Exapunks (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Exapunks (2018)

zachtronics.com

333 pointsyu3zhou4123 comments

For those who don't know -- while Zachtronics is no longer making games, Zach Barth is still active now under the company Coincidence Games. They just game out with a spacecraft engineering puzzle game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2536720/UVS_Nirmana/?cura....

Without specifically looking into it but just going off of Steam releases and headline, I'd assumed Zachtronics closing was Zach Barth leaving the scene, and the company that made Kaizen etc were some of his former colleagues continuing on without him.

But apparently the Kaizen-making company is still Zach Barth?

So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.

Zachtronics wrapped up because they all got a bit burned out by the yearly release pace, and Zach tried to become a teacher. He didn’t like it, and when the rest of the team continued making games, he joined up with them and thus Coincidence. Further down the discussion I shared a podcast where he tells the story.

I understand why he might not want to and hope I would have the character to do similarly in his place, but they should really lead with "by Zach Barth" rather than "from the original Zachtronics team", which still sounds great, but tbh at least for me bumped it from "buy and play immediately" to "wishlist".

From other comments in this thread, it seems I am not the only one who misinterpreted that as not including Zach himself

Maybe he sold his company, or never completely owned the name himself?

Yes, as I recall, he sold Zachtronics to investors sometime after TIS-100 so that he could focus on making the games and have someone else worry about the business.

Here is something I (Zach) wrote up a while ago in an attempt to explain it:

> Back in 2016, we sold Zachtronics to a company called Alliance, who we worked for as employees and made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward. In 2022 we stopped working for them and started a new studio called Coincidence, which we own and run as a sort of co-op that allows us to work on projects together, or not together, or anything in-between. (By "we" I mean the five of us who made all the Zachtronics games from SHENZHEN I/O onward; the team was much more dynamic before that, as described in the first few pages of ZACH-LIKE.)

> I still work for Alliance and maintain the Zachtronics games, but we don't own any of that IP, so anything new we make is going to be attached to the new studio and the new name.

(I did spend a year teaching computer science at a public high school, but that overlapped the last year of Zachtronics, rather than being between Zachtronics and Coincidence like it's often reported.)

At Coincidence, we have released two puzzle games so far, Kaizen: A Factory Story and U.V.S. Nirmana, and have more (four?) in the works. I'm hoping that I'll get to work on some less-obviously-in-the-genre games soon, but I haven't git initted anything yet so I guess it's too early to say.

Hi Zach, Fortune’s Foundation is my favorite game ever. Thank you!

Thanks! I still play it often, which is not true of any of my other games.

My favorite is 20th Century Food Court in Last Call BBS. Some of the other games remind me too much of work (I’ve bought all of them including the coincidence card games but I have only beaten this one), whereas this one reminds me of fun times I had making synths in Logic and VCV Rack for fun. Highly recommend!

I always wished they would make a management or simulation game, I think 90% of all programmers play Paradox games or Tycoon games etc. and I know their take on it would be amazing.

Any chance of making it onto GOG? I prefer to pickup games from there whenever I can.

It's unlikely. We do have a DRM-free version of Kaizen on itch.io, which also includes a Steam key so that you can enjoy the best of both worlds:

https://astralogicalgames.itch.io/kaizen-a-factory-story

Can you extrapolate a bit? Why is GOG an undesirable platform to be on, especially as you seem to be fine with DRM-free releases elsewhere (which is awesome, btw)

Finally, thank you for SpaceChem! Still great, even after all these years

My understanding is that GOG is not necessarily undesirable, but they are very selective: Unlike Steam or Itch, you have to convince them that it's worth their while to sell your game. And their choices of what (not) to sell are not infrequently baffling. Lots of developers have gotten burned by that, including Zachtronics

I have a hard time believing that GOG rejected a Zachtronics game. They're popular, high quality, and a good match for the GOG audience. An GOG already sells several of them (I own SHENZHEN I/O and Spacechem on GOG).

Well, it has happened before:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/confusion-surrounds-gogs-rejec...

Really weird decision. Though it was added to GOG about 3 weeks after that article was written.

And GOG has its share of slop (e.g. a dozen Whale Rock Games which have obviously fake reviews).

The rejection of Opus Magnum got a lot of attention at the time, which probably caused GOG to reconsider. But most developers don't get that kind of attention, if a game of theirs is rejected. I've seen multiple developers of games that I like, saying that they've given up on GOG because of the curation

The Turing Complete dev was pretty unhappy with them and ended up leaving again despite having been accepted and making it onto the GOG store.

