Building Games at Zachtronics with Zach Barth

27:13And so like everything got really small and it just got kind of awkward and just like the flywheel stopped spinning. And yeah. And so we never had to do a game every year, but that was just I think we were always very responsible. Yeah. If you're using AI to code, ask yourself, are you building software or are you just playing prompt roulette? We know that unstructured prompting works at first, but eventually leads to AI slop and technical debt. Enter Zenflow. Zenflow takes you from vibe coding to AI-first engineering. It is the first AI orchestration layer that brings discipline to the chaos.

27:51It transforms free-form prompting into spec-driven workflows and multi-agent verification, where agents actually cross-check each other to prevent drift. You can even command a fleet of parallel agents to implement features and fix bugs simultaneously. We've seen teams accelerate delivery 2x to 10x. Stop gambling with prompts. start orchestrating your AI turn raw speed into reliable production grade output at zenflow.free so for us it was like okay we can make about a million bucks off a game on average we spend about a million bucks a year on like the five of us in our office and our health insurance and our taxes that you have to pay so if we do about a game a year we can keep this going indefinitely right and so obviously indefinitely it was about five years long when we all started getting burnt out and again feeling like things started kind of closing in on us like can we even experiment anymore and we had done experiments in the form of mobius front and eliza and neither one of them was very commercially viable and i think with the walls closing in it's like okay we can't really swap up who we work with you know like nobody wanted to like leave and i i wasn't about to like fire anybody just to get some new blood in there you know so we're just stuck you know and so we kind of realized it's like okay like i want it well and so it's complicated too because i I was getting kind of burnt out again.

29:09And I was getting really interested in something I had always thought about as my backup career, which was teaching. And so for years, I'd been saying, oh, if I ever like burn out and quit the games industry, I want to be a teacher like that seems cool. You know, our games are kind of educational. And I think I would like that. And so the plan was kind of to wrap up Zektronix and get my teaching degree and become a teacher. But like things ended up happening in a weird order where like COVID happened. And then when I started getting my teaching degree, I realized that you don't need one if you're teaching computer science, and they just let me in right away.

29:43And so I actually spent my whole year teaching while we were also finishing up Last Call, which was our last game. And so I ended up, what was supposed to be leaving Zachtronics teaching, starting teaching, turned into Zachtronics and teaching, both wrapping up at the same time at the end of like 2022 or whatever, because it turns out I didn't like teaching at all and was not cut out for it. And so yeah, and so I just sort of found myself at the end of that year with nothing going on right sektronix was over and like pretty dead you know i mean we still run all i still maintain all the games and stuff but the idea the possibility of any new work i started like at the last minute i'm like oh what if we kind of like stuck around and made some more games just with like a smaller team and they're like you could do that i'm like but what about with the other programmer they're like no we're not going to pay for him and i'm just like oh this is over it's like if i can't have i've been working with this guy keith for like my whole career and i'm like if i can't have keep working with me like what's the point and so that was when I realized that the stuff with Alliance was like and we're just going to maintain the old games this is kind of over yeah and so I sort of found myself as soon as I got out of school I had hernia surgery so as I'm recovering from that I'm just like cool I'm just down and out and I have nothing going on and that was when we started coincidence and so we had planned it out so I guess I actually knew exactly what I was doing coming off of school and starting coincidence because we were trying to move into our new office for coincidence while I was recovering from so my abs didn't work but yeah we had as we were wrapping up zaktronics and stuff some of the other people on the team wanted to start working on a project of their own like not without me without me but like not with me you know because i was going to teach and stuff they wanted to do a project i'm like okay if you guys are going to do a project who's going to own it what's the company structure and they're just like uh i'm just like no we need like a company structure you can't just do this willy-nilly and so i i like designed this company structure that would allow them to do the thing they wanted to do and then when i realized that i needed to start doing stuff again and start making games again to make money.

