An Engineer Ranks All The ZACHTRONICS Game 

First half? Got a real brainiach here. I'm lost after the third level

Facts.

@@Hyperlooper Literally me in Exapunks, still don't get it.

I've played most of them, but I think the only one I completed is Infinifactory. It both never gets as challenging as the rest and is short and doesn't overstay it's welcome. A lot of the other games either get really hard, or are so easy that it's not fun anymore, and are long enough that I feel like I got enough and move on. I think I'm going to boot Exapunks back up. I remember the style of it being so good, but I haven't touched it since release.

worst part is when you come back to one after years you have no idea what's going on and you're already in the deep end it's just so hard to pick up again. all of mine are at like 80% complete

Ā edditing games in its files, always fun.

Ofc the man who created a game which is literally just assembly code asks you to edit files to change settings lmao

@@lilyofluck371 To be fair it was the early beta of the game so it makes sense.

@@GodOfReality I know, but any other dev would probably just say, "sorry, not a feature yet" lol

@@lilyofluck371 yeah thats super cool

From what I recall, that same interview also mentioned that he looked at the working hours and salaries, got horrified, tried it anyway for a bit, got horrified even more by the conditions and rushed back into freelance programming. Mostly because, all jokes aside, he had an idealized view of teaching and that view got shattered the moment he looked back at it seriously.

Just imagine the dude creating these games is your teacher. You'll get some according to him simple task and just absolutely despair over it together with your classmates.

@@Maddinhpws Judging by what I've played of Opus Magnum, he knows how to manage difficulty curves, so I'd be pretty stoked about having him as a teacher.

@@TheNextDecade244 He probably taught computer science to more people through his games than he would have as a teacher

@@TheNextDecade244 Ah, go figure. The USA cannot keep talent in teaching.

I was the 129th person to beat Opus Magnum. Unfortunately I lost the certificate but I've still got the patch.

@@DoshDoshington Rather Shocked they did certs for people who beat it, Got into Opus Magnum trying to 100% the games, and got stuck on TIS-100 and took a break trying to beat MHRD (if you never heard of it, it has you build components from NAND up to CPU) Both of which broke my spirit . Now I feel I must try again. Heard of the games when I tried Minecraft alpha on the Mojang site. But it's amazing to find out you helped create a level that got into the main game for Spacechem. Loving the coverage of more niche games between bursts of Factorio torture.

​@@LarryGumballiirc MHRD is a direct rip off of the NAND to Tetris course isn't it?

Frozen Synapse also has a good soundtrack.

Gove me the Sim City 3000 OST or give me death!

Last Call BBS is KIND OF like this. There's an interface where you can plug in a javascript file and add your own games to the BBS server, and I've seen a few folks make puzzle games using it, including a sokoban game where you write programming for the player

The final game is just a link to Visual Studio Code, and the manual is an actual x86 Assembly Reference Document

Zachtronics actually already released this, its called Zach-Like, and it is mostly a collection of PDF files ... not a game.

pretty sure that's impossible to do with the factorio mod API, one of the biggest limitations is that you can't really add new types of things.

Zachtronics mechanics in Factorio? It almost feels like a sin to think about the infernal potential this has.

@@artey6671 id play it

I think someone very recently made a proof of concept mod like that called FactorioChem ?

@@artey6671 I would love a game where you make the production lines and make the machines which work on the production line

He always could, I just don't think his other games were as successful as his puzzles, both design wise and commercially, so he had to choose: another niche puzzle game for the fans or something new and risky. I tried them. They are alright. A lot of people seem to think that too. Eliza stands on its own a bit cause its a VN, but even it doesn't seem to be particularly successful, although I loved the story: Zach clearly wanted to write more than his puzzle games would allow him to.

@@g1gabyt3 until this vid, i honestly didnt realize that Eliza was a zachtronics game. Got it from humblebundle and didnt pay to much attention to the developer. Same with iron clad tactics. I didnt realize last call would be their last game, but i can completely understand it. Wants to pursue other passions, so more to him.

Did Toby Fox suddenly stop working on Deltarune?

@@ITAndroMedian hopefully

@@ITAndroMedian no

That means a lot coming from the Dûnyain

@@DoshDoshington Oh man, *and* you have the worst taste in books?! I guess I'll hit the bell thing by subscribe in celebration - I don't know what it does (never hit it before) but if it helps the algorithm then you earned it. Of course I'm much too cheap to do something actually useful like patreon, but you get the idea. Cheers.

what's dunyain?

@@NoNameAtAll2 Its from a fantasy book, and a better question is "who are the dunyain?" And so, a quote from the wiki "The Dûnyain are a severe monastic sect that has repudiated history and animal appetite in the name of finding enlightenment through the control of all desire and all circumstance."

@@NoNameAtAll2 a group of characters from a book series (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Nothing)

Maybe he will come up with new ideas for games when he's working somewhere else and eventually return to game development. We can hope, right?

Infiniminer isn't forgotten it's just that the name is the only thing that is remembered

Man especially this episode is super interesting, I'm even considering playing it myself!

Nikidino is a bot

@@spacecowboy511 How come? I'm not.

I don't wanna watch the SpaceEx videos until I've actually completed SpaceEx myself... I've never had a better driving force behind me playing that mod than now, and I'm only saddened that I didn't start sooner. At least his series will be complete before I finish it, since I'm guaranteed to play it slower than both him playing it and editing and uploading his videos. These non-SpaceEx videos actually give a great break between them so I can still enjoy his content without re-watching older videos.