What were they unhappy about? Do you have a link to further information?

I'm not quite sure what the expectations of semi-privacy are here, but he's talked about it on the TC Discord, in the #development-branch-feedback channel (a search for 'unprofessional' should find it).

You don't know how much more vibrant the world is knowing that you still make games in it.

Thank you for all of those hours. (And making the tools that help me teach my apprentices.)

I adore your games. Would be curious to know your thoughts about using AI for game development. Personally I find it gross, but I am trying to be open to different views.

It's good at some things (research and programming) and terrible at others (art and game design). In general, I try to look past the tools being used and focus on what is being made.

Surprising to see you endorsing seeing past the tools as a maker of games whose audience simply cares more about the problem being solved than what gets actually made.

Of course I cannot vouch that there aren't people who played games like Shenzhen I/O because they cared about building signs for a fictional corporation.

I just want to say thank you. I've bought most of your games and they scratch an itch for me that few things in life do. I really appreciate it!

Love your games Zach! Hope my kids will take to them at some point.

As others already have I just wanted to thank you. Spacechem is not only what made me start playing games again but playing with computers altogether after a rough couple of years, and will forever be one of my favourite gaming experiences. So happy to hear you’re still making so -and-aptly-called Zachlikes!

Zach I love your games! Thank you! Keep em coming!

Thanks for EXAPUNKS! I love it.

Hey, as someone born in Ghana I just want you to know I think it's pretty cool you used a Mankala-based game as the minigame this time :)

(at least, that's what I'm prematurely concluding based on ten frames of trailer footage)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala?wprov=sfla1

Having played it: yep! It's a solitaire Mankala/Awele game. You use the sowing mechanics to try to clear the board, with chains scoring exponential points.

love your games zach! keep making cool stuff!

> So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.

It's not clear that this happened here, but I could imagine that someone successful enough not to need the money might literally prefer to have their work evaluated on its own merits and not have the outsized level of attention that being well-known brings. I remember reading in Eric Clapton's autobiography (which might or might not be an accurate retelling of course) that the original plan for Derek and the Dominoes was to name them "Del and the Dominoes" and basically hide the fact that he was the guitarist since he was tired of all of the attention. According to him, "Derek" was a slip of the tongue from someone on stage one night, and the record label eventually decided to try to capitalize on his hype by marketing the fact that he was behind it.

Listening to the podcast linked elsewhere in this thread, it sounds like he’s not at all reached the level of financial independence to indefinitely fund future projects. In fact the only game that went moderately viral (Opus Magnum) is not owned by him at all.

This is really disappointing to me as many of his games are some of my favourite games of all time and I assumed he’d be set for life off them. I guess the target audience is just too small.

If I was Notch I'd send a meagre 10 million or so Zach's way out of gratitude. Karma is a thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if they rejected it (if it were to happen), Notch is a horrible human being, only coming out as such after he sold his company. Microsoft mostly scrubbed his name from Minecraft besides one mention in the credits, and seem to have distanced themselves from him entirely, including not even inviting him for the game's 10 year anniversary celebration.

In case anyone's curious I recommend the podcast episode with Zach Barth on the Draknek and Friends podcast to hear where he's at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLrh8wcBy8I

Happy to hear that he's continuing developing games and we can expect more to come!

This is also an advertisement.

I think it's sporting to pay for advertising and not sporting to try and sneak it in on people.

The person who submitted this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Zachtronics, why are you assuming it’s an ad?

If jawarner isn't being paid to make the post, then it's not an advertisement, unless you're using a broader definition for advertisement than is commonly accepted.

This is the guy who invented Minecraft.

He now appears to be inventing 0x10c? ;)

Well, he invented both the parent and the cousin of Minecraft.

What's that referring to? I meant Infiniminer, I'm not too familiar with his other work.

Infiniminer is the "parent" of Minecraft, because Notch made the latter after he was inspired by the source-leak of the former to port the code from C# to Java.

Infinifactory is the "cousin" of Minecraft, because it was built using Infiniminer's engine directly by Zach.

thank you, buying both their games. i'm a big fan of his entire series. i'd just assumed he was gone off the scene

there's also ARGs hidden in all of them, not sure if you're all aware of that

well args in his original games, not sure about the new ones

This is one of my all time favorite games. It and Shenzhen I/O do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

My biggest surprise from playing EXAPUNKS is how futile it is to try and pre-optimize a solution. I had to remind myself time and again to solve the puzzle first, then try and try and optimize it.

