puzzle has, you know, kind of like a programming puzzle or programming problem. Every puzzle has a huge number of solutions and you can just find a solution that works and then you can go beyond that to find a solution that is often we have these like sort of secondary optimization metrics. So it's like maybe you're not just solving the problem, but you're trying to solve it in fewer lines of code than anybody else. Which again, to anybody who's familiar with programming problems and leetcode kind of things, it's totally familiar and a thing that lots of programmers do all the time and don't even think of it as a game necessarily.
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B
Yeah, that's definitely the element that I think it was. TIS100 came out during my first year of university when we were learning assembly and completely one shot me for that reason. And as you say, I think most programmers find the optimization bit especially very addictive. But before we get into, I want to come back to the metrics and stuff. But before we get into that, I guess to round that out. So Zach likes and you said you had the studio called Zachtronics. That was I guess your previous incarnation. You've recently moved over to Coincidence Games. Can you give us kind of a pocket history of your, I guess, the game development journey and where you're up to today?
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A
Okay, so right now it's 2025. I graduated college in 2008 and so that's quite a few years ago now, almost 20 years ago. I did a lot of game stuff in college. But for some reason at the time I was like, I worked at a game studio. I interned at a game studio like my junior year of college. And it was not a bad game studio, but not an interesting game studio. They did, they made, I don't want to shit on them too much. They kind of divided their time between stuff for the government and DLC packs for AAA games. And so like the people on one part of the office were making some kind of like military training tool for teaching people how to use like anti tank missile launchers. And then another group of people were making the DLC for Command and Conquer 3, Kane's Wrath or whatever. And so this was what was going on in the studio. And I was working on this game that was funded by a shadowy group of American businessmen who wanted to. This is like 2007, so this is like peak war on terror. Who wanted to spread American values abroad. And so we were making a western values laden game for Middle Eastern audiences. Yeah, it was crazy. The people who ran the company like went on, they went on like a business trip to Saudi Arabia and came back with all these games that they were selling in Saudi Arabia so we could see kind of like what's like the local market like, and that we were trying to make a game that was funded by these condos who these American businessmen were.
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B
But it always sounded so Radio Free America for games. It's very, yeah, very interesting.
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A
Well, except it was like private people doing it, not the State Department or whatever. So I don't know, it was weird. The game never came out. I just worked on it like early on, but it was, it was, it was kind of like a boring project to be on. And my takeaway from all of that, I like the people I worked with a lot. But my takeaway from that is just all programming is the same, right? It doesn't matter if you're programming a game or programming Microsoft Office, which is where I ended up actually out of college and why I live in Seattle. But I'm just like, oh, all programming is the same, it doesn't matter. And I. And to some degree I actually kind of think that's true. But the thing that I realized over the years is that it's like, oh yeah, because I don't really like programming all that much. Like, I do like programming, but I don't like programming and professional programming sucks. And the thing I really like is design. So like game design and product design and stuff like that. And so when I was at the game studio, I was trying to do more game design stuff because I'd been designing games on my own. I wanted to design more games. And then when I eventually got to Microsoft, I tried multiple times. Like I interviewed to be a pm, I tried switching two times to be a pm. And they're like, no, you're very much a developer. And it's like, I am, I guess I am. Like, I don't, you know, I never understood like what it took to be a PM at a big software company. But I actually think that what was a weakness in that context of only being like a mere programmer with ambitions to do design, I think ended up becoming the backbone of everything I've done in my career since, which is that, like, I can walk the line and I can design games about programming. Arguably some of the best in class games about programming. And so it's like a weird intersection of my. My weaknesses in other contexts became my strength. And Zachtronics and stuff like that, Right?
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B
Yeah, that makes total sense.
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A
Oh, we didn't talk at all about Zachtronics.
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B
No, no, no, it's okay. I'll get that. So I guess like the last bit you met. So that was Microsoft, you were trying to become pm, you're a developer. How do you get from there to Zachtronics?
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A
Yeah, so I was on, off, I worked on Vizio. So after I left, they kind of like canned Visio. I don't even know if you can still buy it anymore. But that's the diagramming program.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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A
You can make UML diagrams with it, which back in 2008 was a thing that people talked about and took seriously.
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B
I do feel like I've seen it under a dropdown in Office365 recently. I think it is still FL floating around.
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A
Oh, that's cute. Yeah, it's actually a really cool product. It looks like a drawing product, but behind the scenes it's a spreadsheet. And this is what powers all their little shapes that you can resize and it totally changes the shape and scales it and stuff. It's all driven by a spreadsheet that has formulas that describe the locations of the points. It's actually really cool.
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B
That's really interesting that it comes to this whole. There's this programming community called Future of Code, but they're really obsessed with how the spreadsheet as like a programming paradigm and how that's kind of a wasted opportunity. And that sounds like a good example of where it could have been. Okay. But also hearing you worked on Visio makes a lot of sense of a lot of your games.
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A
Yeah, yeah, right. Well, and the funny thing is that I didn't even choose to be put on Vizio. I just told them that I didn't care. And then they're like, cool, you're going to go work on Office. Because I was really unambitious coming out of college, I wanted to make not games, but physical simulators. I'm like, oh, I want to work on like Simulators and like immersive games. I was really into immersive physical gaming and stuff and like the idea of VR before Palmer Luckey came and rebooted VR. And I was really into that kind of stuff. And so there's nobody who hires for that. And so when I was graduating from college, I pretty much just got like an offer from Microsoft. I had an offer for some other software company that I didn't take, but I got an offer from Microsoft and I was like, well, I guess I'm moving to Seattle because I don't have anything else going on for me. And they were like, oh, you can work on Visio or you can work on the team on Office that does like the licensing and like serial key validation. And it's just like, oh, God, I don't want to work on that. Like, there's no, no videos.
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B
Interesting problems.
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A
Yeah, yeah, that's good if you really like programming, but not design, user interfacing stuff. And so Vizio, actually, I guess in a roundabout way, was good for the kind of stuff I wanted to do because it's like a very weird bespoke CAD program, which is what many Zachtronics games are like, weird bespoke CAD programs. So I really thought about that. But there is kind of a through line there. Yeah. So I, as soon as I got to Microsoft, I was like, I hate this. I need to go work on something that's actually exciting. You couldn't switch teams for like a year. So I spent like, as soon as I hit the year point of being like a year in, I was like, I need to find another team. And so I spent two and a half years trying to find. I spent like a while looking for another team and I, I managed to find a games team that was starting up and I managed to interview for that. And so I managed to switch to this games team at, I don't know, the two and a half or probably like two and a half years into it, I switched to a games team.
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B
Okay, that's a good, that's a good tenure.
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A
But by then I'd already been working on spacechem because I'd already been making Flash games and I'd already made Infiniminer and I'd already done all these things on my own, just working as an indie game developer, just kind of releasing games and giving away for free on my website. By the time I kind of managed to switch to a games team, like, I'd actually gathered kind of a large group of fans for back then for just Like a random person making free games. And so, yeah, I did flash games. I did a game called RuckEngineer 2, which was my first game that kind of got an audience. It was like a reverse engineering hacking game. I submitted it to Hackaday and that was like a big. I mean, I guess it's still kind of a big site, but it was a big deal back then. It got like a whole bunch of people drawn to my stuff. And yeah, then I made Infiniminer, which was the inspiration for Minecraft. I made a bunch of those games. And then I made. When I switched games to the games team at Microsoft, we were just wrapping up spacechem, which is a game that I'd actually started building with one of the guys I worked with on Vizio, like on the side. We worked on it and what became like a growing team of other people, like an artist in the Philippines and another guy I was friends with from college who came to work at Microsoft as an intern. And we built Basecamp. We launched Basecamp. It did well enough. Steam accepted it. That was back when it was really hard to get on Steam, but it was accepted onto Steam. And at that point everything was going so well with spacechem, our first commercial title, that most of us at Microsoft left Microsoft and then started Zachtronics full time.
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B
Perfect. Awesome. And so, you know, you mentioned VR there and how hard it was to hire that. So joining Valve and working on VR stuff was after you started Satronics, is.
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A
That like, okay, I left Microsoft. So I joined my. I graduated from College, joined Microsoft 2008, 2011 spacecraft comes out at the very beginning of the year. And so a couple months into that, I leave Microsoft, we start electronics full time. I did that. We made Ironclad tactics. We made a bunch of educational games for this company called Amplify. They used to be called Wireless Generation. And funny thing, when they were called Wireless Generation, they were actually the other company that I had a job offer from out of college.
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B
And then you end up making games.
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A
I didn't want to move to New York City because I was like, I'm not really accustomed to living in cities. It seems super intimidating. And Microsoft is in the suburbs. So that's why I went to work at Microsoft. But there's an alternate universe where I.
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B
Moved to Brooklyn and stayed in. Educational games.
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A
Yeah, well, they weren't even doing games then. Honestly. They were doing weird ed tech stuff with like Palm Pilots. Yeah, it was a really interesting. Well, I think really interesting. It was a product. It was all based on Palm Pilots. And you'd give the teacher Palm Pilot and then they go around the classroom while kids are working, and then the Palm Pilot has a question on it. It says, go ask this child this question. And so the teacher goes up, asks them this question on the Palm Pilot, they do it on paper, they write down what answer the student gave, and they do this. And so it's like a machine targeted intervention where the machine is telling them which students to talk to and which problems to give them. And they're using some sort of giant early machine learning big data backend that has all the students and all their answers and knows who to target with what interventions. So it was this Palm Pilot driven, teacher driven intervention where the teacher can. Because this is like the problem with education is that you have one parent, one teacher teaching 30 people. And it doesn't really work all that well. You have to adopt like a completely different set of things than when you're teaching somebody one on one. And so this was, well, we can tell the teacher who to go one on one help. And we can do it using big data to figure that out and be smart about it. And so that was their product. They did that. They're actually pretty big. There were a lot of people in that office when I interviewed there in college. And sometime between then and when we worked with them later, they'd been bought by Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. So Rupert Murdoch is just like, yeah, you guys look like you know what you're doing with education technology. I want you to make a new curriculum that blows all the other curriculums out of the water. The way it was described to me is that he realized he was old and wanted to leave a positive mark on the world, which.