31:32That's when it really came together. I was like, okay, we'll build this company that's like a co-op. But nobody gets paid a salary. Everybody just gets paid with what they work on. So we can run our contract work through it. We can make games through it. The company can own the games and sell them. But we all own the company. So it's like ownership is distributed, but also not. We all own the stuff, but it's owned by a single entity. So it's legally allowed to be sold without conflict. And yeah, and that's coincidence. It's a normal company, except that no gets paid salaries and we i keep a spreadsheet basically like a ledger of all the money coming in and all the money going out and who it goes to yeah and it's a very recognizable co-op structure that sounds really cool yeah it's kind of uncommon in games to be honest games require a lot of like seed money and so and i think a lot of people like a lot of long development times normally i guess for you guys it's quite short but yeah yeah long development times and there's often a lot of unknowns and i don't want to say that game developers are like bad software developers but I think a lot of times like indie projects have a lot of unknowns and just kind of messy logistics and stuff.

32:32And so, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I think people keep telling me it's kind of uncommon and I don't hear about a lot of other people doing the same thing. So I think we're special, but it's totally just like a normal, if you were just going to like run a software consulting company, that's exactly what you would do. Right. So I think to like programmers, it seems really normal to games people. It seems really weird. Yeah. To stay on, I guess, coincidence and its structure in the games industry bit we will talk about a game shortly so throughout talking about zactronics and i guess um some of the comments you made recently you know you talk about the tension between like paying the bills and like being able to experiment and that was like a big pit of what you just mentioned like was kind of the end of zactronics how does that then work in coincidence so like you know you sold zactronics you didn't have to worry about the cash flow and the salary you have that safety net but now you know it's what you make from the games that is it how are you thinking about being able to experiment now Yeah, well, so in some ways, we're less able to experiment than we were before.

33:26So Kaizen was published. That's how we've never had a publisher before. Even when Alliance owned us, we were still self published, like it was all funded off of, you know, Zektronix made money every year. So we were just kind of funded off of that. And we when we started up coincidence, we needed to start finding work. First thing, a couple of us went and got a job at a software startup, like an ed tech startup. So that lasted a couple months until I got fired. I don't know if I should talk about all that It was messy and it was unclear what I was there for It turns out remote companies can be super isolating and it can be really hard to know what people are talking about or what anything is I'm not a fan of remote work and remote companies We have an in-person office We're all physically in each other's presence often and I think that's important because otherwise stuff gets weird like when people don't actually get to be together and bond as people i don't know it was a weird thing no i totally get that yeah i had a manager at a remote job sorry i had a manager at a job who said that like although we were all remote he said it's much easier to be remote after you've met them and you can put their like hear the messages in their voice in your head that makes everything easier but if you never have that experience it's yeah i don't know yeah well sometimes hearing their voices in their in your your head and their voice doesn't help right yeah it's it's tough i would say like it's remote work works really great if there's no conflict sure right but i think remote work maybe if there's conflicts which comes i mean like i don't know like sometimes software is boring but like sometimes software is heated and there's lots of like personal stuff especially in a startup yeah especially in a startup and especially like doing something that's like kind of unknown like games are weird you know like they're like a creative product but they're also a business product software is often not creative or it is like a little bit i think games are just weird yeah and so i think it's really bad for resolving conflicts and that that was what that's what happened but but the thing with me is that it's like something that in person with normal people could have been solved really quickly and really easily and and the remote work aspect of it and the isolation of the remoteness just kind of spiraled it into a very messy situation fair that was part i guess like a tangent from coincidence so now you'll come back to coincidence well that was the first thing we did a coincidence because coincidence allows for like people to be like contracting or whatever it's just it's a structure for anything and so that's what we started off at and then when i came back and when i kind of like tried to bring back people that i had gone there to the startup with and the first project we did that made us money was another educational game for amplify because it turns out i convinced them that they wanted a game and we made them a math racer game and so that is why they were nice enough to let us release it on steam so that way it wouldn't just disappear into yeah proprietary hardware yeah yeah exactly we made those three games for them at previous exactronics and then like there's nowhere to play them.

