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Episode 35: Zach Barth (Kaizen: A Factory Story, Opus Magnum, etc.)
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In this episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by Zach Barth, one of the developers behind Kaizen: A Factory Story and Zachtronics. Topics include the development of Kaizen, making accessible Zach-likes, and systems design.
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Transcript
Introduction to Draknek and Friends Podcast
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to the Draknek and Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them.
Meet Zach Barth: Gaming Innovator
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Saren, the producer at Draknek and Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazelden, the head Draknek at Draknek and Friends.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hey there. Today, we're joined by Zach Barth, who you may know from his work on games like Kaizen Factory Story, as well as Zachtronics games such as Opus Magnum.
00:00:45
Speaker
How are you doing today? I'm good. Awesome. So for people who do not know you or your work, ah can you introduce
What are 'Zach-like' Games?
00:00:54
Speaker
yourself? And then how would you describe Zach-like Yeah, i so I've made a bunch of games. Most of them were at a company called Zaktronics, which is named after me.
00:01:06
Speaker
So starting with like Spacechem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzhen IO, Opus Magnum, Exapunks, Last Call. they're They're all sort of in this genre that's now...
00:01:20
Speaker
regrettably called Zach likes. I don't know. I find myself almost using the term now. um It's kind of embarrassing, but I guess zacktronics was kind of embarrassing too. I didn't come up with the name Zach. Like it's not like i named these
The Open-Ended Nature of Zach's Games
00:01:33
Speaker
games after myself. It was somebody at rock paper shotgun.
00:01:36
Speaker
But they're open-ended puzzle games. It turns out, I mean, i'm sure you guys have talked about this before, but puzzle game is a really useless descriptor of games. And so we our games are, I guess, puzzle games, but they're very open-ended. They're not really like like maybe puzzles to be like a real puzzle kind of have like one solution and like you walk a path to get there. but like with these games that I've worked on, they're just, they're like homework games.
00:02:01
Speaker
It gives you, they're like a problem That's not a good genre name. Well, I mean, we don't have to stick with it. But, you know, they're there're it's like a problem set. It's like where we invent a a domain. Usually it's there most of them are basically programming games. so we're inventing like a programming or engineering genre.
00:02:18
Speaker
And then we're giving you a problem set and asking you to practice and get very good at this set of tools. but they're extremely open-ended problems, um like kind of like the ones you encounter in programming. And there you can solve them many different ways, which opens up the sort of secondary game of trying to optimize your solutions to be really good in certain ways and often really bad in other ways to account for how good they are at other things. So like lot of the games, like in Opus Magnum, you're making machines that glue together molecules.
00:02:47
Speaker
molecule of fake alchemy molecules. And you can make a machine that's really fast. Like it really has like really high throughput and it it glues all these marbles together faster than anybody can imagine.
00:02:57
Speaker
But you can also make one that's very cheap that uses the smallest number of parts.
Community Features in Games
00:03:02
Speaker
But usually because there's so few parts, it takes a very long time for those parts to do all this stuff. And so we have this kind of secondary optimization gameplay.
00:03:11
Speaker
We have ah histograms, which are You know, like we show that at the ah histograms, which like a typograph that shows distribution of numbers um for everybody's scores for all of their solutions their solutions to a puzzle.
00:03:24
Speaker
And so it's like a leader. It's like a global leaderboard, except that you can actually make sense of it. And just instead of seeing just that there's, you know, 100 or 1000 people who cheated and have the best possible score and you're not one of them.
00:03:35
Speaker
So we have those sort of these histograms, we have friend leader boards, people compete with their friends to play the games. you can a lot of the games you can export like a GIF or some kind of artifact of your solution so that you can share it with people and show them how you accomplish such a highly optimum score.
00:03:50
Speaker
So these these are all the hallmarks of a quote unquote Zek-like. so that's So most of the games I've made are like that. What was the process of kind of finding that sort of design spec?
The Iterative Design Process
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, it was, i would just say, like accidental iteration. i Before all those games, I rattled off before I made some Flash games. and Okay, so this story is really silly. but So I made a game.
00:04:15
Speaker
So all these games, they kind of descend from watching a bunch of How It's Made, the TV show where they show how factories work and when I was in college. I watched a bunch of the show. I'd never really seen it before. I wanted to make a game that was like How how It's Made works.
00:04:31
Speaker
about making stuff in factories. And so I made a bunch of games that like all these games all kind of descend from that. And I made one called the Codex of Alchemical Engineering, which is kind of the predecessor to Opus Magnum with the the alchemy theme.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I was such a lazy programmer that I i saved people's progress through the game. This is in Flash, but I didn't save their solutions.
00:04:53
Speaker
And so I said, I was like, hey, if you want to hold on to your solutions, here's a button you can click that'll export like a base 64 string that you can copy into a text file and save on your own computer, which is crazy. Cause like if I was base 64 in the solutions, I could have just started in a key value pair somewhere and like made it automatically save people's solutions. So I don't know why I i did this where it saves to a text file, but for some reason I thought it was better. And and in one way it was better.
00:05:18
Speaker
It let people share their solutions with each other in a way that was really quick. and easy, and you can load somebody else's solution in and then like tweak it. right If it was a screenshot, like Opus, in the Codex of Chemical Engineering, there was if you took a screenshot of a solution, it would show you some of their solution, but not all of it. like It wouldn't show you the programming for all the arms. And so it'd be really hard to share a solution with somebody via screenshots. But these little save strings that I made made it really easy to share a whole solution with people.
00:05:44
Speaker
And so in addition to putting the game on Congregate, which had leaderboards, people could actually just like share their solutions to show how they achieved a score. And it created this sort of community and the forums on Congregate where people were like building off of each other. And so we saw what was happening there when we made Spacechem, which was like the first commercial.
00:06:03
Speaker
game like this that I worked on where I worked on it with a couple other people. I was like, oh, we should try to enable this thing that people
The Role of Social Media in Game Success
00:06:10
Speaker
are doing. And, you know, when we went on Steam, we gained friend leaderboards, which we hadn't had before, which are really compelling.
00:06:16
Speaker
We cooked up the histograms as a way to do global leaderboards that didn't suck and were less prone to cheating. you Yeah, we just kind of we just gradually accumulated all these these features. The idea of like really easily, like SpaceCam, you could export ah video of your solution to YouTube, which is pretty clunky.
00:06:36
Speaker
With Infinifactory, one of our players, they cut together a looping animated GIF of one of their factories running. And it's like, oh my god, like all these games are about doing the same thing over and over again. So GIF is the perfect format for that.
00:06:48
Speaker
And so we added GIF support to Infinifactory and Opus Magnum. it was It was very, i would say like the launch of Opus Magnum, a lot of its success probably had to do with the GIFs. This was back when Twitter was less dead and horrible.
00:07:00
Speaker
And so people were just, everybody had felt like we're sharing GIFs with each other of their Opus Magnum solutions. And it was really great advertising for the game. And so again, like all these all these things we just sort of built up over time and accumulated and kept copying the things that worked from previous games kind of became a ah solid feature set.
