![]() "I looked at it and five seconds later, I was like, 'Oh yeah, we need to make the game export these so that everyone who's not this person can make theirs just like that.' Just seeing that you could do that was all I needed. But that screenshot better fucking sell the game right away" "When people look at the Steam page, they're probably not going to watch the trailer. They had recorded a few frames of their factory from afar, spliced it together to make a looping GIF and uploaded it to the Steam forums. This involved building 3D factories that constantly produced products for alien overlords, and once again YouTube was high on Zachtronics' priority list.īarth and his team spent a long time improving on the video encoder, trying to find a way to make the created factories look fun and convey the premise of the game, but dissatisfied with the results, they opted not to ship this functionality.īut during the game's early access period, one of its more devoted players made an animated GIF of one of their solutions. The team instead fell back on the SpaceChem formula and tried to build another title that centred around puzzles with looping solutions, a project that became Infinifactory. And it didn't - it was way worse and sold way fewer copies." "It was just me and some other people making games on the side, but we were like, 'Okay, we've made some money, we can actually make a games studio.' We wanted to make a game that would be better than SpaceChem, more accessible, look better, and we thought we we're going to sell twice as many copies. "That was the game that made us into a real games studio," says Barth. The answer? Videos that could be uploaded to YouTube "because it was 2011 and that was the thing." A video encoder was painstakingly developed and, sure enough, SpaceChem clips began appearing on the growing platform. When he and his team moved on to SpaceChem, a spiritual successor, they knew they needed to find a way to let players show off their creations. "That was something we accidentally discovered through player behaviour." Zach Barth, Zachtronics "I'd never intended that to be a thing," says Barth. Fellow fans would then look at their solutions and find ways to improve it, again sharing the text. ![]() Players would then share their text on the forums, bragging about how few cycles they had been able to complete each puzzle in. The Codex of Alchemical Engineering saved players' progress but not their specific solutions - however you could export the text instructions for that machine to be shared elsewhere (to this day, Barth is still not sure why he coded the game this way). It was the Kongregate community that sowed the seed for the GIF function. ![]() "Some people were making money, but I was like, 'No, I don't care about that, I'm making these for fun, for myself.' Which is weird now and sounds crazy even coming out of my mouth, because I'm all about the money now apparently. "I didn't want to make money making indie games," he recalls. Initially only available through Barth's website, players encouraged him to publish Codex through Kongregate, suggesting he might make more money that way. Like Opus Magnum, this revolved around building a machine that took elements and combined them together. For its origins, we need to go back to The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, a Flash game Barth and his colleagues developed before the studio had even formed - "the first hardcore Zach-like, if we can call it that," he says. Instead, Opus Magnum - actually the second Zachtronics title to include a GIF feature - is built upon learnings from past games. Before the game even had graphics, it had GIFs" "We built it into Opus Magnum from the beginning. "Can you imagine being that kind of game designer?" "No, that would be terrible," Barth laughs. Was it a goal of the studio to develop a title that was inherently GIFable? spoke to founder Zach Barth earlier this year about the art of making such complex puzzle games instantly understandable, aided by the use of GIFs. In fact, all of its titles have now been made free to educators. Opus Magnum is one of many games from developer Zachtronics rooted in scientific subjects, with a view to exploring subjects like chemistry, industry and (in this case) programming. In just one looping image, you instantly get a sense of what the game is about: creating machines that automatically assemble different components together into the required structure. The alchemical puzzler has something of a viral quality with fans sharing their solutions to each of its puzzles via social media and forums in the form of GIFs. It includes Control (the regular edition), Greedfall and Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age Definitive Edition.It's likely that your first encounter with Opus Magnum was something like the image below. A new batch of games is coming to Xbox Game Pass in the next few days.
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