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B
Cool.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So he bought it up and they, they, they made this like huge curriculum project that required games. And that was actually how we came back to it, is that they never became a games company. They've always been a curriculum company. But there was like this little group within there that wanted to do a bunch of games. And so while we were, I mean, this ties back into the early Zachtronics stuff. We made spacecam, we made ironclad tactics. We made these educational games for this company to put on their tablet that had a charger that caught fire once and then they like killed the entire initiative and switched iPads. But yeah, so we did that. We did infinifactory, we did TIS 100, we did all those games. And then I was just like, well, I'm completely burnt out. And so we Shut down the studio and I went to work at Valve and I worked on VR at Valve. I would say it was a mix of really wanting to make a, like, infinifactory and ti100. And spacechem did pretty well in retrospect, but at the time it was like, ah, they're doing okay. For most of my career, I've had this like, inescapable feeling that, like, I need to be making games that do even better because it's really easy to look around and see all these people who are doing way better than we are. And it's like, well, if only we could make a game that was genuinely successful, we'd be set for life like all these other people. And every time I've tried to do that, it's just been ineffective. Right? You can't just, I don't know, at least for me, like, I can't just be like, oh, I'm going to totally switch gears and be a different person and make something that'll make me successful. It's like, no, I'm only successful in the sense that I did this thing that came naturally and nobody would have ever thought it would be successful, but it was. And it was successful enough that I got to keep doing it. And so trying to make a game that was like, successful, it just completely broke me. And so this was when all the VR stuff was coming up. And like I said, I'd always been interested in physical games and VR stuff. And so for a real chance to do modern VR and not just having it be this like, ghost of 90s VR that was. All the hardware was inaccessible and everything was dead. It was really exciting. It's like, oh, VR's back and this is my chance. And so, yeah, I got kind of FOMO y and I went to work at Valve and I was there for 10 months. I also couldn't work at Valve because I. I don't know, it was. But I was at Valve for a little bit and I did work on VR. The early Valve VR product was called the Lab. And so it's a bunch of mini games. And so there's a mini game in there called Zortex 26xx that I programmed and designed. And it was, it was a fraught production. It turned into a totally different game, like for most of it. Oh God, I don't even want to talk about it. It was like, it was so stupid.
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B
That's very normal for Valve though, right? Like the things, they make things and they change. This is, you know, as someone who's been trying to follow Deadlock. It's how they do things.
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A
Yeah, it started. Oh God. I showed up there. They put me on the Counter Strike Team at first because they didn't put me. Because you can go, you can go anywhere you want in the company, do whatever you want because there's no managers. And so I, I let myself be put on the Counter Strike team because they're like, oh, it's good to work on a team that ships stuff all the time. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I get it. But I got there and I'm just like, I got the Counter Strike Team. I didn't really know how to contribute. It was hard to tell what anybody was doing or how to contribute. And the people I was talking to, like, they, they assigned me like a mentor who was like a technical artist and I'm not a technical artist. And so he was working on a new hand animation system. And then like everybody was drawing stickers because the best way to make money at the time was selling stickers and selling battle passes for their little battle pass system they had back then. And it's just like, cool, I see nothing here that I can contribute to. And they had. I talk about this all the time. I don't know if I should. It was a long time ago though. So meanwhile they're making stickers and hand models and they had a version of pubg, like a, I don't know what you call those kinds of games. Battle royales. Oh yeah. Like they were working on a battle royale and I was just like, hey guys, are we going to work on the battle royale? That looks awesome. And they're like, yeah, we're working on it a little bit. But they were not really working on it, you know, because it didn't make any money. And they were maybe a little bit more short sighted back then with like stuff that, you know, focusing on stuff that makes money.
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B
Yeah, that's fascinating. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called chat concierge. And a simplifier in car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
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A
Three days in, I roll my desk downstairs to the VR team because I had a friend down there, he's like, you should come help us. You know Unity. I'm like, I do know Unity. And that was the only place in the company where I could write C, which is everything else there is like C. And I. Everything at Microsoft was C like on Office. And I am really bad at C. There's too many features in the language. It's. I just never know what to do. I had been writing it in college, but it's just like, there's just so many different ways to do stuff. There's so many different kinds of smart pointers and it's just complicated. And it's like seemingly every time I go to write C, it was wrong when I tried to do it professionally. And I think other people would be like, oh, I want to learn more about C. It's like, no, I don't give a shit about C. At that point I'd already been using C a bunch. I'm just like, this is just like the best programming language ever made. It has all the stuff that's good about other languages without all the stuff that's bad about C. And so I managed to work on, when I was on Vizio, it was all in C, but the new web based stuff was in C. So I managed to get to do some of the web stuff in C. And then when I went to the games team it was all in C. And the one I did, Zachtronics, it was all in C. It's all we've ever written in C. When I went to Valve, I managed to find the one team writing C and it was the VR team, which I wanted to be working on anyway. So I was just like, fuck it, I'm not going to waste time pretending to learn how to do this. I know how Valve works. You do whatever you want. You do the right thing. And so I'm going to go where I'm useful, which is VR writing C. And so I did perfect. And I get down there and I'm just like, what am I doing? What are we working on? And they're just like, oh, we're just building a bunch of stuff. And it's like, oh, I guess this is what they meant by like you shouldn't go work on a new team because no one knows what's going on. And so I'm like, I need something to work on. You guys have to give me something to work on to like cut my teeth on. And they're like, oh yeah, there's this. One of the guys had been like programming like a remote control helicopter simulator because he was into like real life remote control Helicopters. And he's like, you could work on that. I'm just like, okay, I don't know what that means, but sure. And so we, like started trying to build a game with this remote control helicopter thing. And it was like, terrible because remote control helicopters are really confusing because the controls are from the vehicle's point of view. And so it's actually really unintuitive. Right? Like, that's actually a really hard thing. You can't just like, put that in front of random people. They're going to struggle with that completely. And so I rewrote all the controls for the helicopter to be from your perspective as the person looking at it. And so we have the motion control, so you tilt it to your left and it goes to your left. And so we built this and then we built this whole game that was like a bullet hell shooter. This, like, you'd stand on the edge of this platform and like, look into this huge chamber and you'd have this like helicopter flying around in 3D. And then you'd like. All this stuff would spawn and you'd shoot it. So it was like a bullet hole shooter where you're in this chamber. And we just spent so much time on it, people still could not figure out the control scheme. For me, it was super intuitive. It felt like, really you could do these like, big, huge, swoopy flying maneuvers if you, like, identified with the thing and understood how to control it. It felt really free and exciting and like remote controlling a bird or something. But for most people who played it, they just like, couldn't figure it out for the life of them. And we spent so much time trying to do it. They have a thing at Valve called Overwatch, confusingly, because that's like a Blizzard game also. But they have a thing at Valve called Overwatch, where other people in the company who have been there a long time and kind of know what's up, will review your product. And so you give it to them and then they try it. And then you all like, haul them into a conference room and they pick your shit apart and just destroy you. And their feedback on Zortex was they're like, did somebody from outside. Is this like a contractor who made this? Like, this doesn't feel like a Valve game at all. This is. All the other things feel very val Vy. This feels like somebody outside the company made it. And I'm just like, yeah, I made it. And they're like, cool. So like, nobody liked it. Nobody liked the controls. And so it kind of became clear to me that it's like, oh, they're going to kill this unless I can make it so that they like it. And so because like, other stuff in the package did get killed, I'm like, okay, I need to turn this into something that they're not going to kill. I tried a whole bunch of different alternate control schemes. Like, I just like spent two days just like angrily programming at my desk, trying out a bunch of things and I made two alternatives and then I just shoved them at like the guy who was next to me, who was this guy David, who was very nice and had been there for a very long time since like the Half Life two days, I guess. And I'm just like, are any of these any good? I hate all of them. And he tried, he tried them. And the one that he tried that he liked was the one where it's just like, I just glued the ship to your hand and I'm just like, what if we scaled you down? So rather than the chamber you're in being huge, it's just really small and then you're just. It's like your size. And then you are like you're holding a toy spaceship and you're going bew. And I'm just like. He's like, no, this is really good. I'm like, no, you're full of shit. Like, this sucks. He's like, no, this is really good. This is better than before. And so I'm like, whatever, I don't even care at this point. And so I just like, did it. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, this is really good. I'm just like, oh God, whatever. And so that was what we shipped. And. And was it better? I have no idea. I don't care. Right. So at that, after that, what became the Half Life Alyx team? After we shipped the lab, the Half Life Alyx team came through and stole like half the people. The other people who were left over had no idea what they're doing. And I'm just like, I gotta get out of here. There was no project that I wanted to work on there. People were. It was at a weird point in Valve where people were really protective of like, what their, their projects. Cause they didn't want too many people to join their projects. Because then like, if there's too many people in the project now, there's a lot of eyeballs on it. And like, if you're trying to figure out what your game is, you don't want that. And so there was like seemingly nothing for me to work on. And so I'm just like, you know, I. I really just want to. I'd been watching while I was working on VR. I spent a lot of time with the hardware guys because I was working on, like, some platforming stuff too. And, like, I've been like, always drawn to hardware. When I was in college, I did a lot of stuff with electronics, but I find it really frustrating because software just gives you such a bitter feedback loop and I.
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B
And you can't break it. It doesn't explode.
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A
Yeah, well, I'm not even worried about that. There's just like, I'm all, well, I guess so. I'm always like, afraid. It's just like, oh, God, like, what if, like, I accidentally short something and it catches fire? Or how do I know what kind of capacitor to put? Like, electronics has a lot of these heuristics that I could never get a straight answer about. And I really, like, can't deal with that ambiguity. Like, I need. And I think it's less ambiguous when you're actually in practice, but it still feels like it's more of like a. Like an art than a science, like electronics, even though it's like, clearly a science. But I don't know, just software was so much. Resonated with me. So much more like my. My desire for, like, everything to be, like, make sense and be perfect and understandable, you know, like, is really like a software thing. And so I didn't go into electronics. I couldn't have done it, but I'm still interested to it. And so when I was at Valve, I was hanging out with the hardware people and it's like, God, this is so cool. They're like, manufacturing stuff and learning about all of that. I'm like, I want to make a game about embedded programming. I've done embedded programming for my whole hobby since college. Microcontroller stuff is pretty accessible, and with Arduinos, it's become even more accessible. So I do a lot of that in real life as a hobby. And I was like, I need to make a game about, like, electronics manufacturing. And so I did. And that was. That became like, when we sold. So I got out of Valve by selling Zachtronics to a big company in New York that did games distribution called Alliance.
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B
Yep.