00:07:17
Speaker
Yeah, in some ways, it's kind of funny that it took that many iterations to hit on, like, oh, like, just exported GIF. But yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, certainly I, Opus Magnum is when that, like, GIF giving us, like, really felt like, oh, yeah, this is just everywhere on my Twitter timeline.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah. ah when And SpaceCon was like 2011. And so the GIFs have been around since the 80s or whatever, like 89. But like it didn't make as much sense then to do a GIF. And so a lot of these games took place over many years. And so a lot of it is a reaction to like the communities and technologies that were dominant in those times.
00:07:56
Speaker
I also think there's just something that like Opus Magnum is like the cleanest version of that concept of like, here's a shareable looping gif that like, you could have done that with Spacechem, but it wouldn't quite have hit the same way.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, Spacechem has both big and little puzzles, and the big puzzles, wouldn't they don't really work as well in shareable format. Opus Magnum is all like little puzzles by comparison. so Yeah, I don't know. It just works really well with with Opus Magnum, definitely.
00:08:24
Speaker
we We added GIF support to our other games, and it never most of them never worked. very well. Like Exapunks, we can show you a GIF of ah your solution, but it like doesn't show any of your code. So it's just a bunch of little programs running around. And it's like, yeah, maybe this is actually not compelling as a thing to share.
00:08:40
Speaker
ah When you were designing Kaizen, I'm curious how much you were designing for that sense of like, oh, this should be like really compelling to watch a solution in action. Or is that like just what yeah what was the primary design thinking going into it?
00:09:02
Speaker
Yeah, so Kaizen was all about approachability because Kaizen was published by a publisher and part of the deal was that they wanted us to make the most approachable Zach-like ever.
00:09:20
Speaker
Right. Certainly at least as approachable as Opus Magnum. Like there's some scary games in the Zachtronics back catalog. Right. And, you know, maybe there's some if you're if you're a publisher, there's concerns that some of them are too scary for normal people.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so our, you know, the thing that we agreed on that was sort of the the conditions that led to the game being made was trying to make a really approachable. quote unquote, Zack-like that would have way more, not not necessarily accessibility, but like approachability, that it's like scares fewer people away.
00:09:53
Speaker
And for us, that was a really interesting challenge because we've gradually been trying to improve like the usability of our games, but we'd never really tried to make like somebody's
Making Games More Approachable
00:10:03
Speaker
first Zack-like that's gonna bring them into the genre, right? Like if have anything, like towards the end of Zachtronics, I was getting,
00:10:09
Speaker
like just kind of burnt out and it's just like, oh, God, like I have these ideas, but like I can't be bothered to like fully explain them to everybody. Last Call is kind of this, right? Last Call hides behind this.
00:10:20
Speaker
Oh, it's like games from the past when you had to read a manual, but you don't have the manual. So figuring it out is kind of part of the puzzle. It's like, no, I just couldn't be bothered to like explain every little bit of these things to people.
00:10:31
Speaker
Because it's just like, i don't know, it's hard to explain stuff to people. And it' like, you can't really tell things to people. Like, it's very difficult. But like, I wanted to do stuff that was like, just like what was in the game like stuff that was kind of weird and challenging. And it's just like, yeah, yeah people will just figure out how to play the Forbidden Path flesh, you know, growing game. And it's like, I can't really explain it. Words don't really do it justice. You just have to kind of feel it.
00:10:55
Speaker
you know And I was able to kind of hide behind that with the way that the game was packaged together. But like that's not really good design practice. you know You want people to be able to learn and play your games and get the most out of it, I think. And so Kaizen was a chance for us to really focus in on that and make a game that sort of like, I forget where i read this, but in instruction design, there's this idea of when you're teaching something so something to somebody, there's like necessary complexity and unnecessary complexity, which is that if you're teaching somebody algebra, algebra is challenging. And so there's a part of algebra that is just like unavoidable complexity.
00:11:32
Speaker
But then you can also make it worse, right? Like you could teach a class on algebra ah to people who predominantly speak English in Spanish. And that's just like avoidable complexity that makes everything worse. Like if you don't understand like the language it's being taught in. And so there's all these kinds of,
00:11:48
Speaker
Like yeah the the the task when you're doing trying to like teach people more effectively is to identify the stuff that doesn't have to be hard, you know, and then you fix those things and then just try to expose just the the unavoidable complexity.
00:12:02
Speaker
And so, yeah, it was a chance to kind of, sort the two and and figure out like what's what's actually the avoidable complexity. You know, like an Opus Magnum, there's a lot of, don't know, I hesitate to call it depth, but like there's a lot to Opus Magnum that is about pipelining if you want to go fast, where you're finishing up a past solution while you start a new one.
00:12:22
Speaker
And then we were trying to think it's like, is that really where like the the interestingness of Opus Magnum comes from like this pipelining? And so with Kaizen, we were like, what if we like kind of did away with the pipelining, so you just make one product at a time, you know like would that still be as interesting?
00:12:38
Speaker
you know Maybe it's a little less interesting in retrospect. I don't i don't know. It's kind of subjective. But it's certainly a lot easier to explain to people when you don't have to explain like the tessellating code grid and all this stuff. and So yeah, i those were the things that we were kind of trying to focus on as our design goals with Kaizen. Yeah.
00:12:55
Speaker
Yeah, and like now that the game has shipped, congrats on that. Looking back and like reflecting on the design goal, and specifically like where where you feel like it really worked out, and where you feel like maybe this did and maybe this dis't didn't, it's a little subjective depending on the player. like How do you feel about the project overall now that it's done?
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, i the launch went okay. I feel like it is definitely the most approachable Zach-like that we've ever made.
Kaizen's Reception and Approachability
00:13:29
Speaker
i think that's definitely true. I think it's unclear at this point whether that was the right business decision.
00:13:36
Speaker
It's... I don't know. I mean, it's it's tough to... i've I've had a really hard time gauging the launch of this. The last time I launched a game was in 2022, so three years ago. And and like Twitter was a little bit more usable back then. And certainly Opus Magnum, which came out in 2017, Twitter was way more prominent.
00:13:53
Speaker
And so with a lot... I feel like a lot of public internet spaces have kind of died out. And so it's really hard for me to... like With Opus Magnum, we just looked at Twitter. We're like, wow, everybody in here is talking about the game. We must be doing well.
00:14:08
Speaker
Now, I have no idea like how people are finding the game and like what... you know like what the response is. right like I can see like the Steam sales figures and that's it. right and and it's It's tough to tell like what the response is. so I end up looking at like Steam reviews, which is a terrible way you know find out what's going on. right but like I would say nine out of 10 of them are people who are like, yeah, this is fun. you know It's a little short a little easy, but it's fine. I like it. Or people who are like, wow, this game's hard, but I like the challenge, which for me, I think is crazy. but
00:14:41
Speaker
yeah But one out of 10 people are like, oh, this is a huge step back for Zack and Zachtronics team. And it's like way too easy. I beat the game in 15 minutes. And, you know, they're, obviously I mean, okay, they're complaining about was going to say, that person's a genius. Yeah, yeah. More like like three hours or four hours or whatever, especially the people who like hate the story and want to click, could not click through it faster, know? And yeah.