36:15They sold them to like a weird Irish multinational company that put some of them on the app store. But then like those got pulled also. And so they just die. And I'm just like, we just need to be able to sell this on Steam. So we can just keep like a version of it for ourselves alive forever. Right. That became Ad Astra. The funny thing of that is everybody read into it way too much when talking about our studio. They're like, oh, they make educational games now. It's like, no, no, we don't. Like we did that for money. It says on the Steam store page we made this for a client and they let us put it here and people are just like i remember you announcing that and there was a lot of description about why and how you did that yeah exactly no people are like they make educational games now and it's like it's because he was a teacher and it's just like no that's not because we needed money because we were desperate and they're good people so yeah they're a good customer so we did that and then that that gave us some time and then we found this publisher called astrological and no connection to ad astra and they were very excited to work with us and they funded kaizen just off of me waving my hands around giving them a pitch and so yeah they funded kaizen and we made kaizen and it came out perfect yeah let's talk about the video game what is kaizen so kaizen is a we should drum up some sales for kaizen while we're doing this podcast yeah absolutely it is if i was being totally honest right kaizen is exact like you know like a zacktronic style puzzle game it's a lot like games we've made at zaktronics in fact it is i would say mechanically it's a lot like what if you crossed opus magnum with infinifactory but glad you said that we were tasked with making the most literally like when they gave us the money they're like you guys have to make a game that's really approachable like even opus magnum is kind of intimidating for people this is the publisher the publisher yeah and this was there and they've changed like kind of who runs it and their missions changed a bunch they used to be like a puzzle like a thinky games like publisher or puzzle publisher now they're strategy games which are a lot more tolerant i'd say of complexity than like tweet indie puzzlers.

38:10But the objective we were given when we started was to make the most approachable Zachtronic style puzzle game. And so we did. And I'll be honest, like I focus on the negatives more than the positives. And so we're sitting at about a 90 % on Steam and the 10 % of people who thumbs down our game are almost entirely people who liked our old work and thought that this game was too easy and too dumbed down and too short. I can see them. These are the people still doing Opus Magnum competitions on the Discord. I know these people. Oh, I love those people. The Opus Magnum fans are, I feel like the people on our Discord are some of the ones who have been most open to Kaisen, weirdly, but it's the sort of casual hardcore Zektronix fans.

38:49There was a tweet by Notch. That one, it really cut straight to me, is that he was just talking to some other game developers about how, like, yeah, like, Kaisen kind of sucks, you know? Like, it only took five hours to beat. It just was getting good, it ended. And it really cut straight to my heart. Not that I am friends with Notch, but... Yeah, that's rough. There's a lot of people like that. And I totally get it. And I honestly kind of agree, right? And we've added like a bunch of bonus content to the game, some of which is much harder, but it's still fundamentally a game that was designed to be approachable.

39:19Sure. And so I'm talking about this as a weakness, right? Because I see I focus like 10 times more on the negatives. In my heart, we're sitting at 50 % on Steam because those 10 % negatives are so much more strong than the positives. But I think the real less toxic version of interpretation of this is that I think we succeeded at actually kind of making a game that is a tutorial for all the other Zaktronics games, which is not helpful for me because I don't own all the other Zaktronics games. but I think we made a game that's kind of an introduction to those games that we really like sanded off so many of the things that were unnecessarily complicated and maybe we sanded off some of the stuff that was necessarily complicated also but we really made a game that does away with a lot of the stuff that I think made it hard for people to pick up opus magnum interesting what kind of stuff are you thinking of there in opus magnum one of the big parts of the game probably one of the strengths of the game is that you build a machine that builds these molecules, but it does it in a way that's automatically pipelined.

40:16And so your program, we call it tessellation, right? Is that you're, you build this little program, but your program just repeats like back to back to back to back to back. And so we slide them like as close together as we can. So it like creates this like tessellating pattern of instructions. And the way that we show this in game is with like little lights that cycle and tell you which instructions are running, but it can be really hard. Like when your program starts looping and specifically when your first instructions start running before your last instructions have finished running, people are like, what is going on?

40:47And it's like, well, it's tessellating, you need to use like the time stretch instruction if you want. It's like, it's actually really hard to explain. I've been unable to explain it to people. It's kind of like a you just have to like get it. Right, right. If you see it, and you think about it, you'll probably get it. And I think a lot of people do, right? Opus Magnum was super popular, made millions and millions of dollars, which is really good for us, right? Well, really good for Zetronics, not nice. But it did very well. And so I think people are clearly able to understand that system. But also, that is one of the things that kept people from picking it up and figuring it out.