- [24:39]
A
Yeah. And so one of the big problems we had at Zachtronics when we owned it ourselves and ran it, is that we were always one game away from going out of business. And so it made me do stupid things like think, oh, we have to make a game That'll make a lot of money, right? Because I'm like worried about it, you know, Like, I don't. That's like a thing you think about when you try to think about money too much, which I. I think is not helpful. And it was too much. I felt like it was kind of constraining our creative process, you know, having to worry about making money too much. And so I went to Valve and when I was getting out of Valve, I wanted to find something that would like. I wanted to find somebody who would just like give us a lot of money so that we wouldn't have to worry about it. And through somebody we knew from the games team at Amplify, that educational company, they actually were working. They had gone from working at Amplify to working at alliance as like a talent scout. And so it's like, oh, I know, a talent scout at a games company, you know. And so we talked to them and we managed. We met at GDC and we managed to like sell Zachtronics to them so we could go work for them and have like this huge company that did physical games distribution. Kind of like as like a flywheel that like, even if we fuck up and ship a game that doesn't make a lot of money, they just keep on spinning and then everything keeps going. And so because they. They're pulling in like 50 million a year, right? It's like that's. We're much smaller than that. That will keep us going, you know, when we mess up and make a bad game. So we sold to them and that was how Shenzhen IO Opus Magnum, Exapunks, Mobius, Front Eliza, Last Call BBS all came to be. Was all working for them. So that was over the course of that would have been in like 20, I went to work at Valve and like Spacechem 2011, that's when we start Tectronics. We shut it down in like 2015. 2016 is when I go work at Valve. 2016 is also when I leave Valve and go work for alliance. So like 2017 through 2022, I would say was like when we were at alliance, only five, but we managed to ship. I don't even know how many games I named in there. Six. Six games?
- [26:29]
B
Yeah.
- [26:29]
A
In like six years.
- [26:31]
B
Yeah. And so that was one thing I.
- [26:32]
A
Wanted to ask about.
- [26:33]
B
I recall you mentioning somewhere that that was very much part of the deal that like you had to ship on like a regular cadence and the games had to, you know, you had like a year to develop each game. Is that the Case, am I remembering that correctly?
- [26:44]
A
We didn't have to do anything. Honestly, there was very little oversight of what we did. I think things kind of fell apart a little bit at the end. Their business was physical games distribution and their biggest customer was Toys R Us. And so when Toys R Us went out of business, it took their physical games distribution with, you know, like, that also killed the distribution business. And so what started off as this like $50 million, 50 person company, it became us and the CEO and his son. And so it became a much smaller company. They'd like picked up another indie studio at some point in there, but then they'd like shut it down. And so like everything got really small and it just got kind of awkward and just like the flywheel stopped spinning and. Yeah. And so we never had to do a game every year, but that was just, I think we were always very responsible. Yep. If you're using AI to code, ask yourself, are you building software or are.
- [27:33]
B
You just playing prompt roulette?
- [27:35]
A
We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually leads to AI slop and technical debt.
- [27:41]
B
Enter zenflow.
- [27:42]
A
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- [27:51]
B
It transforms freeform prompting into spec driven.
- [27:54]
A
Workflows and multi agent verification where agents actually cross check each other to prevent drift. You can even command a fleet of.
- [28:02]
B
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- [28:06]
A
We've seen teams accelerate delivery 2 times to 10 times. Stop gambling with prompts, start orchestrating your AI. Turn raw speed into reliable production grade.
- [28:16]
B
Output at Zenflow Free.
- [28:20]
A
So for us it was like, okay, we can make about a million bucks off a game. On average, we spend about a million bucks a year on like the five of us in our office and our health insurance and our taxes that you have to pay. So if we do about a game a year, we can keep this going indefinitely, right? And so obviously indefinitely, it was about five years long when we all started getting burnt out. And again, feeling like things started kind of closing in on us, like, can we even experiment anymore? And we had done experiments in the form of Mobius, Front and Eliza, and neither one of them was very commercially viable. And I, I think with the walls closing in, it's like, okay, we can't really swap up who we work with, you know, like, nobody wanted to like leave. And I, I wasn't about to like fire anybody, just get some new blood in there, you know, so we're just stuck, you know, and so we Kind of realized it's like, okay, like I want it. Well and so it's complicated too because I, I was getting kind of burnt out again and I was getting really interested in something I had always thought about as my backup career, which was teaching. And so for years I'd been saying, oh, if I ever like burn out and quit the games industry, I want to be a teacher. Like that seems cool. Our games are kind of educational and I think I would like that. And so the plan was kind of to wrap up Zachtronics, get my teaching degree and become a teacher. But things ended up happening in a weird order where like Covid happened. And then when I started getting my teaching degree I realized that you don't need one if you're teaching computer science. And they just let me in right away. And so I actually spent my whole year teaching while we were also finishing up Last Call, which was our last game. And so I ended up what was supposed to be leaving Zachtronics teaching, starting teaching, turned into Zachtronics and teaching both wrapping up at the same time at the end of like 2022 or whatever because I turns out I didn't like teaching at all and was not cut out for it. And so yeah. And so I just sort of found myself at the end of that year with nothing going on. Right. Zegtronics was over and like pretty dead, you know, I mean we still run all, I still maintain all the games and stuff, but the idea, the possibility of any new work, I sort of like at the last minute I'm like oh, what if we kind of like stuck around and made some more games just with like a smaller team and they're like, you could do that. I'm like, but what about with the other programmer? They're like no, we're not going to pay for him. And I'm just like oh, this is over. It's like if I can't have. I've been working with this guy Keith for like my whole career and I'm like, if I can't have Keith working with me, like what's the point? And so that was when I realized that the stuff with alliance was like, eh, we're just going to maintain the old games. This is kind of over. Yeah. And so I sort of found myself as like as soon as I got outta school I had hernia surgery. So as I'm recovering from that I'm just like cool. I'm just down and out and I have nothing going on. And that was when we started coincidence. And so we had planned it out so I guess I actually knew exactly what I was doing coming off of school and starting a coincidence because we were trying to move into our new office for coincidence while I was recovering from. So my abs didn't work. But yeah, we had. As we were wrapping up Zachtronics and stuff, some of the other people on the team wanted to start working on a project of their own. Like not without me, without me, but like not with me, you know, because I was going to teach and stuff. They wanted to do a project. I'm like, okay, if you guys are going to do a project, who's going to own it? What's the company structure? And they're just like, I'm just like, no, we need like a company structure. You can't just do this willy nilly. And so I, I like designed this company structure that would allow them to do the thing they wanted to do. And then when I realized that I needed to start doing stuff again and start making games again to make money, that's. That's when it really came together. I was like, okay, we'll build this company that's like a co op. And then. But nobody gets paid a salaries. Everybody just gets paid with what they work on. So we can run like our contract work through it. We can make games through it. The company can own the games and sell them, but we all own the company. So it's like ownership is distributed but also not. We all own the stuff, but it's like owned by a single entity. So it's like legally allowed to be sold without conflict. And yeah, and that's coincidence. It's a normal company except that no one gets paid salaries and we. I keep a spreadsheet, basically like a ledger of all the money coming in and all the money going out and who it goes to.
- [32:05]
B
That's very recognizable co op structure. That sounds really cool.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah, it's kind of uncommon in games, to be honest. Games require a lot of like seed money and so. And I think a lot of people.
- [32:15]
B
Like a lot of long development times. Normally I guess for you guys it's.
- [32:18]
A
Quite short, but yeah, yeah, long development times and there's often a lot of unknowns and I don't want to say that game developers are like bad software developers, but I think a lot of times like indie projects have a lot of unknowns and just kind of messy logistics and stuff. And so yeah, I don't, I don't know, I think it's. People keep telling me it's kind of uncommon and I don't hear about a lot of other people doing the same thing. So I think we're special. But it's totally just like a normal. If you were just going to like run a software consulting company, that's exactly what you would do. Right. So I think to like programmers it seems really normal. To games people it seems really weird.
- [32:51]
B
Yeah. To stay on, I guess coincidence and its structure in the games industry bit we will talk about a game shortly. So throughout talking about electronics and I guess some of the comments you made recently, you talk about the tension between paying the bills and being able to experiment. And that was like a big pit of what you just mentioned was kind of the end of Zachtronics. How does that then work in coincidence? So like you know, you sold Zachtronics, you didn't have to worry about the cash flow and the salary. You have that safety net. But now you know it's what you make from the games that is it. How are you thinking about being able to experiment now?
- [33:22]
A
Yeah, well, so in some ways we're less able to experiment than we were before. So Kaizen was published. That's how we've never had a publisher before. Even when alliance owned us, we were still self published. Like it was all funded off of, you know, Zectronics made money every year. So we were just kind of funded off of that. And we. When we started up coincidence we needed to start finding work first thing. A couple of us went and got a job at a software startup like an edtech startup. So that lasted a couple months until I got fired. I don't that. I don't know if I should talk about all that.
- [33:53]
B
But that's fine.
- [33:54]
A
It was messy and it was unclear what I was there for. Yeah. It turns out remote companies can be super isolating and it can be really hard to like know what people are talking about or what like anything is. And I'm not a fan of remote work and remote companies. Like we have an in person office. We're all like physically in each other's presence often. And I think that's important.
- [34:16]
B
Right.
- [34:16]
A
Because otherwise people stuff gets weird. Like when people don't actually get to be together and bond as people. I don't know. It was a weird thing.
- [34:24]
B
No, I totally get that.
- [34:25]
A
Yeah.
- [34:25]
B
I had a manager at a remote job. Sorry. I had a manager at remote job who said that like although we were all remote, he said it's much easier to be remote after you've at least met them and you can put their like hear the messages in their voice, in your head. That makes everything easier. But if you never have that experience. Yeah, yeah.
- [34:38]
A
Well, sometimes hearing their voices in their, in your. Your head, in their voice doesn't help. Right? Yeah, it's. It's tough. I would say, like, it's remote work works really great if there's no conflict.
- [34:50]
B
Sure.
- [34:50]
A
Right. But I think remote work maybe if there's conflicts which comes, I mean, like, I don't know, like sometimes software is boring, but like, sometimes software is heated and there's lots of like, personal stuff.
- [34:59]
B
Especially in a startup.
- [34:59]
A
Yeah, especially in a startup. And especially like doing something that's like, like kind of unknown. Like, I don't know. Games are weird. You know, like they're like a creative product, but they're also a business product. Software is often not creative or it is like a little bit. I think games are just weird. Yeah. And so I think it's really bad for resolving conflicts. And that, that was what, that's what happened with, with the thing with me is that it's like something that in person, with normal people could have been solved really quickly and really easily. And. And the remote work aspect of it and the isolation of the remoteness just kind of spiraled it into a very messy situation.
- [35:33]
B
Fair. That was part, I guess, like a tangent from coincidence. And now you'll come back to coincidence.
- [35:38]
A
Well, that was the first thing we did at coincidence because coincidence allows for like, people to be like, contracting or whatever. It's a. It's a structure for anything. And so that's what we started off at. And then when I came back and when I kind of like tried to bring back the people that I had gone there to the startup with, and the first project we did that made us money was another educational game for amplifying. Because it turns out I convinced them that they wanted a game and we made them a math racer game. And so that is. They were nice enough to let us release it on Steam so that way.