00:15:03
Speaker
you know So it's like ah you know as I see these comments and it's just like, ah this is unfortunately the only like contact I have with like customers playing my game is through Steam reviews. But you know it's like, should the game have been less approachable? like i don't I don't know, right?
00:15:19
Speaker
but yeah One of the big lessons we learned a long time ago was that we made Space Cam. It was successful enough that it started Zektronix. And then we're like, OK, so Spacechem doesn't look that great.
00:15:31
Speaker
And it's really hard to look at. The tutorialization in Spacechem was awful. Like I'd never done anything like that before. it was a hard game to explain. And where so the thinking in our and our on our team was like, oh If Space Camp did that well, while being like kind of ugly and impossible to learn to play, what if we made a game that like looked awesome and it was easier to play? Like surely we'd do way better. And so we did that. We made Ironclad Tactics and it probably made like...
00:15:59
Speaker
one-tenth or one-twentieth of the the money that Spacechem made by now, probably even like less, like one-thirtieth maybe. I don't know. Like making a game that was quote-unquote more accessible did not help us because no one wanted to play the game. Like the game sucked, you know?
00:16:12
Speaker
It was not what people wanted. It wasn't compelling like Spacechem was. And so I feel like that was one of the very early lessons is that just making stuff so that more people can play it doesn't mean that more people will play it.
00:16:23
Speaker
And there's obviously, I guess, some sort of sweet spot in between those two ends. Like if you make a game that's really obscure and hard to play, that that will probably har hurt people from playing your game. But there's a sweet spot somewhere and I don't know where it is. And I don't even after doing Kaizen. We have this huge new data point. I still have no idea. like it stephen It's only been like a week and a half, you know?
00:16:43
Speaker
So guess like a year from now, we'll know, I guess. But yeah. Have you had a chance to like watch any streams or video playthroughs of the game? Yeah, they play it. but like does like I would think, just personally, that because when you're when a player is like streaming a game or like making a video about a game, like they are inherently less focused.
00:17:11
Speaker
like they they They are not applying 100% focus to the game. ah They are applying maybe at best 95% focus to the game. yeah that That would be a really good like indicator of how successful the approachability is. yeah like I'm wondering, like are the people that are like playing the game as you describe it like successful in playing the game?
00:17:33
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah, I would say we did a lot of like in-office play tests with people who'd never seen the game before and are kind of overwhelmed by like being in our office and having us watch them. And yeah, they I mean, I would say the game is successful at being approachable, but like that's, we don't really get rewarded like
Player Engagement and Optimization
00:17:47
Speaker
like necessarily by the market for doing that. the thing The thing you'll never know is how much did the approachability affect the game?
00:17:56
Speaker
Exactly. the game sold. And like, that's like short of a time machine. You'll you'll never know that. Exactly. So I guess I'm more interested in like, how do you feel about the game and that lens on this game?
00:18:09
Speaker
Do you feel like, oh yeah, it was really nice to make a ah really approachable one of these It was, I mean, i don' honestly, I don't really care either way. You know, I've made so many games that every one of them is an experiment in some things that are interesting, but not like super interesting, right?
00:18:28
Speaker
It was interesting to make a game that was more approachable. And it would be just as interesting to make a game that's the opposite of approachable, right? It's just like, at some point, I've made so many games, right? Like, ah theyre it's just like, it's just work. You know, not that I don't like doing it, but it's just like they're all kind of mutually interchangeable and it's fine.
00:18:48
Speaker
it was, yeah, it was it was good to do, I guess. I like how the game turned out. I think it's i think it's cool that there exists say a Zach like that way more people can play and use as maybe like an entry point to some of the more intimidating ones, right?
00:19:04
Speaker
But like if no one plays it, that doesn't matter. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of indifferent, I suppose. Yeah, and I guess there's a few different angles on approachability because like one of them is like making sure the systems are not like super weird like you don't have to think about too many edge cases like the um like the uh throughput system you're talking about for opus magnum like oh it just needs to make a single copy and you don't need to worry about resetting itself to the original state like that's exactly uh that definitely makes it simpler but another side of it is like just um what puzzles are you being asked to solve and like
00:19:45
Speaker
That is an area where like you have more, like you can, like, I know, I know you, you just released some, some bonus puzzles. Like you have the ability to release more bonus puzzles that are more or less approachable or like more or less yeah hard or demanding. Like, do you feel like you're steering that post-release content in any particular direction?
00:20:06
Speaker
I certainly don't feel the need to make any of those puzzles easy anymore. ah So it's interesting. i i want to say it was you, Alan, who said this, that but a long time ago when we were talking about this game, and I was talking about how when I'm crafting a game, I want to make sure I never give somebody the same challenge twice in a row.
00:20:29
Speaker
Right? that i they always There always has to be something new. And then this kind of makes games, my games harder that every puzzle you do, you're doing something that's like a new challenge and you never get the opportunity to like have something that you just know how to do to like reinforce the fact that you know how to do it. And so I was like, oh no, every puzzle has to be different. I swear to God, it was like you who said, like, does it? Like, are you sure you can't just have like a puzzle that somebody knows how to do and just like reinforce you can correct me if I'm wrong but I mean with we had a meeting early on something I could have said like that sounds extremely Alan like if I am to put my best guess as to past Alan's words in his mouth that basically he would argue that as long as it's fun a reinforcement puzzle can be satisfying
00:21:17
Speaker
Yeah, so that's whoever, whatever wise person said this to me. That was something we explored a little bit with this game. And I, you know, I felt like we always had the, even if we made a puzzle that was a little too easy or whatever, or not like a new enough challenge, you could always still optimize that puzzle. And so I tried to make it so that the sort of the the progression of difficulty in the game was very gradual, but each puzzle was different enough from the previous ones that it felt like it would be a different kinds of kind of problem to optimize.
00:21:46
Speaker
And I think for the players who like optimizing stuff, they're finding lots to optimize in this game. And the fact that many players can optimize every puzzle in the game because they're all so approachable, I think is a win, but not every player is into optimization.
00:22:00
Speaker
And I think the players who aren't engaging with the optimization are finding it to be a very short and boring game.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah, like when we were talking about like genre descriptors earlier, I kind of felt like in some ways optimization is at the core of like what makes your games like your games, right? like Some of them about programming, some of them are about engineering, but the through line is the capacity for optimization.
00:22:30
Speaker
Yes. um And yeah, it's super interesting to think about, like, what does player engaging with this game look like if they don't want to engage with with the optimization side?
00:22:42
Speaker
Like, does yeah not that as an experience hold together? in the past, it was... I would say extremely difficult for most players to even beat one of our games, like let alone optimize any of it.
00:22:55
Speaker
um Honestly, I, with Kaizen, it's still the case. meant Most players are not beating Kaizen. We have a, I mean, I obviously like the game just came out. So people are still working their way through it, but for a game that's like, ah you know, arguably,
00:23:08
Speaker
supposedly so short, only 12% of our players have actually solved the final puzzle. So I, maybe, maybe that the 12% of people who get to the end are the ones who felt like it was too easy. And all the people who are still working towards it are the ones who felt like it was just like a note reasonable challenge, just getting through the whole thing.