41:18And so in Kaizen, you make one product at a time, right? And we still loop it. So visually, you get the satisfaction of watching it run over and over again. But sort of like what happens in one iteration of your program has nothing to do with what happens in another iteration of your program. And it simplified a lot of stuff. It made it a lot easier to do another thing, which people complained about Opus Magnum, is that in Opus Magnum, you hit start, it runs. And then when something goes wrong, all you can do is hit stop. And then you don't, you have to remember like what went wrong and what do I need to change about my program?

41:48In Kaizen, you can just scrub back and forth and you can edit your program at any point in time. And so you can just like kind of keep working forwards where like you run your program a little bit, you build the next step, you run it, build it, and then you can slide back and forth. And so it turns out this is actually kind of confusing in a way, because like a lot of people, I think often think of times going forward and not also backwards and so you need this sort of like weird oh what's the like slaughterhouse five kind of like a sense of time and when things take place but so people do struggle with that a little bit but I think it opens up this thing where you don't have to like remember the state of your machine you just like look at the state of your machine and I think honestly I think that's maybe part of why people think the game is too easy is that if you're good at the timeline and you're okay with time going backwards it makes the game a lot easier You don't have to remember where everything was when something crashed.

42:32And it makes it a lot faster to play the game. And so I think we succeeded like on these little things. But it is a much easier game. The puzzles are much easier. The tool set is simpler. The tool set is smaller. Right. It's just very straightforward game because we wanted it to be. And it's both the strength and the weakness. And so I think if I were to recommend games that I've made to anybody, Kaizen is absolutely the starting point. Right. It is the best, the most polished, the most approachable. It gets at the fun thing, right? It lets you build machines and optimize them and compare against your friends and stuff.

43:05But yeah, it's also the weakness of it, I guess. Yeah. I think it's very... you're talking back and saying how it's a good entry to your past games, but I guess also, you know, Azure is the first game... I know you've published some physical games and card games and stuff as a coincidence, but as the first video game from Coincidence, I guess is also a good introduction to what you're going to put out next, presuming you're intending to keep working on Zack Likes. Well, hypothetically, coincidence could do any kind of game. But I can tell you that, yeah, I'm not working on anything other than Zachtronic-style puzzle games at this time.

43:37So, yeah, we have a bunch of data that we're working on. Cool. Awesome. It's one of the challenges of working with the publishers. You're always wondering, like, OK, cool, well, we just spent all that money while we're making the game, so we're back to having no money. What do we do next? Right? And, like, Kaizen has not done well enough that we're making like mad royalties off of it, you know? So it's been kind of a, it's like, I don't know. It was like our strongest launch for like the first two weeks. And then it was now like, it's kind of like flattened off quite a bit. It's not, it's no Opus Magnum, that's for sure.

44:08Everyone's playing Silksong. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so not that Opus Magnum was in the news for very long either, but yeah, I don't know. So we, you know, we're trying to figure out right now exactly like what are we working on next? Where's the money for it coming from? I have no idea. Yeah. So let's take on Kaizen for a bit. So speaking of difficulty, obviously a lot of the difficulty in all your games isn't necessarily in the initial solve, but in the optimization and the graphs, which as in all of your titles have completely ruined my life. For folks who haven't encountered your metrics before, can you tell us a little bit about that system and I guess how it drives the gameplay and how it's implemented?

44:43Yeah, so with Spacechem, Spacechem was the first commercial game in this pattern, but I had made some like Flash games and stuff before that, like the Codex of Alchemical Engineering was a Flash game that I had on Congregate. And Congregate has leaderboards or had leaderboards. I don't even know if you can still go to Congregate and play games anymore. Certainly not Flash games. So they had leaderboards. And so I was just like, I guess I'll hook up leaderboards to my game. And so I ended up hooking it to like, when you solve a puzzle, how fast is it? When you solve a puzzle, how small is it? And I hooked these up to the leaderboards.