- [36:07]
B
It wouldn't just disappear into proprietary hardware.
- [36:10]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We made those three games for them at previous Exactronics and then like, there's nowhere to play them. They sold them to like a weird Irish multinational company that put some of them on the app Store. But then like those got pulled also and so they just die. And I'm just like, we just need to be able to sell this on Steam so we can just keep like a version of it for our. Ourselves alive forever. Right. That became Ad Astra. The funny thing of that is everybody read into it Way too much when talking about our studio. And they're like, oh, they make educational games now. It's like, no, no, we don't. Like, we did that for money. It says on the Steam Store page, we made this for a client and they let us put it here. And people are just like, I remember you announcing that.
- [36:47]
B
And there was a lot of description about why and how you did that.
- [36:50]
A
Yeah, exactly. No, people are like, they make educational games now. And it's like, it's because he was a teacher. And it's just like, no, that's not because we needed money because we were desperate and they're good people. So yeah, they're a good customer. So we did that. And then that, that gave us some time. And then we found this publisher called Astrological and no connection to Ad Astra and they were very excited to work with us and they funded Kaizen just off of me waving my hands around, giving them a pitch. And so, yeah, they, they funded Kaizen and we made Kaizen and it came out perfect. Yeah.
- [37:23]
B
Let's talk about the video game. What is Kaizen?
- [37:26]
A
So Kaizen is. We should drum up some sales for Kaizen while we're doing this podcast. Yeah, absolutely, it is. If I was being totally honest, right. Kaizen is a Zach, like, you know, like a Zachtronics style puzzle game. It's a lot like games we've made at Zachtronics. In fact, it is. I would say mechanically, it's a lot like what if you crossed Opus Magnum with infinifactory. But glad you said that. We were tasked with making the most literally, like when they gave us the money. They're like, you guys have to make a game that's really approachable. Like even Opus Magnum is kind of intimidating for people.
- [37:56]
B
This is the publisher.
- [37:57]
A
The publisher, yeah. And this was their. And they've changed, like kind of who runs it. And their missions changed a bunch. They used to be like a puzzle, like a thinky games, like publisher or puzzle publisher. Now they're strategy games, which are a lot more tolerant, I'd say, of complexity than like tweet indie puzzlers. But the objective we were given when we started was to make the most approachable Zachtronics style puzzle game. And so we did. And I'll be honest, like I focus on the negatives more than the positives. And so we're sitting at about a 90% on Steam and the 10% of people who thumb almost entirely. People who liked our old work and thought that this game was too easy and too Dumbed down and too short.
- [38:32]
B
I can see them. These are the people still doing Opus Magnum competitions on the Discord. I know these people.
- [38:37]
A
I love those people. No, they're great.
- [38:39]
B
I know exactly who they are.
- [38:40]
A
The Opus Magnum fans are. I feel like the people on our Discord are some of the ones who've been most open to Kaizen, weirdly. But it's the sort of casual, hardcore Zachtronics fans. There was a tweet by Notch. That one. It really cut straight to me is that. But he was just talking to some other game developers about how like. Yeah, like Kaizen kind of sucks. You know, like it only took five hours to beat. It just was getting good. It ended and it really cut straight to my heart. Not that I am friends with Notch, but.
- [39:07]
B
Yeah, that's.
- [39:08]
A
There's a lot of people like that. And I totally get it. And I honestly kind of agree. Right. And we've added like a bunch of bonus content to the game, some of which is much harder. But it's still fundamentally a game that was designed to be approachable.
- [39:20]
B
Sure.
- [39:21]
A
And so I'm talking about this as a weakness. Right. Because I see I focus like 10 times more on the negatives. In my heart, we're sitting at 50% on Steam because those 10% negatives are so much more strong than the positives. But I think the real less toxic version of interpretation of this is that I think we succeeded at actually kind of making a game that is a tutorial for all the other Zachtronics games, which is not helpful for me because I don't own all the other Zachtronics games. But. But I think we made a game that's kind of an introduction to those games that we really sanded off so many of the things that were unnecessarily complicated. And maybe we sanded off some of the stuff that was necessarily complicated also. But we really made a game that does away with a lot of the stuff that I think made it hard for people to pick up. Opus Magnum.
- [40:03]
B
Interesting. What kind of stuff are you thinking.
- [40:04]
A
Of there in Opus Magnum? One of the big parts of the game, probably one of the strengths of the game is that you build a machine that builds these molecules, but it does it in a way that's automatically pipelined. And so your program, we call it tessellation, is that you build this little program, but your program just repeats back to back to back to back to back. And so we slide them as close together as we can. So it creates this tessellating pattern of instructions. The way that we show this in game is with little lights that cycle and tell you which instructions are running. But it can be really hard when your program starts looping, and specifically when your first instructions start running, before your last instructions have finished running, people are like, what is going on? And it's like, well, it's tessellating. You need to use, like, the time stretch instruction if you want. It's like. It's actually really hard to explain. I've been unable to explain it to people. It's kind of like you just have to, like, get it. Right. Right. If you see it and you think about it, you'll probably get it. And I think a lot of people do. Right. Opus Magnum was super popular, made millions and millions of dollars, which is really good for us. Right? Well, really good for Zectronics, not, but it did very well. And so I think people are clearly able to understand that system. But also that is one of the things that kept people from picking it up and figuring it out. And so in Kaizen, you make one product at a time, right? And we still loop it. So visually, you get the satisfaction of watching it run over and over again. But sort of like, what happens in one iteration of your program has nothing to do with what happens in another iteration of your program. And it simplified a lot of stuff. It made it a lot easier to do. Another thing which people complained about Opus Magnum is that in Opus Magnum, you hit start, it runs, and then when something goes wrong, all you can do is hit stop. And then you have to remember, like, what went wrong and what do I need to change about my program? In Kaizen, you can just scrub back and forth, and you can edit your program at any point in time. And so you can just, like, kind of keep working forwards where, like, you run your program a little bit, you build the next step, you run it, you build a. And then you can slide back and forth. And so turns out, this is actually kind of confusing in a way because, like, a lot of people, I think, often think of times going forward and not also backwards. And so you need this sort of, like, weird, oh, what's the, like, Slaughterhouse 5, kind of like, loose sense of time and when things take place. But so people do struggle with that a little bit. But I think it opens up this thing where you don't have to, like, remember the state of your machine. You just, like, look at the state of your machine. And I think, honestly, I think that's maybe part of why people think the game is too easy, is that if you're good at the timeline and you're okay with time going backwards, it makes the game a lot easier. You don't have to remember where everything was when something crashed. And it makes it a lot faster to play the game. And so I think we succeeded like on these little things. But it is a much easier game. The puzzles are much easier, the tool set is simpler, the toolset is smaller. Right. It's just very straightforward game because we wanted it to be. And it's both the strength and the weakness. And so I, I think if I were to recommend games that I've made to anybody, Kaizen is absolutely the starting point. Right. Look, without a doubt it is like the best, like the most polished, the most approachable. It gets at the fun thing. Right. It lets you build machines and optimize them and compare against your friends and stuff. But yeah, it's also the weakness of it, I guess.
- [43:09]
B
Yeah, I think it's very. You talk and saying how it's a good entry to your past games, but I guess also it's the first game. I know you've published some physical games and card games and stuff as coincidence, but as the first video game from Coincidence, I guess it's also a good introduction to what you're going to pull out next. Presuming you're intending to keep working on Zach likes.
- [43:29]
A
Well, hypothetically, coincidence could do any kind of game. But I can tell you that, yeah, I'm not working on anything other than Zachtronics style puzzle games at this time. So yeah, we have a bunch of DEED up that we're working on.
- [43:41]
B
Cool. Awesome.
- [43:42]
A
It's one of the challenges of working with the publishers. You're always wondering, okay, cool. Well, we just spent all that money while we're making the game, so we're back to having no money. What do we do next? Right. And, and like Kaizen has not done well enough that we're making like mad royalties off of it, you know, so it's been kind of a. It's like, I don't know, it was like our strongest launch for like the first two weeks and then it was now like it's kind of like flattened off quite a bit. It's not, it's no Opus Magnum, that's for sure.
- [44:08]
B
Everyone's playing Silksong.
- [44:10]
A
Yeah, exactly. Right. And Seth, not that Opus Magnum was in the news for very long either, but yeah, I don't know. So we, you know, we're trying to figure out right now exactly, like what are we working on next? Where's the money for it coming from? I have no idea.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah, so the second Kaizen for a bit. So, speaking of difficulty, obviously a lot of the difficulty in all your games isn't necessarily in the initial solve, but in the optimization and the graphs, which, as in all of your titles, have completely ruined my life. For folks who haven't encountered your metrics before, can you tell us a little bit about that system and, I guess, how it drives the gameplay and how it's implemented?
- [44:43]
A
Yeah. So with SpaceChem, SpaceChem was the first commercial game in this pattern, but I had made some Flash games and stuff before that. Like, the Codex of Alchemical Engineering was a Flash game that I had on Kongregate. And Congregate has leaderboards or had leaderboards. I don't even know if you can still go to Congregate and play games anymore. Certainly not Flash games. So they had leaderboards. And so I was just like, I guess I'll hook up leaderboards to my game. And so I ended up hooking it to, like, when you solve a puzzle, how fast is it? When you solve a puzzle, how small is it? And I hooked these up to the leaderboards and people on the forums on Kongregate got pretty into it and they started. One of the weird weaknesses and strengths of the Codex of Mechanical Engineering is that I knew how to save progress in Flash because the game keeps track of which puzzles you've beaten, but it doesn't save your solution. It instead gives you a chunk of base 64 text that you can copy into a text file. I have no idea why I did that. It doesn't make any sense. Clearly I could have made it autosave. Maybe. I thought people would want to version multiple saves, but it's like I could have just added save slots. I don't know why I did it. It was a long time ago. I was just getting started programming games. I had never made web games before. Things are a little different in a web game. And so maybe I was afraid of people, like, losing their solutions if they, like, cleared their Flash cookies or something, I don't know. So I did it this other way. That was weird. But the side effect of it is that people were able to share their solutions with each other on the forums and improve on each other's solutions. And so when SpaceCam, when we were working on SpaceCam, I'm like, okay, we need a way to allow people to compare their scores against other people's, like, leaderboards. We need a way to allow people to share their Solutions with people in a way that, that lets them explain to each other as like a technical person, here's what I built, here's how it works. And so we ended up adding export to YouTube functionality where it would record a video of your solution and then upload it to YouTube. You would type your YouTube credentials in, like, plain text into the game, and then we would like, sign into YouTube in plain text and then like HTP and then upload a video. And so this is a really long time ago. We were really bad programming. We did that. And then we knew that leaderboards were bad. And so as people with a background in math, we're like, oh, we'll just do histograms instead of leaderboards. Because it's like, we don't really need to attribute the top 100 people who all copied the best solution, right? We can just show what's the distribution of scores. And so we did histograms in spacechem and they were very successful. I would say it worked really, really well. Portal 2 had briefly had histograms in it for scores because they were spacechem fans. Not that it made a lot of sense in that game, but. But ever since then, we've been doing histograms instead of global leaderboards. In our games, we have this thing where, you know, any. You can solve a puzzle any number of ways, but we can add, like, arbitrary metrics like speed or size or instruction count or, you know, area. And if you start adding metrics, people can start optimizing degenerately for those metrics and then we can make that kind of become part of the gameplay. And so we end up shipping that on all of our games now, just sort of by default, because if we were to not do that, people will complain, probably. And. And it's very cheap to add. I actually think it's less. It doesn't seem like it's as effective as it used to be. It used to be that people got really excited and everybody talked about it. I sort of don't know if, like, new players aren't responding to it in the same way or if it's just that, like, social media has kind of gone silent on a lot of topics, and so we just don't know how people are engaging with our games.