While the games are fun on their own, I recommend playing them at the same time as a friend. Trash-talking about finding more optimal solutions really added to the overall fun of playing the games.

> capturing the essence of what makes programming fun and put them into a game.

They definitely straddle there line between "those is a fun video game" and "it looks too much like my job" for people in the industry, but there's a whole genre of workplace simulators for doing other people's jobs vicariously. A semi truck driver would see playing a semi truck simulator in the same way, but American Truck Simulator is quite popular. Anyway, play Zachatronics games if you find them fun, but if you don't, then, uh, don't feel bad about not playing them.

Too true. I used to absolutely love Zachtronics games. Then I became a professional programmer and I just can’t play the programming themed ones anymore. Kind of a shame because TIS-100 is what made me want to be a programmer in the first place.

I used to feel the same but, with the LLM mandates made me have more fun playing Shenzhen I/O than actually programming at work. I'm one of "those people".

I have a strong feeling that with the advent of AI these kind of games are going to come back in style. Many programmers myself included aren't doing that much "coding" in the workplace anymore.

Even if we ignore AI for a moment, I doubt many programmers actually solve the kind of challenges Zachtronics games are known for on a daily basis.

For me, it’s less that I’m burned out on coding and more of a feeling that if I’m going to be doing puzzles in assembly I mine as well just do it in real assembly.

As an older engineer, I love the Zachtronic games because they're pure development and I don't have to drive consensus or herd cats.

I should set up a LARP where 30 people solve TIS-100 together

Make sure you get those JIRAs filed and pointed. Standup is at 10:30.

Hey can you do this high priority thing real fast? It shouldn't affect your timelines, just throw some AI at it

We're pushing the rewrite back another quarter, so that soap integration needs to be actioned asap.

Will the LARP costumes require suits and ties and a Company Song, ala 1960s IBM, or require scruffiness and nap rooms ala dot-com-bubble tech startups?

...our vision of global strategy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo

There's a good vice article about that very topic.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-do-we-play-video-games-t...

There's a portion of American / European Truck Simulator's playerbase who are truckers. I've even seen a few streams from guys playing ATS/ETS in their sleeper cabs. Some of them have said the game is a way of processing the stresses in their jobs. I found that very interesting.

It's an interesting contrast to programmers and programming games. For me personally, the best way to process is to do just about anything else. Programming games are most fun when I haven't had to do much coding recently. Though sometimes, if I'm already in the flow, it's fun to play one of them and ace it since I'm already in the right mindset.

I feel the same as you about programming games, but can sort of see it for truckers, because surely some truck drivers picked that job because getting in the "flow" of long-distance driving appealed to them. I presume the trucking games try to appeal to exactly that feeling without, as you say, many of the actual stressors of the job.

So I can imagine it might let them reconnect with that feeling and be a relaxing experience much more easily than a programming puzzle game would let us reconnect with what we love about programming. Being a puzzle game it inherently will involve some frustration, which is the thing I want to escape from after a day of programming.

I love the Zachtronics games and Zach-likes, but, for hardware engineering the minor differences with reality drive me crazy. Such as the clock edge timing in Shenzhen I/O and other points where something so lifelike doesn't work the way I know it does in real life.

I also get this problem when I play Linux-terminal-emulating games like the various "global hacker" CLI based games.

I had a great evening with a friend playing through TIS-100 together. We plugged in two keyboards and mice so we didn't have to pass them back and forth.

I enjoyed both TIS-100 and Exapunks though I didn't have the patience to finish either of them. For me they get too hard (due to constraints) too fast (if not straight up obscure).

Their catalogue is well worth buying.

https://store.steampowered.com/developer/zachtronics

"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!

I think about this game often

I'm good friends with the writer of Eliza. If you enjoyed it, you might like his novel.

https://matthewseiji.com/process

It's one of my favorite visual novels and is so underappreciated.

Maybe it's because (unlike others in the VN space) it totally eschews unusual settings, gimmicks, or flashy set pieces to sell itself... I only bought it because I liked the tidbits of story in Shenzhen and Infinifactory, by the same author. Every part of it is unbelievably strong though.

I tried to replay Eliza this past winter after having played it and loved it when it came out. But I couldn't get past the start of the game because not only is it so dark, BUT SO MUCH OF IT CAME TRUE!

The in-game phone apps that just show a looping pixel art city scene with haunting ambient music are mesmerizing, even moreso than the beautiful solitaire game.