45:11And people on the forums on Congregate got pretty into it. And they started, one of the weird weaknesses and strengths of the Codex of Chemical Engineering is that I knew how to save progress in Flash because the game keeps track of which puzzles you've beaten, but it doesn't save your solution. It instead gives you a chunk of base 64 text that you can copy into a text file. I have no idea why I did that. It doesn't make any sense. Like clearly I could have made it autosave. Maybe I thought people would want to like version multiple saves, but it's like I could have just added save slots. I don't know why I did it.

45:40It was a long time ago. I was just getting started programming games. I had never made web games before. You know, things are a little different like in a web game. And so maybe I was afraid of people like losing their solutions if they like clear their flash cookies or something. I don't know. So I did it this other way that was weird. But the side effect of it is that people were able to share their solutions with each other on the forums and improve on each other's solutions. And so when SpaceCam, when we were working on SpaceCam, I'm like, okay, we need a way to allow people to compare their scores against other people's like leaderboards.

46:09We need a way to allow people to share their solutions with people in a way that lets them explain to each other as like a technical person. Here's what I built. Here's how it works. And so we ended up adding export to YouTube functionality, where it would record a video of your solution and then upload it to YouTube. You would type your YouTube credentials in plain text into the game. And then we would sign into YouTube in plain text. And then for HTTP. And then upload a video. And so this was a really long time ago. We were really bad at programming. We did that. And then we knew that leaderboards were bad.

46:40And so as people with a background in math, we're like, oh, we'll just do histograms instead of leaderboards. because it's like, we don't really need to like attribute the top 100 people who all copied the best solution, right? We can just show like, what's this distribution of scores. And so we did histograms in SpaceCam. And they were very successful. I would say it worked really, really well. Portal 2 had briefly had histograms in it for scores because they were SpaceCam fans. Not that it made a lot of sense in that game. But ever since then, we've been doing histograms instead of global leaderboards in our games.

47:11We have this thing where you know, any you can solve a puzzle any number of ways, but we can add arbitrary metrics like speed or size or instruction count or area. And if you start adding metrics, people can start optimizing degenerately for those metrics. And then we can make that kind of become part of the gameplay. And so we end up shipping that on all of our games now just sort of by default, because if we were to not do that, people will complain probably. And it's very cheap to add. I actually think it's less, it doesn't seem like it's as effective as it used to be. It used to be that people got really excited and everybody talked about it i sort of don't know if like new players aren't responding to it in the same way or if it's just that like social media has kind of gone silent on a lot of topics and so we just don't know how people are engaging with our games so i actually had this as a question because you said you spoke about the evolution of this feature on the dacnet podcast recently and you spoke about its evolution over different social platforms and so i was going to ask you you know social media has imploded i don't know how it works anymore like what what does it even me now.

48:08And so I was interested in how that had affected this. And it sounds like it has. I guess. It's sort of just like a large hole in my sense of the world, right? So it's like, I don't even know if it's, I don't know. I have no idea. It's hard to tell what's going on. The other thing I was going to say, when we got on Steam, we actually got access to proper leaderboards for SpaceCam. And so we added friend leaderboards, which our intuition was that global leaderboards are garbage, but friend leaderboards are great because you know your friends and if they're cheating that's a friend problem that's a you problem not a us problem and so a lot of this stuff is about decreasing like the attack surface for like cheaters and and stuff so we just don't have to like try to like moderate that all of the global leaderboards for all of our games we eventually got them in the form of our fans keeping track of the best scores and so they are way more rigorous about inspecting people's solutions making sure that they're not using exploits, they can spot the exploits from like a mile away where I would be like, sure, it's fast.

49:05I have no idea. So they maintain those leaderboards. And I don't know if maybe they would prefer that we did it. But I don't think I could do as good of a job as they do. So yeah, I think it works out okay in the end. Awesome. But yeah, jumping back for a second. Yeah, like this was the thing that in our like an Opus Magnum, everybody was on Twitter, for instance, talking about, oh, they love the competing and the gifts and stuff. And And the GIF export feature, oh yeah, that was the other thing. So with SpaceCam, we had upload to YouTube, which was, I guess, appropriate for the time. When we were working on Infinifactory, we were going to do export to YouTube, but I couldn't get like a good angle.

