Hi, this is Mark Brown with Game Maker's Toolkit, a series on video game design.
Infinifactory is one of the funniest games I've played this year. Which is pretty impressive,
considering that the fact that it's not really a comedy game.
To get the joke, you need to know how the game works. In each level, you must fabricate
some complicated structure - like this 5-piece cross thing - by building a production line
that transports and manipulates blocks that plop out of a hole in the wall.
You build your machine with chunky cubic blocks like conveyor belts, pushers, optical sensors,
rotators, and welders.
After spending an hour carefully building a machine to forge that 5-piece cross,
I finally got it to work...
But, Infinifactory wants you to make ten perfect copies of the structure,
to prove that your machine is actually a functioning production line.
So, I let the machine run a few more times, confident that it would spit out nine more
perfect crosses, and then this happened...
The sheer absurdity of it. The insane comic timing. The slack-jawed disbelief of how stupidly
crap my monstrously complicated machine was. It had me doubled over in stitches, laughing
at it. It was either that, or cry.
The opportunity for impromptu comedy is not the only thing that sets the games of Zach
Barth apart from other puzzlers.
In fact, they feel so fundamentally different, that to put a game like Infinifactory in the
same "puzzle" genre as games such as The Talos Principle and Snakebird might be doing it
a great disservice.
Because when you play Portal, you're trying to discover the solution to the puzzle.
Whereas in Infinifactory, you are literally inventing a solution. And the use of "the
and "a" in that sentence is important because
typical puzzle games have just one answer. Maybe there's a couple alternative solutions,
or you could tweak the main answer slightly, or there's a solution that the developer never
intended. But in Infinifactory, the possible solutions are... Infinite. Well, sort of.
There's a lot of them, at least.
Which is shown very clearly in these end-of-level histograms, that show you how efficient your
solution is compared to every other player on Steam - in both your use of time and space.
That also sets Barth's games apart from other puzzlers - it's practically pointless to play
the same puzzle twice in The Swapper
but it's genuinely enjoyable to return to a completed Infinifactory puzzle and try to
make your solution more productive.
So maybe we should stop saying these games are about solving puzzles, and say they're
actually about solving problems. These are games where you have a goal, some materials,
a limited work space, and some tools. Your job is to reach that goal - in any way you
can.
That is why these games feel less like unravelling contrived riddles, and more like solving real-world
problems - like making production lines in Infinifactory, plotting efficient train lines
in Mini Metro, making spaceships in Kerbal Space Program,
or writing code in Spacechem.
Yeah, Spacechem has actually got way more to do with coding than chemistry - right down
to the logic gates and subroutines and debugging.
And that's cool, for two reasons. One: programming is basically the best puzzle game in the world,
because it's truly open-ended and it's wonderfully satisfying to dream up, jot down, iterate
upon, and execute some totally unique solution to the overwhelmingly complex problem at hand.
And two: it means the game, and those like it, can be truly educational, without being
"educational games". SpaceChem was actually used in a few schools in the UK, according to the
trade association, TIGA.
Similarly, Minecraft's redstone - a mineral that lets player wire up mechanised contraptions
- is introducing tonnes of players to simple coding. Or, not so simple. Minecrafters have
used redstone to make a calculator, a GPU that can draw shapes, and an 8-track sequencer
that can belt out Pachelbel's Canon in D.
By the way, Zach Barth also made the blocky, competitive mining game Infiniminer that would
directly influence Minecraft so he probably dies a little inside every time you say that
Infinifactory controls like Minecraft. Just a heads up.
His other games, if you want to search them out, are also notable problem-solvers.
That includes games like The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, which is about programming commands
into rotating arms to transfer imaginary minerals. Bureau of Steam Engineering, which is about
connecting up boilers to steam-powered weapons on a robot. And KOHCTPYKTOP: Engineer of the
People, which is an almost impenetrable game about designing integrated circuits to meet
specifications.
And in the new game from his studio Zachtronics, which is called TIS-100, you literally write
simple assembly code into these blocks to manipulate data. You're even encouraged to
print out a PDF reference manual with all the commands and instructions that you need.
This seems to be part of a trend of programmers making games about programming. In 2DBoy's
next game, Human Resource Machine, you write commands for office workers so they can automatically
complete jobs. And in Quadrilateral Cowboy, by Blendo Games, you write commands into a
DOS-like interface to shut off alarms and unlock doors so you can break into highly
secure buildings.
The point is that if you play any of these games, you'll clearly see that by taking inspiration
from real-world problems, like programming or engineering games like Spacechem and World
of Goo can actually be more fun than those built from arbitrary puzzles.
You get the satisfaction of making something work (and the comedy of making something that
doesn't). The same problems can be played multiple times as you try to make a more efficient solution
And it might be easier to make the levels themselves. In a postmortem on Spacechem,
Barth revealed that his puzzle creation process was essentially to throw together interesting
inputs and outputs, make sure the puzzle can be solved, and then reorder all the levels
based on difficulty.
Don't take this as me saying that I want to bin traditional puzzle games.
The Witness, for example, is one of my most anticipated games at the moments. Take it more as a friendly
reminder that this is still a small, burgeoning group of games and there are still loads of
real-world problems to take inspiration from in your new, open-ended, problem solving game.
Thanks for watching! Let me know your favourite problem-solving puzzler in the comments. Also,
please like the episode, consider kicking in a few bucks a show on Patreon, and if you
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Subtitles by the Amara.org community