00:23:25
Speaker
i don't know. This is where I like, I feel like I'm really hampered by not actually having something. Not not that reading Twitter was ever a good way to know what was going on in the world, but like i really have no I really have no idea. right fire hose of information. Yeah, and it's just hard to know like what the response even is. you know i hang out on the Discord, but they're hardcore.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yeah, you're feeling less engaged with the community of players playing your games. Well, I mean, like i'm I'm pretty engaged with the small group of extremely hardcore people who are playing the games. But like, yeah, all the other people, I like i have no idea. i have no idea who those people are or what they think. And it's, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I guess this has always been a problem, but I feel it really acutely now, especially when we're trying to do something that's like supposed to be a reaction to players, but like approachability angle. It's supposed to be a reaction to players.
00:24:15
Speaker
hypothetical people who in the past have bounced off of Zaktronics games because they were too unapproachable. And it's just like, is it working now? I have no idea. We did some in-office play tests, but that's not the same thing. you know i do not have a lot of data. And I think that's where maybe the only way we'll be able to tell is like you know a year out, if the sales are really strong over the year, it's like, I guess we can assume that it worked.
Playtesting and Feedback in Game Design
00:24:35
Speaker
Maybe. Yeah, what was playtesting like? You've said a couple times that you invited some people in, but like what was the process? We do two kinds of playtesting. do like your standard like Kleenex playtesting where you bring in somebody who's never seen the game before and then sit them down and watch them play the first you know hour or two of it.
00:24:56
Speaker
That's how we refine like the the pickup of all the mechanics and all the stuff like that, you know making sure that people... like when they when they feel the need to click a button, can they find the button? Can they click the button? Do they actually click the button? Like really like low level UX stuff like that.
00:25:11
Speaker
Kind of seeing where they get stuck in the tutorial. I think like you shouldn't get stuck in the tutorial. Like that's not supposed to be the puzzle is getting through the tutorial. And for a very long time in Kaizen, people were absolutely stumped by the tutorial. And I had to keep dumbing it down and dumbing it down so that people would have the opportunity to learn how flipping works.
00:25:30
Speaker
Because it turns out that People are really all over the place with how well they understand what happens to like transform things when you flip them over. Some people get it instantly. i had a friend from high school who's never even played any of my games before, but he came out, he's a mechanical engineer, came out to Seattle and i was like, oh, you should try my game. And he figured it out instantly because he's like a mechanical engineer. He designs gearboxes. He's a pretty good understanding of how like things translate and relate to each other physically.
00:25:55
Speaker
um Whereas I had other people come in who had played Zaktronics games before and were just completely unable to wrap their head around what happens when you flip something over. And we had to keep dialing in the tutorial levels to make it more and more reliable for people to get through them.
00:26:11
Speaker
And there was also like a weird thing too, where in the first, this is like kind of maybe overly technical, but in the first chapter, we're trying to teach the basic mechanics, but that meant that we were kind of like leaning into complicated things outcomes, like emerge complicated emerging outcomes of using the basic mechanics.
00:26:29
Speaker
And then you get to chapter two and it teaches you new mechanics. And it's simple again, because they're just like, it's like cutting for the first time you're learning about cutting. So it's a simple puzzle. And so we ended up in this weird case where the puzzles in chapter one were actually harder than the puzzles in chapter two, because they were,
00:26:43
Speaker
like going into complicated emergent behavior of like the first half of the mechanics. And we actually had to like back out all that emergent stuff and leave that for chapter three and make it so that chapter one is simple and chapter two is simple. And then like gradually towards the end of chapter two and into chapter three is when you finally start seeing these like emergent mechanics.
00:27:00
Speaker
And it took us a very long time to dial it in. And that was entirely through in-office playtesting. ah And then the second type of playtesting we do is like sort of like long-term playtesting where we engage with people online, usually people who've played Zaclikes before, and then therefore can be counted on to um like actually play through much or all of the content.
00:27:19
Speaker
And then we just say like, hey, play the whole game. Let us know like what puzzles are screwed up. You know, what's too easy? What's too hard? What do you not understand? What bugs do you find? let them do that.
00:27:30
Speaker
And then we track the the metrics for that and kind of see like which puzzles are taking people too long and and stuff like that. we We do like pretty robust metrics collection on puzzles in our games. Yeah, so those are the two types of playtesting we do. We also collect data after launch, and so that's kind of like a third type of playtesting, which is looking at how do players progress through the game? Are there any puzzles that are sort of like really hard?
Linear vs. Branching Game Progression
00:27:51
Speaker
the The metric we track is what we call bounce rate, which is how many people get to a puzzle, and then they're like, yeah, you know what? I think I'm done with this game rather than solve it.
00:27:58
Speaker
And so we look for any puzzles that have sort of like really abnormally spiky bounce rates, because that's usually an indication that like something is wrong with the difficulty on that puzzle. um At least that's what we we think it is.
00:28:10
Speaker
So yeah, that's our that's our main thing. Yeah, I guess talking about bounce rates, certainly this one, and I think a almost all of your previous games too, is like there's a very linear set of levels.
00:28:23
Speaker
have you Have you ever thought about like designing it so the progression is more of a tree so you can have harder puzzles earlier, but you don't need to solve them till you progress?
00:28:37
Speaker
ah Not really. I've seen that in other games. um I've never considered it. Our stuff's usually pretty story-driven. So like the whole like the the story is not necessarily like what the game is about, but it's certainly what I'm hanging the whole design of it on. And so that's how I know what puzzles to make. is like well Which puzzle would be appropriate for this part in the story? And kind of trying to weave that together.
00:28:59
Speaker
would say that's like one of my oddities as a game designer, is like really trying to hang all that stuff together. And so... It just sort of makes less sense. I think you need to have a game where like the mechanics are a little bit more abstract and then you can like introduce, you just introduce mechanics just like as new mechanics. And then, yeah, you like go deep on it in a branch.
00:29:18
Speaker
And I, I don't know. I've seen it before. i never really liked it in games. Like one of the, so we've done in some of our games, we've let people, we'll unlock, like an Opus Magnum, we'll unlock a bunch of puzzles in the middle of a chapter to let them be done in any order.
00:29:34
Speaker
And people almost always just solve them in the order they're presented in the UI. Yeah. So to me, i kind of took that as a hint that like, maybe it's not that important to let players mix it up. Like they're all, you know they're all puzzles. It doesn't really matter. You have to get through all of them to get through game. Right.
00:29:48
Speaker
So it, you know, it didn't really seem to matter that much. um Speaking of story, I consider the choice to open the game with a fairly lengthy dance mini game. It's one minute.
00:30:05
Speaker
It's one minute long. It feels like more...
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah. Divisive. Yeah. No, a bunch of people, when the demo came out, that was in the demo, and there was a bunch of comments on Steam talking about how they stopped playing the demo as soon as it asked them to do the dance game.
00:30:20
Speaker
And it's just like, are you kidding me? Like, yeah, I guess I get it, right? That it's like, well, it's not what you thought you were going to get, and some people just can't handle that. I don't know. Yeah, and we thought it was important for the story.
