Are there any other developers who make puzzle games similar to Zachtronics...

Are there any other developers who make puzzle games similar to Zachtronics? If you're not familiar with them the games generally involve faux engineering/electronics/chemistry/programming in order to solve problems. I've played through their free games and started Shenzhen I/O, just wanting to see if I have more to look forward to in future.

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igg-games.com/sethian-free-download.html
imgur.com/gallery/NnXYR
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Holy shit I was trying to remember what these guys were called for years! thank you OP.

Have fun user.

If you played the free ones why didn't you start with SpaceChem instead? Shenzhen will be a lot more enjoyable if you've played TIS-100 first.

I've completed the main campaign of most of his games but haven't done 63Corvi for SpaceChem yet, or TIS-NET for TIS-100, or the Avalon City pack for Shenzhen.

I seriously doubt it, Uplink looks a little similar but nobody really does assembly puzzle games.

I enjoyed Engineer of the People the most, so went for Shenzhen first. I might grab Spacechem of TIS tomorrow.

The feedback on Shenzhen looks a lot like KOHCTPYKTOP but at its core it's more like TIS-100. There are even mechanics in Shenzhen that were almost certainly inspired by puzzles from TIS.

If I had to deduct points from Shenzhen for anything it would be a lack of novelty, it's pretty easy to play it and say "Oh this is like the circuit building from Engineer of the People with the code-writing and manual use from TIS-100 and the factory layouts from SpaceChem". Otherwise I think it my be my favorite Zachtronics game, it's definitely a little more challenging and satisfying than the others to me.

They're part of a very small pool of games I bought after pirating, and I think Shenzhen's the only game I bought into while it was still EA

Well, there is Human Resource Machine. It is an assembly puzzle game, albeit much simpler than any Zachtronics game.

How about Factorio? It looks promising, I've had it sitting on my desktop for a while

am i a pleb for liking infinifactory the best? its just so comfy to me for some reason

The UI in that game makes the programming feel way worse than it should be.

reminder that TIS-100 is on humblebundle right now

How is that even possible?

You could give Sethian a try. Info/download: igg-games.com/sethian-free-download.html

Wouldn't know, haven't tried it yet. Looks pretty similar to SpaceChem to me but I'm not sold on the game being worth four times as much as the other ones.


Thanks for the rec

It's definately the one i'd recommend giving people who don't know about Zach to play the first time. Very simple to see and plan ahead for what you want and don't want to happen, you never need a pen and paper to finish the campaign at all.

Possibly. The other games tend to be a lot more demanding, as even an inefficient solution can be hard to implement, as there's not always enough room to work with, and occasionally you have time limits, be they explicit or by just having trouble in delaying one input. You can almost always just cheese your way by leveraging the abundance of space in Infinifactory.
But I could see that being the source of the comfy.


That's my solution.

I'd see the pen and paper thing as part of the appeal more than something that would scare someone off. My Shenzhen binder is half-full of written notes and I have a stack of incoherent sketches and scribbles for different puzzle solutions that came to me while I was in bed.


No shit? I just googled "infinifactory gif", what are the odds

I've only posted that thing a few times on here and nowhere else. It's a strange feeling to have that shit crop up elsewhere. Even worse if you make something specifically for one thread, never post it again, the general topic gets co-opted by undesireables and it ends up in places that make you never want to post it again.

Some of the later puzzles are pretty neat, the one with the whale comes to mind. Designing a machine that either does or does not leverage doing rotations with large chunks gets tricky if you want any kind of efficiency.
I did like the .gif feature in Infinifactory. Takes a view point and just makes a loop from the point where the pipeline's completely saturated, at the touch of a button. Good publicity for Zachtronics as well when those things were shared around, as getting recordings to upload is and has generally been too bothersome for regular schmucks to bother with it.

If you're morbidly curious it looks like it ended up on Imgur with a bunch of other gifs, probably found its way there via Reddit via here.
imgur.com/gallery/NnXYR

It's definitely something that has me interested in Infinifactory and got me interested in SpaceChem in the first place, solutions looks incredibly intricate and are satisfying to watch when they're completed. It's something that the other games don't really have, I don't know if anyone would get excited watching a clip of a TIS-100 solution.

I was disappointed with this. I went into this thinking it was about exploring the syntax and lexicon of an unknown language, but the game is frustratingly linear, and when every you try to go outside of the intended route, the computer will throw “I don’t understand” or “I can't elaborate at this time” at you. The game also doesn’t give enough time for the player to learn the language, and while it does present complex sentences to the player, it immediately tells you its translation nearly all the way up to the end. It almost makes me what to make a completed version of what the developers were trying to do.

That should be "want to."

HRM is baby tier and it doesn't even feel rewarding, I completed all the challenges and unlocked nothing.
I'm glad I pirated it

I wanted to like it but even though I get programming just fine, assembly is just boring

Factorio isn't really a puzzle game, it's more like a Terraria or a Minecraft but with a tech tree and automation. You can work your way through everything without really any constraints by just building outward and slapping on more assembly machines or furnaces wherever and get a really ugly and inefficient layout that gets you to the end all the same. When you try to get into making shit efficient though it ends up possibly more autistic than Zachtronic stuff with balancing build rates and belt loads and shit.

Human Resource Machine is dogshit. It's literally just making simple programs with assembly. TIS and ShenzhenIO are fun because you're working with a limited toolset and limited space even though you're making a simple program.

How much longer until Shenzhen's finished and I can buy it on GOG?

...

Feels bad man.

It's been out of EA for two or three weeks now, the bonus campaign is out too. No idea when the DRM-free version is coming out but all of his other games are on GOG so it's a good bet.


The way it was pitched to me was "SpaceChem meets Dwarf Fortress", which piqued my interest, I'm not really that into sandbox building games or anything like that though

spreaking of factorio

I'll inform the Wizard Council.

Had he used his powers for evil, he'd be POTUS right now.

For some reason this made me laugh more than it should have.


Big Pharma is pretty good. Not quite Zachtronics - it doesn't make more than a brief pass at looking like actual pill manufacturing - but it does make an issue of constraints in the puzzle solving.

I wish more games had simulated computers with operating systems, stuff like TIS-100 is way too base level for me to easily understand and have fun with

...

That's a decision for council.

I wish they had introduced the achievement earlier because I think I have beaten 100 games by now.


Uplink? Hacknet?

Hacknet is a ton of fun if you want a movie hacking faux OS game.

I thought I'd get more messages the more I played. Possibly in increasingly angry Chinese.

...

Thank god Notch bit that bullet for Zach

he certainly could make better use of money than the autistic lardass who selled out himself into complete isolation and solitude

notch is going to commit sudoku in the near future but I don't get how Zach didn't go to Gensokyo yet

if you still haven't bought it, humble bundle has it under the $1 tier still

Ok I quickly caught on with the first three, but I'm not quite sure what to do with the Power on Reset Generator. Additionally do all logic gates just need to be a bunch of gummed together PNP/NPN gates? Is there no way to make more complex ones directly?