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

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.

Yeah that hurt

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.

sdpc loop stays winning

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 remember making a synchronised clock, a system to encode/decode data into/from packets, and a weird handshake protocol just for one level that absolutely didn't require it (one of the human body ones IIRC). I don't think any other game, including ZT games, has ever made me actually want to do something so difficult and fiddly of my own free will. Best part is it didn't work, the clock kept desyncing and the encoding didn't deal with certain numbers well, but I learned an absolute ton from the experience.

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.

Oh, and you write javascript instead of assembly 😀

@@peterschmidt1900 you had me until the second comment

Magnum Opus is a lot easier than Spacechem, so I think you should play it first.

Ruckingenur II was a blast. I have no idea how I stumbled upon it those 15 years ago, but it made me fall in love with Zach's games. It was wild.