00:30:31
Speaker
It doesn't make sense later in the game. It was meant to like evoke like the the story beats, which apparently some people don't give a shit about. so Yeah. Unfortunate, but so it goes.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah. I, I, yeah, I don't know. Anybody, i think anybody who couldn't make it through a minute of the dance game and like truly noped out at that point, like how much further were they really going to get through the game? You know, it's going to, the game is nothing but asking you to do stupid stuff.
00:30:57
Speaker
You know, like that's one way to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. We had ah an exapunks. Exapunks starts with a a little activity where you have to transcribe a receipt because it's like a story beat. And like, yeah, I don't know. Whatever. I,
00:31:12
Speaker
No, I didn't really see that many people complain about transcribing the receipt. Maybe it was like a very small number of people. We actually like logged some, we put some metrics into Exapunks to make sure that people weren't actually quitting the game and refunding it when they saw the receipt entry thing.
00:31:26
Speaker
And the metrics were like, no, most people are not stopping at that point. It's fine. um So I figured with the dance game, it would also be fine that it's like, yeah, it's like a minute long activity that kind of gets the story started. But the dance game was way more divisive than I expected it to be.
00:31:40
Speaker
Like, I'm certainly not going to do that again, right? But I'm not going to take it out just because some people complained about it. Yeah, I think for me, it, like, sets weird expectations about what the game you're about to play is.
00:31:53
Speaker
Like what? Like, if you're just playing this for, like... ah if you If you don't know much about the game, and then you sit down in front of it, and then that's the first thing you play, you...
00:32:07
Speaker
you are going to be surprised when it then goes to that stuff. And now the number of people who are going to sit front down in front of this game without some level of expectations of what it is, it's like probably a small number, but I still think that that, like, I guess it feels slightly, ah uncohesive to me.
00:32:25
Speaker
Um, and maybe that's a sign that I don't value the story as much as other people might. Oh yeah. That's Alan doesn't like stories of video games usually. So I like cohesive stories.
00:32:40
Speaker
told through gameplay exclusively. No, the the overall story um in Kaizen, like, yeah, there's like a bit more dialogue than I would like, but like it it feels cohesive with the overall thing. like that Like that that side of it, like I can see structurally how it supports the game.
00:32:58
Speaker
Like i have no I have no problem with there being story in Kaizen. I just feel like the DDR game doesn't support that story Enough to justify its inclusion right at the start of the game, in my opinion.
00:33:13
Speaker
So we were hoping it would make people feel a little surprised and like like a fish out of water, because that's what the story is about. ah So that was what like the the goal was with that.
00:33:24
Speaker
But I mean, ah the stuff you're saying is that people have said that about the story in general, right? Like there's a decent number of people who complain about there being a story in the game. i don't I don't know what to tell them.
00:33:36
Speaker
Play a different game if you hate it so much? I don't know. i All of our games have weird shit like this in it, right? The solitaire games. like There's people complaining about the fact that we have solitaire games, that you need to play the solitaire games to get the achievements, and that they have to get the achievements, right?
00:33:50
Speaker
They've got to get the achievements. Yeah, this I don't know. there's Our games are always filled with like stuff that is weird and you might not put in like the good version of the game. i don't I don't know. like it didn't It didn't fail that badly during testing. If anything, the thing that everybody hated during testing was the fact that you can't while you're playing the dance game, you can't look at all the people dancing.
00:34:11
Speaker
That was the problem. That was the feedback we got. We had to add a little picture of him dancing right next to where the... It's actually really hard to like show people stuff going on while you're playing a rhythm game, it turns out. I didn't realize how hard it was going to be.
00:34:23
Speaker
but But yeah, so that was the thing that everybody gave us feedback about. Nobody was just like, oh, this is ruining the cohesiveness of the experience for me. You know, I don't know. like yeah but Like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. like i'm I'm curious, both for this game and for previous games, how tricky has it been to get the story right?
00:34:47
Speaker
Not tricky? I don't know. Well, depends what you mean by right. I mean, like, according to some people, we got the story wrong this game. No, I mean, I guess to hit your standards for, like, because I feel like in some games for some creators, you can have something which is a great gameplay system, and then you try to add a little bit of story, and then that story, like...
00:35:12
Speaker
getting the story to fit with the game and the game to fit with the story is way more work than expected. But it sounds like you don't have that problem with these games. You just kind of have this sense of like, oh this this kind of story structure will work.
00:35:26
Speaker
Like this is the rough arc of a story. We'll just write it and we'll make the puzzles and we'll stick them together and it it will work. Yeah. So the the the process for most of our games is to be we start off with like,
00:35:39
Speaker
Like what's like the core idea of what you're doing in the game and what's the core idea of the
Story Beats and Puzzle Design
00:35:44
Speaker
story? And then from there, the two just kind of get made to reinforce each other. Like every puzzle starts with a small pitch for like, what is the story of that puzzle?
00:35:54
Speaker
you know And sometimes it's like, oh, I have a cool idea for a puzzle mechanically that we need to like shoehorn into a story. But usually it's starting with a story beat and then turning that story beat into a puzzle that evokes that story beat.
00:36:07
Speaker
So I mean, because our process is so built around this, it's usually not that hard to make it make it work. Yeah. I can't remember. Did Codex of Alchemical Engineering have a story?
00:36:22
Speaker
So that was just me by myself a very long time ago. It has like little cryptic, like all my games from back then have like little cryptic story beats in them. Like little, like I'm i'm not a writer, um ah but it has like little notes about like alchemy or something. It's supposed to be like a book. Like the whole game is themed as if it's like a book because it's like the codex, right? So like a book has like notes in it, like a book or something.
00:36:46
Speaker
um like construor has like The other games from that period have maybe like slightly stronger narratives. like The Bureau of Steam Engineering is all about the Civil War, but with robots, which later turned into... We remade as Iron Cloud Tactics.
00:36:58
Speaker
um Constructor is like some sort of like alternate universe where like America went communist during the Cold War or something. It's really stupid. It's told by like TV guide entries or something. It's very stupid.
00:37:13
Speaker
And then... ah Yeah, I don't know. They all have... Ruck Engineer, like, so I made this game. One of my early games is the one that started, like, all the Zachtronics games being things that people knew about and played because it called them Hackaday.
00:37:26
Speaker
That has live-action cutscenes that I recorded. oh wow. But there's no voice because I'm not a good actor, so they're all dubbed over with, like, little, like, comics... Like, the video will pause and, like, a little comic book speech bubble pops up and...
00:37:40
Speaker
It's so silly. It's like me, you can see me like right out out of college running around like the woods near my house filming these these little cut scenes. Yeah, so it's, yeah, there's like lot there's there's always been like a really heavy story in all of my puzzle games.
00:37:58
Speaker
Otherwise, like if you don't have a strong story, how do you know what kind of puzzles to make, right? Like what kind of crazy person would just make puzzles in isolation where they're just like, oh, look at this clever puzzle. No comment. No comment.
00:38:11
Speaker
You're on the wrong podcast to ask that question, unfortunately, Zach. Yeah, well, see, that's why I'm not, I don't really think of myself as like a puzzle guy or like a puzzle designer. Because it's, they're not, they're,
00:38:22
Speaker
They're like a different kind of thing. i don't know. Whenever I make puzzles, usually I don't know the answer to it or even if there is an answer. It just cause like yeah that feels like there's probably an answer to this.