And a real hero

Honestly the way his games work he really is a teacher and he should consider the wide audience he was able to teach

Not literally every single game. Ironclad Tactics isn't anything special, and while I do like Möbius Front '83 a lot, it's a tactical turn based game. Still, I own most of their games for a reason. Zach Barth is one hell of a game designer.

Moebius Front '83 and Last Call BBS are their best games IMO. ExaPunks and TIS-100 come close to those, but I'm not a huge puzzle game player.

My first Zachtronics game was Ruckingenur II back in 2009. What a wild ride it was, definitely made a lasting impression and made me fall in love with their style.

Your solutions only show up in the histogram if you stick to the instruction limit. I think the ability to go over it was added during Early Access at some point.

I once got a solution to a Space Chem puzzle I got stuck on in a dream. And it worked!

After playing Factorio I better understood the importance of some programming concepts, like good design, planning beforehand and scalability.

@@ankh_k And that's before you start playing in multiplayer. It's amazing how wonderfully Factorio captures the feeling and motions of software development while not really being a programming game at all (excepting circuit networks, of course). It's a game I recommend if you want to experience what making software is like without having to do any programming.

If you liked the programming challenges in Exapunks, definitely try TIS-100 and Schenzhen I/O as well.

Yeah that hurt

He... did mention it, though?

Haven't played zach games, but completed signal state. This kind of logic game is a little more enjoyable than assebly ones for me... But I wonder how difficult is it compared to zach games? Where would you put it in this list?

SWP just swaps the values in ACC and BAK around. You can't address BAK directly, so it's like putting a value in the back room of a store and wheeling in what was already there.

The hard part about Youtubing is when you need to make an inaccurate but more eye-catching title

@@DoshDoshington coulda just covered them too

@@ragnose1 Sadly that takes both time and effort. It didn't feel like they fit the theme well enough to justify it.

It's a shame he probably never saw this comment. It's super hard to tell in that screenshot, but on the web page it's clearly just using the Cyrillic characters which resemble the English(/Latin) characters to just write "Constructor" in English. I'm sure there's a word for that, but I couldn't find it.

sdpc loop stays winning

When you think about it, a programmer uses a strange language known to a select few to inscribe the right combination of magic words to force energy to resonate through a matrix of crystals and effect a change upon the material world. It IS magic.

This is the 5 core program I wrote, in full. if you're quite bored, may be fun to try out. N is the number placed in the registers. For full length, use 999. For benchmarking, use 2. I've included # comments to explain some bits. Core 1: T: MOV N ACC . .# set up i L: SWP . . . . . . . . # mov i into secondary register MOV N ACC . . . .# set up j S: NOP . . . . . . . . # a nop burns an extra cycle per inner loop, for fun JLZ CC . . . . . . . .# if j has decremented to -1, inner loop is complete SUB 1 . . . . . . . . .# decrement j JMP S . . . . . . . . # jump to start of inner loop CC: SWP . . . . . . # put i back in primary register JLZ C . . . . . . . . .# if i has decremented to -1, outer loop is complete SUB 1 . . . . . . . . .# decrement i JMP L . . . . . . . . # jump to start of outer loop C: MOV 0 LEFT .# send "continue" signal (0) to next core MOV LEFT ACC # wait for signal to come back from next core JEZ T . . . . . . . . .# if return signal is "continue", start from beginning MOV UP LEFT . .# otherwise, signal was returned "complete". move the value Cores 2, 3, 4: (These cores are identical, save the MOV commands, which each point in different directions. They'll be abstracted to PREV and NEXT.) T: MOV N ACC L: SWP MOV N ACC S: MOV PREV PREV . .# wait for "continue" signal, immediately send it back SUB 1 JGZ S . . . . . . . . . . . . . # if j hasn't reached zero, jump to start of inner loop* and wait SWP JLZ C SUB 1 JMP L C: MOV PREV NEXT . # send "continue" signal from previous core to next MOV NEXT ACC . . . . # wait for signal to come back from next core MOV ACC PREV . . . . # send copy of signal back to previous core JEZ T . . . . . . . . . . . . . # if return signal is "continue", start from beginning MOV PREV NEXT . . . # otherwise, signal was returned "complete". move the value * SUB-then-JGZ has two problems over the JLZ-then-SUB used elsewhere: 1) the original value of N never reaches JGZ, because the decrement happens first, and 2) the loop breaks at j == 0, instead of j == -1. In effect, it only runs 998 times, instead of 1000. However, JLZ-then-SUB has one huge disadvantage: it's actually a JLZ-SUB-JMP; you need an extra unconditional jump to restart the loop. cores are capped to 15 instructions, so for these middle cores, I'm flat out of room. For the record, until yesterday, I was using SUB-then-JGZ everywhere. It was realizing this optimization that gave me the 20x time boost I mentioned in the above comment. Core 5: T: MOV N ACC L: SWP MOV N ACC S: MOV LEFT NIL MOV 0 LEFT . . . . .# costs one more cycle than MOV LEFT LEFT, had room for it. JLZ CC SUB 1 JMP S CC: SWP JLZ C SUB 1 JMP L C: MOV LEFT NIL .# burn "continue" signal MOV 1 LEFT . . . . .# finally... send "complete" signal MOV LEFT DOWN # move the value, completing the test.

I dunno, at some point you have 3 more girls to go but you have to go through the same minigame 12 more times after you completed it 24 times already, so at this point I better go play something else than to do it again. Yes you get 24 pictures for this, but I better to spend 2 hours in net finding 24 memes for future negotations.