- [47:54]
B
So I actually had this as a question because you said you spoke about the evolution of this feature on the dacnet podcast recently, and you spoke about its evolution over different social media platforms. And so I was going to ask you, you know, social media has imploded. I don't know how it works anymore. Like, what does it even mean now? And so I was interested in how that had affected this. And it sounds like it has.
- [48:12]
A
I guess it's sort of just like a large hole in my sense of the world. Right. So it's like I don't even know if it's. I don't know. I have no idea. It's hard to tell what's going on. The other thing I was going to say, when we got on Steam, we added. We actually got access to proper leaderboards for SpaceCam. And so we added friend leaderboards, which our intuition was that global leaderboards are garbage, but friend leaderboards are, because you know your friends and if they're cheating, that's a friend problem, that's a you problem, not a us problem. And so a lot of this stuff is about decreasing, like the attack surface for, like, cheaters and, and stuff. So we just don't have to, like, try to like, moderate that. All of the global leaderboards for all of our games, we eventually got them in the form of our fans keeping track of the best scores. And so they are way more rigorous about inspecting people's solutions, making sure that they're not using exploits. They can spot the exploits from like a mile away. Where I would be like, ah, sure, it's f. I have no idea. So they maintain those leaderboards and I don't know if maybe they would prefer that we did it, but I don't think I could do as good of a job as they do. So, yeah, I think it works out okay in the end.
- [49:16]
B
Awesome.
- [49:16]
A
But yeah, jumping back for a second. Yeah, like, this was a thing that in our like an Opus Magnum, everybody was on Twitter, for instance, talking about, oh, they love the competing and the GIFs and stuff. And the GIF export feature. Oh, yeah, that was the other thing. So with spacecraft, we had uploaded to YouTube, which was, I guess, appropriate for the time when we were working on Infinifactory. We were going to do export to YouTube, but I couldn't get like a good angle. I was trying to do a thing where you like pick an isometric angle and render it, but it didn't really look good. And so we didn't ship an export feature. And then one of our fans mocked up a looping first person GIF of their factory running. And I took one look at it, I'm just like, holy shit, this is it, right? GIFs loop, factories loop. We can like isolate the portion of the factory and record Those frames. And it was just like I had it within like a day or two, I had completely rewritten all of our YouTube code that we didn't ship to crap out GIFs. And it was just like, this is amazing. I love. This is the coolest feature ever. And so when we did Opus Magnum, we had that feature at launch and it was in like a little branded frame that said Opus Magnum on it. And it just like blew up Twitter. Right. And people there was at one point not like, wait, so Opus Magnum came out in 2017. I want to say like a couple years ago. Like, like three, two years ago, Reddit changed something about their algorithm that caused Opus Magnum gifts to start popping up on people's feeds who had never heard of Opus Magnum. And this is from the Opus Magnum subreddit. So it's just like. And everybody like so many people showed up and they're just like, what am I looking at? What is this game? Somebody explained this to me like, I'm an idiot. On Reddit we had this huge influx of people who had just seen these GIFs and it's like, yeah, they're really cool looking. Right. And that worked really well with Opus Magnum. And we did gifs in Kaizen and just like no one posts gifts, no one cares. You know, they're not as cool looking as the Opus Magnum gifts. The Opus Magnum gifts have a lot of rotation. The pipelined repetition is very cool looking.
- [51:10]
B
I guess they're very abstract as well. Right. Like everyone you can kind of know what's going on in the kaisermon. You see a tv boom, put together or whatever.
- [51:16]
A
Oh yeah, yeah. It's not the same. Yeah. I don't know. So it's always hard to tell. It's like, was Opus Magnum just like truly the best game that I could ever play possibly make or is like are things different with how stuff spreads now? Like I have no idea. Maybe we need like upload to TikTok functionality on our games now. I probably.
- [51:32]
B
Yeah. With like yeah. Some automatically choosing the algorithmic song of the day.
- [51:36]
A
Yeah.
- [51:36]
B
Speaking of the visuals, I realized we haven't actually said what the style of the game is. But one of the things I want to ask about that so you know it's set in like at Japan manufacturing, which is a manufacturing said you've always been electronics. It's not surprising. It's a common theme for you. Shenzhen IO you played with it, you played with it in a couple of things in Last Call bbs. You said this game is kind of like a mashup of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory. So I was kind of interested in thematically. Did you arrive on this from trying to make a simpler Obelisk Magnum, or was it you wanted to make another manufacturing game? Like, where did the theme come out?
- [52:05]
A
I wanted to make a game about the theme, and then I made a game to go with the theme.
- [52:09]
B
Cool.
- [52:09]
A
Which is like, the wrong way to do it. But, like, I don't know. At this point, it's very hard for me to just come up with like, oh, this set of mechanics would be cool in the abstract because I've made so many games games. Like, I've used up all of my ideas for mechanics that came to me just as mechanics. And so the way that I make most of my games now is to, like, think of, like, a scenario or like a story and then try to come up with, like, okay, what's like a cool mechanical or systems. Kind of, like, what's. How would. How would they do computing in this world? And it's maybe not the best. Like, the best way to make a game is to have, like, a really good idea and then make that game, you know, And a lot of people do that for their first. First game as it's like something that they'd been thinking about for a long time that they made. But, like, I've made so many games that I just need to be able to just like, come up with game ideas constantly, and they have to be interesting. And so for me, the crutch I lean on is trying to evoke a narrative thing. And so when we were at so Last Call, BBS was a collection of little games, but before it was that, we were trying to make a game about manufacturing in Japan in the 80s. And so it just seems like it wasn't working and it was like, too small and too boring. And so we ended up pivoting that into 20th century food court, which was originally a game about manufacturing stuff in Japan in the 80s.
- [53:17]
B
This is actually because you said previously that Lastcore PBS was a bunch of ideas that hadn't worked. And I was like, no, there's loads of Kaizen in here between the robot making and the food Court. Okay, that makes total sense.
- [53:27]
A
That's awesome. Yeah. But then I'd been. We ended up pivoting to this weird thing where it's like, oh, it doesn't take place in the 20th century. It takes place 800 years in the future. And they're trying to recreate. It's like a parody of the 20th century. And that was what we ended up settling on. And then we bundled it up with all these other games. But then after we shipped Last Call and a couple years had passed, I just kept myself like, I kept finding myself thinking, I wish we just made the game about Japan in the 80s. Because I'm really interested in the time period. I think we can really evoke it in an interesting way in the office. We're all kind of intrigued by this. As somebody who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I don't know, just the idea of Japan was very intriguing. And obviously in real life it's like, no, it's just a bunch of people who live in a place. You're being weird by obsessing over it, but there's still this like vision of it and like watching like movies from like the 80s and stuff and it just like really evokes a thing. And so, I don't know, just like wanting to make that game and wanting to like explore that story and just like focus on this time period and you know, like people make historical TV shows all the time and historical movies. And so it's the same kind of thing, right? It's like they're not always accurate, but just kind of evoking the idea of a time period in a place is like a thing that is sometimes really interesting to do. You get to explore aesthetics of the. Of things. I mean, I. In some ways you're kind of like reducing real life to like this weird Disney version of it whenever you do like historical, you know, I don't know. Like historical romances are about this like all the time. It's like, what if we turned like the 1700s into a time of like beautiful, sexy people and not just everything smelling like shit like it probably was in real life, you know, I don't know. That's what we do with history is we turn it into different things. And so. So just really coming back to this and wanting to like, wanting to make this game and kind of geek out on it a little bit. And so when it came time to pitch some games to Astra, this was one of them and they liked the idea and it kind of fit with what they were thinking. You know, it's. They're backed by a non profit, like a math nonprofit. And so they need stuff that's kind of like family friendly, right? And so this kind of hesitate to use the word cozy, but like this kind of cozy story about like a guy going to work at a job and. And it's, you know, maybe there's like a little bit of, like light romance. Maybe not. It's just like very cozy and safe and nobody's going to feel weird about putting this in a school.
- [55:39]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [55:39]
A
So they just. They like that. We liked that. And so it just kind of all aligned.
- [55:43]
B
That's awesome.
- [55:44]
A
Yeah. But then it was originally going to be a 3D game. I had no idea what the gameplay was. I'm like, you're going to build products and I don't know anything else. I knew it was going to be about building products probably out of cubes because we wanted to make it physical. The original idea for so 20th century food court is about assembling stuff, but you don't assemble it spatially. It's almost like when we were developing the game, we talked about it being the algebra of products, which is cup plus purple soda equals cup with purple soda. And then you can put a lid on it and stuff. And it's like this representation of adding these things together and coming up with, you add two symbols, you get a new symbol. But it's like every puzzle has its own little set of symbols and how they transform when you manipulate them with these tools. So it's actually not spatial at all. It's just like symbolic manipulation. It just looks like food. And that was originally what we were going to do for building products. Like, oh, like a keyboard, musical keyboard is like a plastic body plus like 8 keys plus 4 black keys and like, you know, or something like it's like an algebraic thing. But it, like, wasn't. It was hard.
- [56:46]
B
It's hard to follow that logic through to a lot of things. Right?