Eliza is one of the only games that I enjoyed so much that I sent fan mail when it came out — it’s nothing that a standard Zachtronics game but it stands alone as an excellent visual novel.

i loved playing ShenzhenIO! So much so that i ended up buying and registering the domain of the fictitious company you were hired by in the game. That domain redirects to Seam now

I've been writing a game off and on that's sort of at the intersection of a Zachtronics game and... Starcraft? I guess? With some Factorio in there, for good measure.

The idea is that you have to break into and exfiltrate data from a laboratory that uses their own transputer-like architecture. Write a mobile program to explore the network, another to start migrating the data, and so on. Migrate too hard and the humans notice and reboot the network, kicking you out. There could be other players in there too. Of course, the nodes run the lab's terrible version of Forth. There's no UI, you connect via a TCP socket, and are expected to write your own tooling.

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or if I'm having a psychotic break.

I'd play it.

hooray! one potential user, market validated

The no-UI part will probably deter a big portion of players. Allowing own tooling on the other hand sounds cool. Adding an optional UI, or getting someone to do it for you would certainly help. But then again, if it is interesting enough, someone might just do so after you launched it without a UI

that's all true. i'm not really trying to get a huge audience, just make a fun internet thing...

Exapunks and TIS-100 were a huge influence on my career trajectory.

I was always scared of assembly and low level stuff as a kid / college student, who mostly was trying to learn from random sites that assumed a lot of CS background.

Even though they're not near the complexity of x86, these games made me realize that assembly isn't really that scary. I still don't daily drive x86, but they gave me the confidence to go through a few Advent of Code and Project Euler problems. Having a really stripped down assembler was a fantastic learning tool!

Without them, I'd probably still only be working in Python (which is a great language, but abstracts a lot)

Printing the physical zines in exapunks as a reference was very cool, and a good throwback to when games shipped with boxes and detailed manuals.

Spacechem was my intro to Zachtronics, and it consumed me when it came out. The concept of instructions inside the actual work area is amazing and still makes my head spin. I consider beating Ω-Pseudoethyne one of my top coding/steam achievements.

I fell off for a bit because the leaderboard grind against friends felt draining, but rekindled my joy by mostly ignoring them (Unless I'm way out of distribution). I'm so glad Zach and the team are back.

Same, I played SpaceChem in high school and it captivated me. A lot of my solutions were unoptimized sync monstrosities and the boss battles filtered me pretty hard, but man it was satisfying to figure out a solution and just watch it create the molecules. The music was amazing too, it was on my study playlist all through university.

Oh man, the music in all their games is top-notch!

Print ondemand can be ordered for less than $5 per zine in Lulu, since 2022 or so. I guess Zach doesn’t make a cut from it since this $5 probably barely covers the cost of print and Lulu fee :(

Some irony in so many posts about AI becoming more capable at programming, at the same time, top post on hackernews is a game about where you code by reading a magazine like it's 1997.

I unlocked the Redshift handheld video game system; became obsessed and made a video player ( https://www.reddit.com/r/exapunks/comments/tzv1m5/redshift_v... ) among other things. So fun! I should progress past Redshift.

bought opus magnum recently fun game, I have played exapunks a while back, it's not my cup of tea. I love programming for fun, but the language didn't gel with me. I liked their other games better, opus magnum is definitely in the top 2

for anyone on the fence about these games: I'll highly recommend Opus Magnum as the starting point. It's a good intro-to-Zachtronics game because every problem can be brute forced if desired - in many of the others, you need to make some clever arrangements and logical leaps to progress, due to very limited playing field sizes.

they are quite unique and very well-made though. if you like sequence-puzzle games but are getting tired of the endless flood of Sokoban-flavored things, give it a try!

Exapunks was my first Zach-like and I loved it. It and most other Zachtronics games have a very well-tuned difficulty curve that pushes me out of my comfort zone just the right amount. I think getting stuck for short periods of time makes for a good puzzle game.

I finished Opus Magnum a couple weeks ago and I found it a little frustrating because of the same reasons you brought up. The game doesn't force me to be clever; I can be as simplistic and inefficient as I like. I did go out of my way to design a couple efficient designs, but it didn't feel especially rewarding.

FWIW, my favorite game from them is Last Call BBS. It has several great "mini"games that feel rewarding to just complete.

yea, I don't think Opus Magnum is my favorite either. I just think it's a good starter, to get a gentler introduction to the many-step puzzles and those optimized-build leaderboards - if those leaderboards call to you and you like fighting your way towards the left, you're going to be a Zachtronics addict in no time.

if you don't enjoy them, then you've at least had a sizable taste of the mechanics and know why it's not your thing, rather than getting hard-blocked early on because you couldn't figure out a trick :)

I think I liked Infinifactory the most because:

1. It had the least overlap with my day-job work.

2. It's somehow more-pleasing to watch a mechanical (albeit simulated) 3D machine do work, contrasted to the flickering playgrounds of Exapunks or Shenzhen IO.