00:38:33
Speaker
And then you like try and solve it and see, like was there an answer to this? What? Is it interesting? Yeah, that's the Zactronics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I've never even played the last level of Space Camp.
00:38:44
Speaker
I just figured it was doable.
00:38:50
Speaker
but We had play testers play it. One of them managed to beat it. And it's like, okay, I guess it's doable and probably the right difficulty. Back then I used to think that games had to be really hard because I would have all these people who'd be really good at my games. And it's like, okay, the last level in a game should challenge even the people who are best at it.
00:39:08
Speaker
And so that's how you get Space Cam with the last level. Like, I'm not the best person at my games. I'm not the best person of Spacechem. so like A lot of Spacechem players are way better than me. So the last level is for them, not for me.
00:39:18
Speaker
i don't design games quite like that anymore, but that was how I used to design games. But I still design stuff where it's more sort of like theoretical design. It's like this ought to be within the system of tools, this ought to be solvable. And then I'll like test it out myself to make sure it's true.
00:39:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's something about the type of puzzle that your kind of games make. like ah a lot of the puzzles I make are like ah about something and like every possible solution to this puzzle needs to have this key moment or the puzzle has failed in its approach.
00:39:56
Speaker
So like i'm I'm getting more inspired by the mechanics and the world or the setting. But i don't think that approach really works the same way when the puzzle is not like, do you do this thing, but like, do this thing optimally or like, do you do the thing efficiently?
00:40:18
Speaker
Yeah. all All my games are really about computation, right? And computability. And so there's like a thing, do either one of you have a computer science degree? Mm-hmm. So they they make you take a class about like computational models and like Turing machines versus automata and stuff. Yeah, and that's how you get Manufactorio.
00:40:38
Speaker
ah Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a game that's literally about Turing machines. Yeah. So the all the Zaktronics games, like all these Zacklicks, for me, they originated in a little Java program called Jflap, which is a program that we used in a computation class I took in college where you can model like Turing machines and automata.
Inspiration from Computational Models
00:40:59
Speaker
And our homework was make an automata that parses this string or this type of string. I was like, wow, this is awesome. I want to make games like this. And then all the games I've made since then are just J-Flap the game, J-Flap with a story.
00:41:15
Speaker
They're all about like computational models and stuff like that. And so I think that's what enables it to be like this puzzle. is about like a certain, like not as, like it's kind of related to the thing you're talking about. Like, oh like it evokes a certain mechanic, but it's like, oh, this like evokes like a certain space of computability or like capabilities and and stuff like that.
00:41:37
Speaker
So it's it's similar, but much just much more open-ended, right? Because the tools are so open-ended. And I can, because it's like computing, I can be like, okay, if you want to solve this problem, you're going to need to use memory, right? Because we know like and like in Shenzhen IO, you have these like little microcontrollers. They don't have enough registers to store all the data that I know you need to keep like in your working set to solve this puzzle.
00:41:56
Speaker
So you're going to have to use a RAM chip. And that's what this puzzle is about is like, how do you use a RAM chip to do this type of thing? And it's like, how do you use a RAM chip for something that's O of N versus how do you use a RAM chip for something that's O of N squared?
00:42:09
Speaker
And so I can like kind of eyeball like all these like things, these these these qualities and make puzzles about it, but they're still highly open-ended because there's a lot of specific... There's like ah there's many, many, many specific ways to get there in terms of like which instruction do you place in which slot of which CPU, right? And so it has this like second level where all the...
00:42:31
Speaker
possibilities and impossibilities take place rather than a game that's more about like placing stuff on like a specific grid, like, like symbols, games and stuff. Yeah. Actually, I want to push on something thing here. Cause you said that a lot of a lot of your puzzle inspiration will be based on like, um, the story and like, Oh, what's what's a like sensible thing to make at this point in the story. Yeah. but You, I'm curious, how does that fit with the,
00:42:57
Speaker
design approach of wanting all of the puzzles to feel really unique. Like surely that means that sometimes you have story ideas, but they end up in gameplay feeling too similar or.
00:43:13
Speaker
No, we only do things that satisfy both sides of it. Right. So like if I like one, like the, the counter example I'll start with first is like, we needed an another, we needed an extra puzzle in chapter two that had flipping in it.
00:43:27
Speaker
So I was like, okay, what's something that would have like a second, like a part that's used twice that gets flipped. And it's like, oh, like a bun, like with directionality. It's like, well, maybe we could do like a hamburger.
00:43:38
Speaker
And so I wandered over to Matthew's desk. I was like, Hey, can you, can we write a story for a hamburger? And he's like, yeah, sure. So he like banged out a story for a hamburger that fits with the story. And so that was easy. That was very much like the rare example of it coming from the design side.
00:43:52
Speaker
the The other version of it is that ah specifically with Kaizen, I did a bunch of like searching and came up with a huge list of products that would have been made in Japan in the 80s that were like some iconic, some not, but just did a whole bunch of research. And then We went through those and picked the ones that seemed promising.
00:44:13
Speaker
And I like tried to sketch out pictures to make sure that we could make stuff that looks like puzzles for them. And then Matthew sat down and kind of wrote stories and tried to make it work. And you know, like kind of, I don't know, like but the stuff that wouldn't have worked for, I'm trying to think if there was any puzzles I had that didn't work story wise, you can kind of write anything, you know, like at that point we'd already nailed down, like what's the framework of the story.
The Creation and Reception of Solitaire Games
00:44:37
Speaker
Um, I kind of want to go back real quick to something that you mentioned, uh, offhand, and I'm sure that you've told this story ah million different places, but maybe our podcast our audience hasn't fully heard it.
00:44:52
Speaker
Why do you, all your games have solitaire?
00:44:56
Speaker
Oh, because they're fun to make. Uh, so with, when we were doing Shinjin IO, um, the The conceit for it all, I think it was the first one we did. like it's like um It was a virtual desktop.
00:45:09
Speaker
We were like, OK, it's a game about making circuit boards in China in a modern day or like near future. like What does the interface for this game looks like? And it's like, well, people use computers to do that. So it probably just looks like a computer.
00:45:21
Speaker
and And like TIS 100 had a computer interface, but it was like this really like kind of old school kind of DOS like one. And we're like, no, we just need something that looks like a like Windows or whatever. And so we designed like our little desktop environment where all this stuff takes place.
00:45:35
Speaker
And it was just like, oh, if we have a fake operating system, we should make a solitaire game because everybody knows that operating so good operating systems come with solitaire. And I had a deck of that.
00:45:47
Speaker
for a game called Ming, which is it's kind of like Mahjong turned into a card game for Western audiences. It's from like the 70s or 80s.
00:45:59
Speaker
Cause like Mahjong is actually quite complicated. And so it was somebody who was like clearly inspired by like the aesthetics and the the rules of Mahjong, but wanted to make it something that like Americans who were familiar with Rummy could play.
00:46:10
Speaker
Cause Mahjong and Rummy are kind of similar games. And so i found a copy of this game, having never heard before, at a thrift store. And so I had these cards and I was like, oh, I should make a solitaire game that you play with these Mahjong cards.