- [56:49]
A
It is. And like a lot of. Of stuff hides what's in it. That was actually why we settled on food is because food, with the exception of, like, burritos, food almost always shows you what it is. Like a burger. You can look at the side. I mean, I love, like burgers and puzzle games because you look at the side, you can see all the stuff stacked up on it. And so food exposes itself in a way that most things don't. So when we came back to this topic, it's like, okay, this needs to be. Somehow we need to be able to, like, show you what you're building. The idea of, like, we're going to make stuff out of blocks. And originally I was thinking it'd be 3D, but again, 3D has that problem where you don't know what's inside and there's like too many dimensions and too much, like too much freedom. Honestly. And so that was how we settled that. Like, okay, you're going to make pictures of things. Like, we'll kind of like take all the products and put them at an angle where you can kind of see all their components that go into them. And it feels like assembling electronics. But, like, obviously things are. They don't have any, like, inside. You know, you build a vcr, it's just flat that. Right. So it's like, obviously most of the magic of a VCR is on the inside, not the outside, but we're going to kind of reduce it to the outside and just assemble a picture of it. And so that was. That was the compromise we landed on. But originally we were thinking it was going to be like a 3D block building game or something with machines. And it didn't end up like that at all.
- [57:58]
B
On that setting of style stuff. And you're talking about being 3D. One of the things that. I mean, and I may be misremembering some past electronic games, but it seems to me there's a lot more animated art and voice acting than previous games. Is that all a consequence of the publisher or is that just a stylistic change? Like, I'm used to the story being delivered via emails. Right. Like, this is a very different delivery.
- [58:16]
A
Mechanism just in Shenzhen, really, That's the only one with emails, really.
- [58:20]
B
Exapunk.
- [58:21]
A
Well, that one has, like, people come to your door and you talk to them.
- [58:24]
B
Okay.
- [58:25]
A
I don't even think they're actually emails. In Exapunks, there's a chat room, there's an AI that talks to you, but that's like in a little window that pops up and then there's like, cutscenes of people coming. They're simple, right? They're just a picture of a person, but they come and talk to you. And those are fully voiced in exapunks. There's a lot of voice acting in exapunks.
- [58:43]
B
I need to do some replays. Here is what we're learning.
- [58:46]
A
Well, Shenzhen I.O. we made Shenzhen I.O. in four months. I don't even know how. We can't do anything in less than a year now. Kaizen took us 18 months when it was supposed to take 12. Right. Like, we've gotten very slow and, like, kind of overdoing it on the art, I think, a little bit. But yes, Shenzhen was like four months start to finish. I mean, we spent time adding extra content, but it was very quick. But. But the extent of story artwork is that it's like we have little postage Stamp size portraits of the characters. Right. And it's all in emails and stuff. And so it was very cheap. No voice, obviously there's. It's such a minimal game. With Exopunks we started with. So there's that. So Opus Magnum we had like cutscenes where there's talking heads that like they're on little portraits and they like pop in and talk to each other. So that was a little bit. But still no voice. But that was still like a little bit of an elevation. There's like backgrounds of rooms that they're in and characters talking. And then in Xapunks, we did a little bit of voice acting and we found that we actually got a really good return on voice acting because it's like, I don't know, like the voice acting in Xpunks was probably like $20,000. Right. And so for a game whose budget is closer to like a million, $20,000 is nothing. And I think it really. Players responded pretty well to it. We were able to get good performances out of these, like real actors who can do like real voice acting. And it just kind of elevated the game a little bit. And so everything after that we did voice acting. Mobius Front, which no one played, has fully voiced cutscenes in that. Eliza's a visual novel that's fully voiced. Like tons of text. It's like a fully voiced visual novel. Last fall didn't have any because it didn't really make sense to put. It's like an old computer. Like it doesn't not gonna have a lot of voice acting. And the games are weird.
- [60:20]
B
Some spooky noises in Ex Pug Bugger. Or have you how you pronounce it?
- [60:24]
A
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The forbidden path is what we call it.
- [60:27]
B
Oh, there we go. That's a better way.
- [60:28]
A
Yeah, yeah. So we had all these tools in our toolbox. When we went back to do Kaizen, we're like, oh yeah, definitely. We'll do voice acting for this, do voice acting cutscenes. I think we went overboard a little bit with some of the art and the cutscenes. They all take place in places. But that was also the point of the game, right. Is that we wanted to capture this sense of place. Like our artist who did all the story art was in Japan, drawing and painting old factories and stuff like that. Like these buildings still from the era that still stand. And so. So I think for a game that one of its kind of big strengths is that it's almost a little bit like a fake travel log in my Mind, I don't go on a lot of trips internationally because it's expensive and they're hard to put together and it's hard to see stuff even when you do go places. I think that these games are kind of a little bit like. It's like going on a vacation a little bit. And so, yeah, we can take you back in time, too, which is really hard to go on vacation back in time. I always think that'd be the coolest thing. That's like. I'm not a guy with a lot of fantasy, but I fantasized about being able to go on vacation back in time. I think aside from the part where everything, like, gets you killed and smells like. Right.
- [61:28]
B
If you're, like, ephemeral.
- [61:29]
A
Yeah, that would be, like, the coolest thing. You know, blend in, don't let them know. Don't, you know, here's money for the time period, you know, like, it would just be like, the coolest thing ever to go. I'd probably be too afraid to go on a trip back in time, though. I know. There's so many places that I'd be afraid to go in the world. Now.
- [61:44]
B
I'm trying to imagine what the Zach. What the Zach. Like, mechanics all set in this.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah. Yeah. But in some ways, like, that's what Kaizen is. Is like, take a trip back to the 80s, you know, and you get to see some stuff that looks like the place and.
- [61:55]
B
Yeah.
- [61:56]
A
I don't know. See the food. Yeah.
- [61:58]
B
Nice.
- [61:59]
A
That's why so many cutscenes and Kaizen take place in, like, bars and stuff.
- [62:02]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that also fit in perfectly. You know, you said you were worried about romanticizing and whatever, but I think it does a very good job. I mean, the characters will also just outright talk about, you know, being normal people, but I think does a very good job of just portraying playing working life and what schedules were like and stuff. And, yeah, it was very evocative on the technical side. So I believe traditionally you mentioned C and that I think traditional games have been like your own framework of SDL2. Is that still the case in the Coincidence era?
- [62:28]
A
Yeah. So with SpaceChem, we started using XNA because it was 2009 and that was the thing to do, so we started using xna, but really quickly we realized that that's not going to work on anything other than Windows to X. Done. And we have Linux fans, we have Mac fans, and so we switched to writing our own. Turns out XNA wasn't doing that much anyway. And so we made our own version of XNA, basically, that used SDL. And so we did that for SpaceChem. We used that again on Ironclad Tactics. But we started. So XNA is all just like, immediate draw calls. Like, the sprite batch is like the thing they call it. I think that's what they call it there too, because we still call our sprite batch, but it's basically like, you know, you turn a bunch of 2D drawing calls into, like, a dynamic mesh and then you draw it using the gpu. And so we did that as, like, our XNA replacement. That's how XNA works under the hood, I'm pretty sure. But one of our programmer, this guy Keith that I've worked with for a very long time, he had this idea, or it's like, well, what if we, like, built like, a scene graph dynamically every. I don't even know where he got the idea. He was doing a lot of, like, Haskell and like, functional programming. And so it's like, like, what if you did graphics as, like, functional programming, where instead of it, like, having the side effect of drawing, you just, like, return, like an object that gets, like, plugged into a tree, that gets returned, turned into an object and gets plugged into a tree further up. And so you have this, like, you make all these function calls and you end up with a tree that was constructed of things that all get drawn after you've built the tree. And so this was called, like, scenes, like a scene graph, but rather than like a scene graph. Like, a lot of scene graphs, like in Unity has a scene graph too. A lot of them do, but you create an object and. And it stays there. So you create an object once and then it stays there until you remove it or change it, and it just gets drawn every frame. And so we were generating a scene graph every frame, which is nice because you don't have to keep track of, like, the state. It's just like, oh, God, like, what's in the scene graph? When did I last update it? Whose job is it to remove this or update it? Like, these are all things that I don't want to. These are all things that create bugs in software, right? If you create an object and you don't know who is in charge of it, that's a bug, you know, just waiting to happen. So by returning a scene graph, building a new scene graph, every frame, it's kind of like drawing your game every frame. You always know stuff's only going down if you want it. Right now, it's kind of like an immediate mode thing, except you're generating a scene graph to describe it all. And so we did this spacechem started off being like XNA and then turned into this scene thing. And we had this horrible hybrid where some stuff is drawn with these scene graphs and some of it is drawn immediately. Ironclad Tactics was drawn entirely, entirely with scenes, and so entirely with this scene graph thing. And two of the educational games we made were same thing, entirely done with scenes. The performance on it was terrible. For making little 3D games, it was actually. We spent a lot of time drawing text because we had to assemble these huge scene graphs for text. And we tried to build, oh, this is an object that describes a block of text. We don't have to have a bunch of little characters in the scene graph, which is one text block thing. And it's just like. I don't know, it just kind of got out of hand. And then around that time was when Unity was picking up. So this is like 2013. So for one of our educational games, we were like, should we. I feel like it must have been like our other programmer who was like, way more into using tools that other people were using. So we had two programmers, Keith and Colin. And so Keith was really into making his own weird shit. That's like the guy doing Haskell. And Colin was just like. He worked with me on Vizio and he liked C and he was very into using tools that other people were using that are like things that are contemporary. And so we had these. They used to argue about programming and stuff because they had these two totally different philosophies. And so I had to have been call and said we should use Unity for a game. So we did, and it was messy because we didn't know how to use Unity. And you just get all these objects created all over the place. But we made a game, we shipped it, and best of all, we were able to put it. When Amplify switched From Android to iOS, we were able to just make an iOS build and it was easy, whereas trying to port all of our C games into iOS was impossible. We ended up actually having to, in order to port our C educational games to iOS, we made it so that we could host our engine in Unity and then kick off a build. We made an object that gets dumped into the scene that dynamically renders itself using all of our old scene graph stuff. And the performance on it was awful. But we saw with Unity, we're like, ok, this is really cool. You can make it build and run it anywhere, which for us has always been really hard. We did infinifactory, a 3D game in Unity. I think that's maybe part of the reason why it was 3D, is that we felt really confident making a 3D game because we had a 3D engine that we were already using for 2D games. And so we did. And I made TIS 100 in Unity using their at the time, new UI system. And the thing we realized is that the tooling on Unity is definitely. You just end up with stuff in the scene and you don't know how it got there or what it's doing there. If you change a file. I was always really afraid of accidentally changing a file. And even though we had everything in text mode and could diff it and check it in, you still don't really know what all the changes are. You make a change, it changes like a million lines in this huge text file that has all your shit in it. You don't really know what you're changing. And so there is the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what's happening with the game. We had some build reproducibility issues, where sometimes textures would get detached. Every time we'd make a new build of the game, I'd have to make sure that one of the characters didn't turn purple because for some reason the texture reference kept getting messed up. I still have no idea why. I still have to be on the lookout for that whenever I make a build of Infinite Factory. Yeah, so there's that. It was expensive to use Unity, the licensing fees on it were quite high and they were switching to stuff that was even higher. And then the big thing that made Keith refuse to ship another game in Unity is that when we got to the end of Infinifactory development, it was slow. And so he was trying to figure out how to profile it and making it faster. And it was almost impossible. And we're not the first people to run into this with Unity. The thing that these people say about Unity, Unity makes it really easy to start a project and really hard to finish project. And it was true for us. TIS 100 had abysmal performance. The performance was so bad that a developer from the Unity team contacted me because game programmers love my games and was like, hey, can I take a look at your source code? I can help you make your game run better since it's a Unity game and I work at Unity, etc. I sent it to him and he's just like, yeah, you could try capping the frame rate to 30 frames a second, that was the only thing they could think of, right? Because I wasn't doing anything wrong. It's just that their UI system was really, really inefficient for some reason. I have no idea why. And the performance was abysmal. And it was a game that was trying to look like dos. It was crazy, right? Between those two experiences, Keith refused to ever use Unity again. And I was like, at that point, I don't know, I was like, how could we possibly make a game without Unity? The tooling is so good. I don't know. I was just. When somebody takes you hostage.
