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Comment by toma_caliente | Hacker News Reader

Zachtronics leaving game development is such a blow to the industry. Zach is directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of games we see today. His game Infiniminer was a major inspiration for Minecraft, he published a game that was also a book explaining his philosophy on puzzle design, and his games were genuinely fun with no BS.

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I dislike the games, since they are too close to work/programming to be fun for me (just like Factorio). However, the success of Zachtronics - both business and creative, is undeniable. I wish they were the ones to gain success with the original 3D cube digging gameplay and not the massively popular Minecraft clone.

I hear this a lot, but I personally don't get it. These games are the best part of my job (the problem solving) without any of the nonsense. Most games today are a grindfest that we convince ourselves is fun because it's happening in a beautiful virtual world.

Playing Zelda Breath of the Wild atm and I sort of feel this way. I love riding around the map but I'm getting a bit... tired

I view these games similarly. I don't think anything has helped me in my day-to-day decision making at work more than the time I've spent planning and designing my factory(s) in Satisfactory.

There doesn’t have to be (as much) nonsense on a personal project where you’re only beholden to yourself, can pick your own tech, etc.

(I’m sure people also have less nonsense and make money from it, but I don’t right now.)

Less, but not zero. Personal projects can still suffer from obscure bugs or undocumented behaviour in dependencies, unattainable goals, costs, and other non-bureaucratic frustrations. A significant part of the satisfaction of Factorio for me comes from the knowledge that, if something isn't operating as I expect/hope it to, I can _just look at_ the surface-level representation of the system to diagnose it. This isn't possible in software projects without a huge amount of investment in observability - which is rarely fun or prioritized.

Yes.

The programming game TIS-100 gives you a view of the internal state of the machine far superior to what exists with most systems. The exception being that Commodore 64 emulator that shows _everything_ going on in memory in real time.

More often (in the embedded world) you are debugging things via JTAG and a serial port (if you are lucky) or a GPIO-driven LED (if you are not lucky or this is super-early in the boot process). And often the JTAG is less than 100% reliable.

I absolutely loved playing TIS-100 despite having no clue what a real world counterpart would be. It was really nice understanding the limitations of the system and then trying to be creative to solve problems. I got through 3/4 of the game before I lost my save (on my GoG version). I just re-bought it on steam for the cloud saves. Same thing happened to my ExaPunks save.

The closest real-world thing would be something like The Connection Machine, which combined 64Ki processors in a hypercube. Individually, they had just a small amount of RAM for programs.

Today's GPUs are more about executing the exact same small program in a massively parallel way, and not individually programming each of the compute elements.

You know... it would be a fun project to make a TIS-100 in actual hardware on an FPGA or something. Actually, if you aren't the FPGA type, you could just write an emulator on an 8-bit microcontroller, and connect them all together. Bonus points for having each one with a display that shows its current execution state.

Yeah, I enjoy having a definitely-solvable problem with good restraints.

Unfortunately, the latter half of the programming games generally gets too messy for me. I lose patience with them and never end up completing them.

I don't regret buying them, though. I have a lot of fun with them before that.

I don't get it either.

I remember hearing the same thing about the show Silicon Valley. People in the workplace would say things like "OMG I can't even watch that, it's so like our daily lives!" -- is it? Yes we're coders, but is it?

Having said that to each their own :)

Zachtronics games give you a limited playing field with a limited set of operations. The fun comes from thinking carefully about small problems, and doing a lot with a little.

Factorio is more like work, because they don't know when to stop. There is just too much going on, too much complexity.

I always wondered how Zach felt about missing what’s arguably the biggest game industry boat of all time: his ideas in Infiniminer being the basis for Minecraft. In the early days the games looked almost identical. But one never became a household name and the other literally the top selling game of all time.

It sounds like he’s found peace with it and had fun and is on to something else. Good for him. That would be hard for me.

Well Western Culture generally gives the most credit to the first person to have an idea, when I personally find the second people (like Persson, also Sergey Brin) to deserve--in these cases--more credit. There's a shortage of second parties to inventions.

notch's decision to add survival and traditional RPG mechanics to Minecraft is what led to its mainstream success.

Based on Zachtronics' other games, I really doubt Infiniminer would've gone in that direction had its development continued.

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