00:46:24
Speaker
And so i I was playing Free Cell at the time a lot. I never i never knew how to play Free Cell. But my wife knew how to play Free Cell. And so at one point, we had like ah instead of like a TV, we had a computer and a projector. And so she would like, after we watched TV, she'd like play Free Cell on it. And I was like, okay, you need to teach me how to play Free Cell. And she taught me how to play Free Cell. I was like, wow, this is way better than Klondike.
00:46:46
Speaker
This is like a great solitaire game. And so really the goal with Shenzhen Solitaire was just like, can I do a free sell with these Ming cards? And that made the Solitaire game.
00:46:57
Speaker
And so we shipped that with Shenzhen.io and lots of people joked. They're like, oh, you know, like this is a great Solitaire game. I guess there's also a puzzle game attached to it. You know, 10 out of 10. And so we saw all these comments, and all these people responding positively to the solitaire game.
00:47:11
Speaker
And so when it came time to make our, our next game, which was Opus Magnum, I was like, Oh, actually specifically before it was Opus Magnum, we were working on this thing called Typhoon, which was like an open world.
00:47:22
Speaker
It was like a, like an open world, like harvesting and like submarine building game that we worked on for a couple of months. Cause we wanted to make a popular game. And the,
00:47:33
Speaker
I was more excited in that that Typhoon game about the solitaire. I was like, oh, it I'll have three solitaire games instead of one. i was more excited about the solitaire games and the programming language that you use to automate your submarines and not like fighting fish or whatever the fuck you'd be doing. And so I was just like, this this sucks. Let's just make a puzzle game and because that's what I want to be making.
00:47:55
Speaker
And so we we made Opus Magnum instead. I was like, well, it needs to have a solitaire game. And so I actually... we were We were just getting into like Hex Encounter war games. So we've been playing Napoleon at Waterloo, which is like a really old Hex Encounter war game in the office.
00:48:08
Speaker
And so I was like, oh, I want to try making like a little war game. And so I spent a bunch of time working on like a little solitaire war game for Opus Magnum, which you can play in Zack like, which is like the Steam version of my book.
00:48:19
Speaker
But it didn't really people weren't really understanding how to play. I think it's pretty good, but no one ever understood how to play. And so like after kind of giving up on that, in a fit of rage, I very quickly designed Sigmar's Garden, which is like one of the best solitaire games I've ever done. um And the Sigmar's Garden was really cool because it kind of acted as like a tutorial for teaching people and reinforcing what all the different elements in the games are. So it's like, wow, this like synergizes really well.
00:48:44
Speaker
um And so then we released that with it was Magnum and people loved Sigmar's Garden. At that point, it's like, okay, we've done it twice. Now I clearly have to do this in every game. And so we do. And it's, I don't know, it's fun. I feel like when we spend like even a year working on a game, I get really bored just working on that one game. And I don't really do game jams or things like that because they take a lot of energy. I don't want to like,
00:49:07
Speaker
spend a lot of energy making something that I can't like sell and release, you know, like it's less appealing to me. So I'll make these little solitaire games, those little game design experiments within a game that I'm working on. um And it's, they're they're really fun and people like some of them, not all of them, but some of them, people don't seem to like Pachinko Solitaire very much, but I like it.
00:49:28
Speaker
Well, you know, not, not everything has to be for everyone. Well, that's you say that, but when you when you when you sell games, they kind of you kind of want them to be for everybody. you want You want them to be for as many people as possible, of course. Yeah, but but you don't always get that. That's what the approachability of the main game is for.
00:49:44
Speaker
Yeah. so well And the funny thing is that Pachinko Solitaire, people's main complaint is that it's too random. That's Pachinko. Like Pachinko, yeah. So it was actually really hard to turn Pachinko into something that felt like Pachinko, but wasn't so random. And in the end, it's still too random, I guess.
00:50:00
Speaker
I like it. Some people like it. um Before we wrap up, do you have any questions for us? You told me I was supposed to prepare questions for you guys. And I'll be honest, I did totally forgot about that and don't have any questions.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, I don't really. i'm trying to think of what i know you make like real puzzle games. I don't. How are you to find real? Well, like ones where they have like a solution, right Like the thing that that Alan was talking about, right? Where it's like you you try to get at specific mechanics things and create puzzles that have... Do puzzles all have one solution or like do you ever have multiple solutions? Oh, there's multiple solution puzzles.
00:50:40
Speaker
Okay. ah like Often there's multiple solutions, but they are broadly the same class of solution. Okay, that makes sense. A lot of the work back on a Draconect puzzle is like, what is the experience or reinforcement that you're trying to give the player?
00:51:00
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, I don't i don't know. i'm not I'm not really into puzzle games that much, if I'm being honest. Let's stick on Solitaire
Balancing Randomness and Solvability in Games
00:51:10
Speaker
games. Have you played Hempuli's Solitaire Collection?
00:51:14
Speaker
I have, I played it earlier. I don't know what it ended up being when it released. I played some of those. Yeah. Probably ended up with like twice as many solitaire variations as the one you played. Yeah. Massive.
00:51:25
Speaker
Yeah. I didn't like it. I thought a lot of them didn't work.
00:51:31
Speaker
Is that because you're too much of a Soltech connoisseur? No, I just didn't really understand any of them and they just didn't, I don't very i don't know. i just i didn't I didn't really get any of them and I sort of was expecting to get them more.
00:51:46
Speaker
I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, it was it was an early version. i played like played quite a bit of them, but yeah, I never found one that I liked. I don't know.
00:51:58
Speaker
Did you play it? I didn't play the release version. I played several like as he was making them. yeah like i'm I'm not really a solitaire person. so like i um i I appreciated the design variety there.
00:52:16
Speaker
yeah Like I think he, like the like that anthology I think takes Solitaire to some weirder places than your Solitaire games have, um which like as a game designer, like I appreciate the weirdness more than I appreciate the Solitaire.
00:52:34
Speaker
Yeah, i think I think it's totally possible that the version I played was too early and they were still just like sketches of ideas rather than things that are refined. Like we spend like an inappropriate amount of time trying to refine our solitaire games into things that are like properly solvable.
00:52:50
Speaker
Like it's the line between like a good solitaire game and a bad solitaire game is really is really hard to judge because. like I feel like they have to... like it's It's very possible to make a solitaire game that doesn't feel actionable at the start, and that's like really bad. right like In my mind, like a good solitaire game... At the beginning of the game, there's obvious moves to start making so that you can feel like you're making progress, and then like you'll make some...
00:53:18
Speaker
You're constantly looking for patterns and making decisions as you go, but you have to like not overwhelm people, especially if you're playing like a totally open solitaire game where all the cards are revealed. like its It's actually quite tough. And I think this is of the things that works really well about Shenzhen Solitaire is that all the cards are faced up at the beginning, which is a little intimidating, but you'll see lots of moves to make at the beginning, and they're all safe moves. like You can't like screw yourself by moving like ah you know like a black six onto a red seven. like That's fine.