- [69:06]
B
Stockholm syndrome.
- [69:08]
A
Yeah, I was Stockholm syndrome. And using Unity because we had built up some tooling in it and it was just like, I was so used to it. But he's like, no, we're not going to use Unity anymore. And that was when I went to work at Valve. So I actually ended up using Unity at Valve before they killed Unity at Valve because they have their own engine that they want people using instead of Unity. But when I came back from Valve to work with Keith again, he had spent like the 10 months that I was at Valve writing his own game engine. And it was based on Casey Miratori's stuff with, like, the Handmade Hero.
- [69:35]
B
Okay, cool.
- [69:36]
A
Writing a game engine from scratch in C that, like, you don't need anybody else's shit, you can just write your own game engine from scratch in C, presumably using sdl, but he had implemented live reloading in C and all these things. And so Keith had watched all this. And then Keith was working in C, but I told him, there's no way in hell I'm using C or C. We built up our own version of that in C. We have live reloading in C. We'd switched entirely to immediate mode stuff. So no more scene grass. You just call draw and it just draws something. And we switched to all immediate mode GUIs. The way you do a button is you draw a button and then the function that draws a button returns true if the user clicked on that button right then and there. And so it's all like an immediate. It's hard to describe immediate GUI because, like, I can't show code while we're talking about it, but if you look it up, you'll see that, like, the flow of the program is also the flow of drawing. Your UI is also the flow of logic for it, right? Like, you can like the idea that, like, a button, the function that draws a button returns true or false based on whether they're clicking the button right now, I think that makes it obvious. Right? Yeah. And so this was for. Our games have so much UI in them, like ti 100, all UI. Right. That this paradigm works really well for the kind of stuff we do. And I was worried about like, oh, is it hard to dynamically lay out stuff? It's like, no, you just do a little bit of math and then you put it where it needs to be. When you draw text, you just measure the text and you can lay stuff out wherever you want. And so we. That's how we wrote games. That's how we did Opus Magnum. Everything beyond it. When we went to Coincidence, we managed to get a license to keep using our old, like, engine code. Basically, we. We don't really have an engine. We just copy the last project and delete all the game code out of it and then use that as the starting point. And we've done that like, probably like 10 times now to get to Kaizen. But that's how we write all of our games now. And it's. It is like, superior to anything we've ever done before. Right. I guess. We haven't shipped a 3D game since we started doing this, so maybe that's a little telling. Right. Is that we. We like, kind of have 3D support, but we've never actually used it and.
- [71:32]
B
Right.
- [71:33]
A
But it's like, I don't know, like, most of the game ideas they make don't make sense in 3D. Like a lot of them are like kind of CAD experiences. We. We have 3D in last call BBS. I take that back. In Ship wizard, we have a little 3D visualization of all the, like, pads and the silicon, like, of your. The integrated circuits you're building. It's this little 3D view. And we wrote a software renderer for that. Like, we're manually sorting all the polygons. I mean, we wanted it to feel like an old. Kind of like an old shitty 3D thing from like the like 90, early 90s. And so, yeah, we wrote a soft, like, I mean, we're not like rasterizing it ourselves. We're drawing the quads with our stuff, but it's like kind of like a software render kind of thing thing. And that's the only time we've shipped 3D in recent years, but that's what we do now.
- [72:11]
B
Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, I guess I was going to ask if the nature of the engine constrains what you're making, but I guess it's More the other way around. That the engine is what it is. Because that's the games you like making, right?
- [72:22]
A
Yeah, exactly. And like, if we wanted to make a 3D game, hypothetically, we can. Right. And we just have to, you know, we have like depth, buffer support and stuff in our engine. Like, Keith added it hypothetically for the future. Future. But we've never shipped anything with it. And so I don't. But again, like, it's. None of the stuff I have teed up is 3D, just because we don't. We don't have any 3D office artists in the office. And it's. Everything gets really expensive when you start doing it in 3D. Right. Like, it's pretty easy to hack stuff together in 2D if you're making games about programming.
- [72:52]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess to switch back to the business of making games for a minute. So I think a lot of game developers would find the idea of rebranding, especially from a niche where you're so well known, into a new one quite a daunting task. How did that go? Did you manage to bring all your audience with you? Has everyone found you again?
- [73:09]
A
Oh, I have no idea. Probably not. I don't know. I was always kind of skeptical that most people don't know who Zachtronics is. Right. People have heard of Opus Magnum maybe, but they have no idea who made it. And I think that's true for most games that I think, like, as a person in the games industry, of course we know everybody who makes everything, but I think gamers in general are a little bit bit more selective about, like, which game creators they know about. I think a lot of people know, like, the name Blizzard.
- [73:35]
B
Sure, right.
- [73:36]
A
There's some game studios that everybody knows, but I don't think we're not Blizzard, you know, we never were. So I think that most people probably don't pay attention that way. Honestly, I think most people, they would just see Opus Magnum pop up like on their Twitter timeline or whatever, and that's how they learn about it and play it. And they never know what a Zachtronics is at any point. And so I. I don't think it hurts us there. And I think all the people who were into Zectronics enough to know us are probably like subscribed to our mailing list and have ways to tell them that we have a new studio. And like, obviously that's not true because I still get emails all the time at Zachtronics for people being like, oh, I hope you make another game one day. And it's like, yeah, we did. It's out now. We have a new studio. And they're like, oh, wow, cool. And it's like, okay, I failed in that department. So I think obviously the switchover has not been perfect. But honestly, we didn't really, like, we didn't really have a choice. If I could have seamlessly kept using the name, like, I probably would have. Even though I'm not. Like, I think it's embarrassing. Right. Like, I literally came up with it when I was as a child.
- [74:30]
B
You have also just launched a physical game called Zach Attack, though this does have to be said.
- [74:35]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, I still put my name on stuff, you know, and we've been very forward with, like, my name and the marketing stuff because it's like, I don't know, it's like, that is my name.
- [74:44]
B
Yeah.
- [74:44]
A
But we were given the opportunity to continue using the Zachtronics name, but it did not make sense.
- [74:50]
B
An expensive opportunity, I imagine.
- [74:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. An insulting, expensive opportunity. I don't know.
- [74:56]
B
Yeah.
- [74:56]
A
It's my name. Right. And so I feel like if you don't own something, you don't really control it. It's like, okay, unless we own the name Zachtronics, I don't want to borrow it. Because then it's just going to be. It's going to cost more in the future if things go well, you know, and it's just like it. We're a new studio, we have a new ethos, we run things differently. You know, Zachtronics really was me, top down, dictating everything. That's not what coincidence is. Right. Coincidence is everybody does whatever they want. Sometimes I dictate stuff, sometimes I don't. Right, right. In 10 years from now, maybe people will know coincidence. Like, they knew Zachtronics. I have no idea. It doesn't. Whatever. You just got to make the games. Right. The games are what draw people in. If Kaizen had a weak response, it's not because people didn't know where Zachtronics went or that it's a Zachtronics game. Right. It's because Kaizen didn't like, shock people into buying it from, like, either changes in, you know, the game wasn't good enough, or tastes have changed or who knows? Right? Silksong. It's all Silksong's fault.
- [75:49]
B
Yeah. So I don't want to do the horrible thing of asking you what's coming next, but we've established that Kaizen got some ideas from article bbs, which is very important to me because in terms of your noted previous ideas that didn't see the light of day, I am dying to know, are we getting submarines? Are submarines happening under coincidence?
- [76:06]
A
Oh, no. That game, I don't know. We built it. It didn't work. I actually really have zero desire to make anything that's like a survival crafting game game at all. Especially now it's been done to death. When we started that game in 2016, that was like kind of a fresh genre. Everybody does that now. Every game is like that every night. That's not true because there's lots of balatro like games too.
- [76:27]
B
But sometimes the survival games have balatro like games in them.
- [76:31]
A
Yeah, sure. I don't know. This is the thing I wrestle with a lot still. If I was making just buckets of money just by doing the thing that came naturally to me, this would be really easy, right? Because I'd just be like, I'm just going to keep doing the thing that comes naturally. But like, the stuff that comes naturally to me has always been good, but not good enough. And so I'm always wondering, it's like, oh, should I be doing something different? Should I be mixing in different stuff? And even when we talk about in the office, a lot of times it's like, well, how do we Kaizen did okay. How do we make a better game? And then the answer is always like, oh, we could add more mechanics from other popular games. And it's like at one point I got kind of fed up with it. It's like, no, why are we not focused on trying to just make the best games in our style that we can? Why is the answer always that to make a better game it has to be less like, what we do and have been successful doing. And the reality is that I'm constantly torn over this and I'm never like, so like, I'm not so full of myself that I think that, like, oh, I have this vision that needs to be realized. It's like, no, I'm just kind of making games over and over again. We're so far past the point where I'm making like my dream game or whatever. But like, at the same time, like, I'm not to a fault. I have to like, do my own thing. I'm just not interested in stuff that doesn't, like, by my ego in that way or whatever. And so this is what. This is why I'm not cut out for software. I think to make like real good software where you actually have to be like, really low ego and like, you have to not care about what it ends up being like creatively, because you're just trying to do a job and you just need to do the best version of the job. And like, I wish I was that person, but I'm not, right? Like, I. A big part of what I do is. Is being creative, right? I spent a lot of time thinking, like, oh, like, it's too bad I couldn't fit in at Valve because I'd be making a lot more money if I was at Valve. But, like, the reality is that the reason I couldn't be at Valve is because the opportunities for creative are, like, pretty thin, right? Like, they make a game game and it has. Their games are bigger than my games, right? But, like, way more people work on those games. And so the amount of creative input you get to have on a project like that is just a lot lower. And if I think back to all the people I worked with at Valve, they were all people. Their strength was not unbridled creativity, right? Their strength was that they're all extremely competent game developers, right? But me, I'm not extremely competent. I'm extremely creative, right? And so that's what the game is for me, right? Like, that's what this is. I think it's so obvious at this point that it's like, I just have to, like, accept it. Accept it, right? That, like, my strength is creativity and putting that into practice in like this weird kind of field. And so those are the kinds of things I want to do, right? And so, yeah, you're asking about what's coming next. Right now I am working on a bunch of puzzle games because that's the thing I can do. And I know that at least to some degree, it'll be received well by people. It just works. Like, you just have to do the stuff that works and it's an opportunity to be really creative while I'm doing it. I love the, like, systems, I think are very interesting. We, the games we have coming up are experiments. Like, if you liked that kind of experimental nature of Last Call, like, our next two games are going to be smaller, rougher and like experimental systems, like exploring, like, what are like new. I want to say, hesitate to say models of computation, but what are new kinds of systems that we haven't really done before that explore this kind of computational puzzle space, right? When that's. Yeah, because that's what I like doing.
