This is much more directly distilled from factories, and industrial engineering. So SpaceChem had a slightly more direct comparison to computer architecture, as it was based on a sort of very convoluted computer architecture that doesn’t exist.
"Any puzzle game can create a solution, tear it apart and then get you to put it back together." Whereas with SpaceChem and Infinfactory it seems much more like you’re trying to convert coding into something more understandable and less conceptual. There have been a lot of games that have used a coding-like interface to communicate hacking, or interacting with computers, but the product is often not much like coding. Any puzzle game can create a solution, tear it apart and then get you to put it back together, but with our puzzles they’re so unlike traditional puzzles that they’re more like a task - a puzzling task - than a puzzle. You can create a really clumsy and convoluted solution that just barely works, or you can make a really tight and elegant solution. It seems that often with SpaceChem and Infinifactory there’s a wide spectrum of success.
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A lot of the puzzles in the workshop are: "Here’s something we managed to do that’s really strange, see if you can figure it out too!" So it’s a totally different kind of puzzle, and I often have no idea how to complete them. Ours are designed to be very open ended, and not about "tricks," necessarily, but just building different kinds of things which require thinking about how you’re going to construct things. So… kind of like SpaceChem, we have this quirk where people think our games are hard with the puzzles we make, but the user-created levels are always so much harder, and already that’s the case.
The primary reason, though, is that it’s hard to telegraph to players that, "Yes this game is out, but the scope of content and what you see in the game isn’t final, and it might change, especially early on." Letting players know that we are listening to them and want to build the game around their reaction.Īnd you’ve got Steam workshop support with Infinifactory, right? How’s that been? It seems your motivation for doing Early Access was slightly different to that of most developers, in that you wanted to sidestep people judging the game before you’d had a chance to adjust it to the public. I talked to Barth about how things are going with Early Access, as well as why the small indie studio decided to invest in a fully voiced story in an abstract puzzle game, and what it's like to have Jon Blow and Notch publicly playing your game. With its swarm of conveyor belts, pistons, and welders, Infinifactory extrapolates the ideas that Barth established with SpaceChem, translating them into 3D which understandably increases the complexity of the puzzles Zachtronics has created.
Gamasutra talked to Barth back in October about his motivations for this approach, and the benefits of having people play a game that isn't considered finished through Early Access it appears to have worked out exactly as he wanted.
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