00:53:47
Speaker
You know? And so I guess like maybe there's like, if there's like a green six, you should have moved over, you know, like that's possible. But like, for the most part, like there's safe moves to make and it makes you kind of like, you make some safe moves, you get a little invested in the game and it helps that when you get stuck, you've at least made some progress into it. That's like definitely a good step forward.
00:54:05
Speaker
And so like you, you want to have like that quality to it and, I don't know. this it's it's It's weird. it's you know It's not like I have rules for making a solitaire game, but there's there's like a feel thing that I think is quite hard to get right. And not every... like I don't know. i Whenever I'm making one of these, I'll try lots of things, and lots of lots of the things I try do not work at all.
00:54:26
Speaker
And then you know when I find something that works, I try to refine it a bunch. And I've been doing... like It's actually one of the things that's... I saw the there was an article that... um where somebody interviewed him fully about solitaire games. And he was like guessing about how mine are made and like how they're, solve like are they all solvable or not? And like, he had seen me talk about how like some of the, like the ones I've made are guaranteed solvable. And he's just like, ah, whatever, you know? And it's, it's the randomness of solitaire is, is,
00:54:57
Speaker
is like a whole thing too, right? Like some of our solitaires, if you actually deal them out randomly, are so unlikely to be won that we had to write solvers and give people guaranteed solvable games.
00:55:09
Speaker
Whereas some of them, like Shenzhen solitaire, is almost always winnable when dealt out randomly. So it doesn't really matter if we give somebody an unwinnable deal because it's so rare that you know Maybe they just screwed up. Who knows?
00:55:20
Speaker
um But we've we've had I've been doing a lot of things lately, and maybe this is like a thing you don't want to talk about, is that like kind of like fudging the randomness to make the game better. Like in in shenji and in and Sawayama Solitaire and Last Call VBS, it deals out three cards at a time.
00:55:36
Speaker
And it's mostly random, except that it's actually possible to deal out... sometimes three cards that totally screws the player. And so I like in playing the game a lot, kind of realized it's like, oh, it's really not fun when this happens.
00:55:49
Speaker
And so I like detect when that happens and then like rearrange the card silently just to make sure that it's not like the worst version of it. And so I've been experimenting with stuff like that. Like the Pachinko Solitaire has a huge amount of... Because it's based on golf solitaire, which is actually an incredibly random and unfair solitaire.
00:56:08
Speaker
um And so like when... ah Like the Great Alien games, they've done a bunch of golf solitaires. And so they have like all kinds of power-ups you can use to like ameliorate the the randomness of it. But with this, like I just kind of like fudged fudge some numbers sometimes and like fudged the RNG a little bit sometimes to make it less just like unfun.
00:56:26
Speaker
But like... Now you're getting really deep into like you know totally manipulating the player and their experience. and It's maybe maybe a bad thing. i don't know.
00:56:38
Speaker
I think you should make a programming game that's about solitaire. You could be programming an AI to play a solitaire game. You could be programming a solitaire to deal out the best or worst possible deck.
00:56:53
Speaker
So in Exapunks, I was going to have that idea the the motto of Exapunks was hack everything. And so I was going to have it be that you program an AI to play the mini games in it.
00:57:04
Speaker
And just incredibly unfun. Actually, it turns out writing solitary AIs is not fun. It's really hard. And like most people I don't think could just do it naively off the top of their head if they didn't know how to solve a problem like that.
00:57:17
Speaker
And it requires a shitload of memory, which is never present in any of our programming game models. So yeah, we've we've definitely seriously considered that for X upon like, no, actually that would be terrible. Nevermind.
00:57:29
Speaker
Like I have to write solvers for our so our solitaire sometimes and I hate doing it and it's hard. Yeah, I'm not surprised. ah Well, thank you so much again for jumping on and recording with us.
00:57:45
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. This is really fun. ah Where can people find you online?
Exploring Physical Games with Coincidence Games
00:57:51
Speaker
Around the internet. um ah You can buy Kaizen, a factory story on Steam.
00:57:58
Speaker
yeah You can check out our website at coincidence.games, as in it's a coincidence that all the people from Zachtronics went and started a new studio together. What coincidence. Coincidence. Yep, coincidence.games, just spelled normally.
00:58:13
Speaker
We have... Kaizen is out, obviously, but we also have... I've been experimenting with physical games, so we did, like, two card games that you can buy. have a scratch-off... I made, like, a scratch-and-solve puzzle pack, which is a bunch of scratch-off games. Yeah, is that still going to be backable when it's possible? Yeah, you can...
00:58:30
Speaker
You can back it now up until it's still, I mean, the but so it's it's July right now, the end of July when we're recording this. This is out this will be coming out ah in September.
00:58:42
Speaker
Okay, yeah, it'll still be backable in September. It's going to be backable right up to the point where we get them and ship them, which probably won't be until like the end of the year. it's great It's been difficult to get the scratch off manufacturing just right. it turns out they're hard to make. wouldn't And wouldn't you know it, I'm guessing most of the supply is going to lottery tickets.
00:59:00
Speaker
Well, it's weird because there are companies, there's two in the US, there's two companies that make scratch-off lottery tickets, but they don't really do other stuff. And so like we're getting this manufactured by ah like a board game manufacturer. And so it's actually like totally different process-wise.
00:59:16
Speaker
Oh, Because lottery companies have to worry about fraud. And so it's like its own weird supply chain. And we have nothing to do with that supply chain. Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. I...
00:59:30
Speaker
I have so many weird one-off manufacturing complication stories that I'm sure I could have another podcast for you about, hey, did you know that if you want a classic wax sealed trading card, there's only one guy in the whole country in the United States that still has a machine that can do it, and he lives in a cabin in Vermont?
00:59:53
Speaker
Oh, that's funny. Yeah, I love manufacturing. I mean, it's it's there's all awful, but it's it's fun, too. Yeah, it's like, okay. You know, i'm im look, I'm happy for you, dude.
01:00:04
Speaker
You're the only dude in the whole country that still has a machine that does that. We had floppy disks manufactured a couple of years ago. That was wild. it's oh yeah. Oh, and any retro media, any retro physical anything.
01:00:19
Speaker
trying to We were trying for a project that didn't end up happening. I was trying to get like a nineteen thirty s tin toy. um That's ah that's a nightmare because we were trying to do it at scale.
01:00:35
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:00:38
Speaker
Mm, mm, mm. I guess machine and outsource it to people in the past. Exactly. you know, if I could just go back a hundred years, this would be the easiest thing to manufacture in the world. Cause they were being made for pennies.
01:00:51
Speaker
That's funny. And now it was, good then it was going to be like, all right, it's going to be $50 a unit. I'm like, no. right. Anyways. ah Yep. Check us out.
01:01:03
Speaker
Yes, thank you. Like Zach said, Kaizen Factory Story available now on Steam. yeah like It's approachable. approach It's very approachable. ah If you got worried about hearing like programming solitaire AI solvers, I can vouch.
01:01:18
Speaker
Kaizen is nothing like that.
01:01:22
Speaker
Yes, really good. Really good check it out. lot of fun. um Thank you again, Zach. Yeah, thanks. And thank you for listening to the Draconeck and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com.
01:01:35
Speaker
Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawadniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice, and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.
01:01:48
Speaker
Music
01:01:55
Speaker
you