The ZACHTRONICS Thread: Infinite variations on a cool crab

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The ZACHTRONICS Thread: Infinite variations on a cool crab

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Optimizing for power in Shenzhen IO spoke to my weird brain in ways no game before or since ever has and I love it to pieces. I've spent 200+ hours optimizing my solutions and never even beat the campaign.

Basically, you work for a cheap electronics manufacturer and are given a spec for each puzzle. You get a number of components to use, but the big one is a microcontroller that you program using the game's own very simple assembly language. You are encouraged to cut corners to save power/cost, and the specs are incomplete and let you produce products which do unexpected things or work poorly in undefined cases. As an example, you make a doll that plays music, but you never actually have to play the same song more than once. So it's totally fine if playing the song a second time will fail - the child who has to reboot their doll to hear the song again won't be happy, but your bottom line will be. It's simple enough that you can play without knowing anything about assembly language, but deep enough that you can spend a long time optimizing if you want to top the leaderboards. Beat my high scores, thanks in advance.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2020 23:40

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 08:18

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

CharlieFoxtrot posted:

I have the feelies for both the Shenzhen I/O and Exapunks special editions, they're really rad

Yeah I never buy stuff like this and largely don't want silly video game kitsch in my house but I'm happy I bought these.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2020 06:49

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

cubicle gangster posted:

I enjoyed opus magnum, but i'm really not a fan of its leaderboard style being your cumulative results rather than based on a single solution like spacechem was.
It was a lot more open ended and easier to me than spacechem too, solving a puzzle prioritizing only low cycles, or low area and allowing the others to spiral out of control made it super easy to brute force solutions - and due to the leaderboard design it doesn't seem to encourage trying to find the best equal balance of all 3.

I still love it, been playing spacechem again recently and I seem to have forgotten how to play it, I'm re-learning all over again which is fun. I've been a little intimidated by the assembly language based ones and haven't given them a shot.

I wish it showed the whole pareto frontier in all of these games, though usually I find one of the optimization goals to be strictly most interesting and just go for that. I think the three most interesting solutions are always going to be the three optimizing for one thing alone but it'd be cool if it acknowledged when you've reached any sort of solution that has never been strictly improved on.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2020 23:24

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Taratang posted:

Crossposting from the general Steam thread in the hopes they might spot this in a quieter thread:

StrongMouse your Steam account has been compromised. Go reset your password now.

Yeah was wondering who this was but assumed they played Zach games. Fix your poo poo, get a steam authenticator on your phone, etc.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2020 16:18

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Rexxed posted:

NERTS! Online is out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhavFAaAYT0

edit:
http://www.zachtronics.com/nerts-online/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1131190/NERTS_Online/

I saw this and.... :stare:

. What a weird project.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2021 11:37

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Shenzhen IO optimization is full of stuff like that. Oh? You wanted the circuit to play the same song more than once? Too bad, ain't in the spec.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2022 03:49

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

There's a deluxe edition for sale here:
https://zachtronics.com/pop-up-store/

# ¿ Jun 15, 2022 21:57

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Snake Maze posted:

Yeah, same here. Got the receipt from paypal but nothing else so far.

Same - I got the receipt from paypal but that's it.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2022 03:39

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

I got tracking info and apparently my feelies are coming tomorrow but yeah, game not unlocked yet.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2022 22:32

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

I believe compressure does the board within a board thing, which makes sense as it is the same author's previous game. I didn't get far enough into it to get a good impression but it seemed interesting.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2022 10:23

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

It sounds like he's just like, a bit bored with his own formula. I can't say I blame him. It explains the forays into other genres and the longer stretch between games as well. "Think of a weird programming model and build a game out of it" probably isn't as interesting to do the tenth time.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2022 18:22

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Nth Doctor posted:

They were already owned by a larger game company. I could see internal transfers being available.

Ohhh I actually had no idea - I wonder if this is why they're "shutting down"? Getting out from under this owner after getting paid? Do something else for a couple years then come back with a new company after non-competes are up?

# ¿ Jul 4, 2022 22:36

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

ymgve posted:

When were they owned by a larger company, and which one? As far as I know Zachtronics has always been independent.

I thought the same thing until I read that post, but wikipedia says this at least:

quote:

In 2015, Barth joined Valve to work on SteamVR.[8] He worked there for 10 months before departing.[9] Near the time he started to work at Valve, Barth had been considering shutting down Zachtronics due to stress of running the business alongside the new responsibilities at Valve. Sometime between the release of TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, Barth had come into contact with Alliance Media Holdings who offered to buy the studio and to manage the publishing of the games, while allowing Barth to retain his creative lead and control.[7] Since the studio's acquisition, it has published Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks.[7]

# ¿ Jul 4, 2022 23:03

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

chaosbreather posted:

Looks like their parent is less an overbearing corporate overlord and more utterly evaporated; their stock has been worthless for a while and their website doesn�t exist. Not even notable enough for a Wikipedia page.

This looks to be their site - pretty barren:
https://www.alliance.games/studios

# ¿ Jul 4, 2022 23:17

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 08:18

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

TheCenturion posted:

Yeah, Shenzhen is a little bit too on the nose in being a 'working engineer' simulator. "We have ten thousand of these chips. We're not even sure what they do. Figure out a product we can build with them to recoup our losses." Or eventually finding some of the undocumented commands that, in retrospect, make half the game trivial.

I had a lot of fun with this. I was always endlessly amused at finding ways to obey the letter of the spec without the intent it. Oh the doll can only play each song once and then needs to be rebooted? Oh the secure lock just uses some garbage hash function to check your password despite millions of possible collisions? Welp, spec is the spec, ship it.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2022 23:15

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The ZACHTRONICS Thread: Infinite variations on a cool crab