- [79:34]
B
Definitely my favorite bit about Last Call, like, the forbidden part was awesome. That was like a very cool.
- [79:39]
A
How would you feel about a bigger version of that, like, a better. A better system that's less, like, random and, like, more deep and absolute dream.
- [79:47]
B
Absolute dream.
- [79:48]
A
Yeah. That's. That's not what we're working on. But I. But.
- [79:50]
B
But you should.
- [79:52]
A
I'm working with a writer on one of our upcoming projects who I was a fan of many years ago. And I don't want to announce. I've never talked about this with anybody, but. So I'm not going to announce too many specifics. But I'm working with a writer. Writer. And so he's very creative also. We started working together. I'm like, pitch me a bunch of ideas for video games. And he's like, I've never made a video game before. And I'm like, this is the kind of video games we make. These are how, like, our puzzles work. Pitch me a bunch of games that work with this. So he pitched me 12 ideas for games. They're really good. Right. And so. So one of them I could imagine being a kind of forbidden path. What if that was, like, expanded into, like, a real game and stuff? And so why I'm tempted to make that one. So you saying that you like that game a lot makes me think, like, oh, maybe there's something to that. Maybe I should do that.
- [80:39]
B
Yeah. I don't know if Cellular Automata hits what was going on there. But, like, Ultimate Models of Computation was. When you said that, I was just straight away where my head went. I just thought that was a really good example of that. That's very exciting.
- [80:49]
A
Yeah. It's not that often you get to interact with systems about stuff that grows.
- [80:53]
B
Yeah.
- [80:54]
A
Right. Like, obviously, like, cellular. Like, it is cellular Automata. But I. I think it's, like, not. I'm not like, a. A. I think, like, some people are, like, kind of math nerds that, like, really like cellular automata. And it's like, for me, the thing that's really interesting is, like, what kind of information do you need for something that grows? That was where Forbidden. Forbidden Path, I think, is actually one of my favorite little designs because it came from years of trying to think of how to make a game about cellular differentiation. Because I've always been really fascinated with the idea of, like, how is it that a person, like, grows into the shape of a person. Person. Right. It's unbelievable. It doesn't make sense. Right. I think some people might think, oh, well, that means that it can't be understood. It's like, no, it can be understood. Like, I want to understand it. Like, I want to. I want to make A game that distills that so people can understand that concept of how things can grow into these complicated shapes. And I. And the more I learned about it, cellular differentiation is just so weird and it still doesn't make sense. How. Just so chemical gradients, like, how does a chemical gradient turn into like this beautiful specimen of a man that you're talking to right now? You know, it doesn't make sense. But like, I don't know, like that's. I think like that's a good prompt, right? It's like magic, right? That's the thing. I always. I feel like I always fall short of it. Kaizen certainly falls short of it. Maybe that's the problem. But I want to make a game that's about an engineering system that's entirely fictional. So it's like magic or something, right? Like, but like. And people, a lot of people want to make a game like what if magic was real? But they always fall back into like game design stuff where it's just like, oh, you'll just. It's like making spells. And Skyrim, it's like, oh, it's an area spell and it does fire. But. But it's like that's not really systematic. Right. And so that's the thing that I always want to do. And that's been the inspiration of a lot of my games. Like one of my very first flash games, the Bureau of Steam Engineering. But that was like a pretty like steampunk played straight kind of thing. But before that I was like, what if there was like magic? What if you had like magical Steam mix? You know, I'd seen somebody made like a role playing game setting that was about that. And so I wanted to like, how does magic work if it's real? And that's always been like a thing that I kind of keep coming, coming back to these systems that are. They're not real systems, but they have the. Believe the verisimilitude of like a real system, like an engineer.
- [82:57]
B
There's a system of logics and rules. It's just beyond.
- [83:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so anything like that is like the ultimate thing that I'm like chasing after with a lot of these games. And I almost always fall short of it because it's really hard to make stuff that's completely made up, yet somehow system systematically functions as if it was real and coherent. Like it's. It's hard to. I don't know, it's just hard to carve out those spaces. Right. But like that's. That's always the dream Right.
- [83:19]
B
Yeah. Well, I think that is a fantastic place to end, Zach. Thank you so much. If folks want to and they're not already on your channels and they want to hear about these upcoming games, where's the best place for them to go?
- [83:30]
A
Oh God, I don't know anymore. Right. And social media is dead. You can follow us on. I think really the best way is we have a. We have an email newsletter. If you go to coincidence games, you can sign up for our newsletter and that's the best one because I, I only send out stuff to it because I have to like, I have to pay. I've actually gotten it down to a dollar whenever I want to send out an email. It used to cost a lot more, but we self host and do a bunch of stuff with that. But I only send out emails when there's earnestly something exciting going on, right? Like something to buy, something cool coming out soon. I don't spam it. And so that's the best way to find out about stuff because like you'll be guaranteed to get the email, right? Whereas if like if you follow us on Twitter or Blue sky, you might see something, but you might not. And you might see a lot of other nasty shit if you're on Twitter too. So whenever I log on to Twitter to check our Twitter, it's always just like what is any of this stuff? Right. I think our email is the best way to go at this point, especially for like your audience. Right? Like email is. I love email. I don't know. Do you love email? I love email.
- [84:31]
B
I am a big fan of a newsletter. I do like a newsletter.
- [84:33]
A
Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of like people in the like the kind of program y tech space have sweet switch back to loving like email newsletters because like.
- [84:39]
B
Give me a newsletter RSS feed, you know, like.
- [84:41]
A
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get them real. I love email because it's kind of like an RSS reader without having to check an RSS reader. It's stuff comes to you and it's like the stuff you want. You know, usually somehow I got subscribed to like it's like an indus like a. Oh God. It's like pipes and valves, like the pipes and valves industry newsletter. And so I get all this stuff.
- [85:00]
B
About it seems useful for you to be honest.
- [85:02]
A
No, because it's like really hyper specific about pipes, you know, and it's. Yeah, it's very weird. And so I guess aside from stuff like when you get signed up for stuff like that by accident, big fan of email. Though, do you zero inbox?
- [85:14]
B
No, never. Oh, no, I'm a demon. My inbox would.
- [85:18]
A
No, no.
- [85:19]
B
I don't have a single email account that's got like less than a hundred thousand emails on it.
- [85:22]
A
Oh, no. Well, I mean, you can archive them. It's just. How many are in your inbox?
- [85:26]
B
I don't like to. It has to. If it has to happen as process or it's not getting done, like, just naturally.
- [85:31]
A
Yeah, don't listen to them. Everybody listening to this podcast? Zero inbox.
- [85:34]
B
No, that's it. Everyone's unsubscribe, subscribed.
- [85:35]
A
It's dumb.
- [85:36]
B
I've killed it.
- [85:36]
A
Yeah. Zero inboxing is the best. One of the best things I've ever done in my life. Right. It's just. It's so. Yeah, it's like version control. I had a background. I had 10 episodes of my podcast. And you'd be shocked at how many indies came on. And we're just like, what's version control? Or like, oh, we should use version control, but we don't. We just live edit files on our web server. And it's just like.
- [85:55]
B
I mean, this could be a whole other podcast. Because, like, version control in games is horrible, though. Like, it is. Is cursed. Like, it's. The options are all bad. What you git? Lfs, like, what are you. Are you locking file? Like, it's all the bind when you get to.
- [86:09]
A
We just use git. Well, I guess if you have a lot of people, we have really small teams. Right.
- [86:13]
B
So how are you handling big binaries? Okay, fair enough.
- [86:18]
A
PNGs, like, I don't know, they're like a couple megabytes. That's not that big anymore. We actually did well. We used to use BitBucket. We were on their free plan. They dropped their limit limit to like 1 gigabyte for like, all of your repos or something. To add it together can take up one gig of space. So it really seems like they're trying to like, kill their free plan off, but. So that was a problem. But as long as you don't have, like big caps on it. Like, our games are actually kind of small. Like, source code's tiny. We only upload, like, compressed audio. We only upload PNGs and stuff. We have other backup solutions for, like, all the source files.
- [86:52]
B
Yeah.
- [86:52]
A
And so they're not.
- [86:53]
B
But you imagine like a 3D unity game. Like, they're punished by git.
- [86:57]
A
Right. Like, I guess. I don't know. We. We. Infinifactory was all in Git. Right. That was actually like quite a few people. Yeah, because, like, the assets are usually not that. As long as you're not, like, I don't know, PNGs. Like, it's a good compression scheme, right. And, like, you can do other, you know, stuff if you want. I don't know. Like, yeah, we did png. I don't know, it was. I mean, that was not like a super high res. Like, if you're making a game that installs and is like 150 gigabytes, like, yeah, you have problems. Right. But use like Perforce or whatever, everybody manages. It's fine. Right? Like, that's what I used. When I was at Valve, they had Perforce. When I was at Microsoft, they had Perforce. It's fine. You don't need git. Like, I don't know, like it's. Yeah, branching sucks. How much branching do people really do? I don't know. I mean, I guess less when it sucks, but people manage.
- [87:34]
B
Apparently not game devs. Yeah, not as much as they should. Alrighty. Well, thank you so much, Zach. Thanks for joining us today.
- [87:41]
A
Yeah, thanks.