Opus Magnum is one of the most polished Zachtronics games IMO. The presentation is great.

Exapunks can be pretty tricky with the distributed nature, which share some similarities with TIS-100. Like Opus Magnum, though, there are no restrictive code size limits, meaning that some puzzles can be solved with brute force masses of code. It's not as bad as Shenzhen I/O where you have to deal both with a tiny MCU and routing.

Reminds me of one of my favorite games: Hacknet (https://hacknet-os.com - https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/). Likely contributed in a meaningful way to me becoming a programmer. I think I have Zachtronic's SHENZHEN I/O on my wishlist—will have to check out his whole catalog.

85% off and $1.49 USD right now for the summer sale

I wish Zach would start making games again. :-(

He never stopped, he’s just under a different label: https://coincidence.games/

They’ve released two Zach-likes, Kaizen and UVS Nirmana.

Blatant self promotion, but if you want the full story, he chatted to me about it on Software Engineering Daily after the release of Kaizen: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2025/12/18/designing-in...

This is an excellent interview; thanks for posting it.

What's up with the AI narration at the beginning? Or is it just someone with an incredibly steady voice and AI cadence? It's uncanny and weird considering that this is a podcast hosted by actual humans!

It’s not AI, that is an honest to goodness human! She reads the intro to every episode on a daily podcast, she’s just well practiced.

I'm glad!

The official "spiritual successor" seems to be Coincidence studio - their games in the genre being "Kaizen: A Factory Story" and the recent "U.V.S. Nirmana".

https://coincidence.games/uvs-nirmana/

I haven't played this, but just reading the description...

> Learn to hack from TRASH WORLD NEWS, the underground computer magazine.

It seems like a missed opportunity not to name-drop 2600. But I guess they wouldn't be allowed to do that anyway.

TWN is totally 2600 fanfic. Except for the part where it's got a bit too much in the way of gorgeous art. Same size, same rhythms, same vibe. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=25151...

Trash World News has a way less annoying editor than 2600

Older, but I love me some Zachtronics.

Always wish Exa could scale a little more. I understand that it's supposed to stay at the low level of coding, but when i realized unfolding loops was a very valid way to improve your score, I learned a lot, and also realized it's not quite for me.

All the joys of code reuse (as silly as that might sound) do get kinda lost in the game. I still loved it, but I'd kill for a sequel that was a little higher level on the tooling.

The thing is, you can play it in any way you like. You don't have to optimize for speed at all if you don't enjoy it

Yeah that's what I did, but the focus on lower level programming meant a lack of part of what I find fun about coding which is code reuse optimization and abstraction. I sorta reached the limit of what I could do in Exa (hell i was just copy pasting my code from VS code).

I'd kill to be able to build my own small helper libraries in something like Exapunks, but that's way beyond the scope/flavor they were shooting for. I do think there's a neat game there where you setup different problems in a way so naive coders find out their abstractions/libraries aren't perfect (what do you mean i got a null?), but obviously that's a different game at that point.

Every zachtronics game is a gem.

I spent so so much time playing SpaceChem. My favorite game of all time.

All games by Zachtronics can be highly recommended to this crowd here, obviously why his games have come up here https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Zachtronics

  - SpaceChem

  - Shenzhen I/O

  - ...

  - the funniest concept is probably a game about assembly programming (TIS-100) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100

The one thing his games suffer from though, for me, is that a few hours into one, I question myself whether I should not just be programming to begin with...

also can recommend the soundtracks! I often listen to computer game soundtracks while programming, my favorites are Deus Ex (original) and Zachtronics OSTs (it tracks, good puzzle game OSTs are naturally suited for fading into the background while concentrating): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zachtronics+ost

My favourite Zach game so far is Infinifactory. TIS-100 was also fun, until it started feeling like work.

Its discounted on steam summer sale, I bought it and played all evening yesterday.

Printed the zine.

It took me to my happy place.

Thank you.

Why is this relevant to HN? (especially since it's nothing new?)

Hey.

Stop stalking me. It's creepy as fuck. Be better.

embedded youtube video on an advertisement site

how do I unsubscribe from your blog's ads?

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