49:39I was trying to do a thing where you like pick an isometric angle and render it, but it didn't really look good. And so we didn't ship an export feature. And then one of our fans mocked up a looping first person GIF of their factory running. And I took one look at it. I'm just like, holy shit, this is it, right? GIFs loop, factories loop. we can like isolate the portion of the factory and record those frames. And it's just like, I had it within like a day or two. I had completely rewritten all of our YouTube code that we didn't ship to crap out GIFs. And it was just like, this is amazing. I love this.

50:08This is the coolest feature ever. And so when we did Opus Magnum, we had that feature at launch and it was in like a little branded frame that said Opus Magnum on it. And it just like blew up Twitter. Right. And, and people, there was at one point not like, wait, so Opus Magnum came out in 2017. I'm going to say like a couple years ago like three, two years ago Reddit changed something about their algorithm that caused Opus Magnum GIFs to start popping up on people's feeds who had never heard of Opus Magnum and this is from the Opus Magnum subreddit so it's just like and everybody like so many people showed up and they're just like what am I looking at?

50:43What is this game? Somebody explained this to me like I'm an idiot on Reddit with this huge influx of people who had just seen these GIFs and it's like yeah they're really cool looking right? and i that worked really well with opus magnum and we did gifts in kaizen and just like no one posts gifts no one cares you know they're not as cool looking as the opus magnum gifts the opus magnum gifts have a lot of rotation the pipelined repetition is is very cool looking i guess they're very abstract as well right like everyone you can kind of know what's going on in the kaizen one you see a tv boom put together or whatever yeah oh yeah yeah it's not the same yeah i don't know so it's always hard to tell it's like was opus magnum just like truly the best game that i could ever possibly make or is like are things different with how stuff spreads now like i have no idea maybe we need like upload to tiktok functionality in our games now i probably yeah we've like yeah some automatically choosing the algorithmic song of the day yeah speaking of the visuals i realized you said what the what the style of the game is but one of the things i want to ask about that so you know it's set in like 80s japan manufacturing which is a manufacturing you said you've always been to electronics that's not surprising it's a common theme for you shenjin I.O.

51:49You played with it. You played with it in a couple of things in Last Call BBS. You said this game is kind of like a mashup of Obus Magnum and Infinity Factory. So I was kind of interested in, thematically, did you arrive on this from trying to make a simpler Obus Magnum, or was it you wanted to make another manufacturing game? Like, where did the theme come out? I wanted to make a game about the theme, and then I made a game to go with the theme. Cool. Which is, like, the wrong way to do it. But, like, I don't know. At this point, it's very hard for me to just come up with, like, oh, this set of mechanics would be cool in the abstract because i've made so many games like i've used up all of my ideas for mechanics that came to me just as mechanics and so the way that i make most of my games now is to like think of like a scenario or like a story and then try to come up with like okay what's like a cool mechanical or systems kind of like what's how would how do they do computing in this world and it's maybe not the best like the best way to make a game is to have like a really good idea and then make that game you know and a lot of people do that for their first game is it's like something that they'd been thinking about for a long time that they made but like i've made so many games so i just need to be able to just like come up with game ideas constantly and they have to be interesting and so for me the crush i lean on is trying to evoke a narrative thing and so when we were at so last call bbs was a collection of little games but before it was that we were trying to make a game about manufacturing in japan in the 80s and so it just seems like it wasn't working and it was like too small and too boring and so we ended up pivoting that into 20th century food court which was originally a game about manufacturing like stuff in japan in the 80s you know this is because you know you said previously that last call bbs was a bunch of ideas that hadn't worked and i was like no there's bunch of there's loads of kaizen in here in between the robot making and the food court okay that makes total sense that's awesome yeah yeah but then i'd been like we ended up pivoting to this weird thing where it's like oh it doesn't take place in the 20th century it takes place 800 years in the future and they're trying to recreate it's like a parody of the 20th century and that was what we ended up settling on and then we bundled it up with all these other games and then but then after we shipped last call and a couple years had passed i just kept myself like i kept finding myself thinking i wish we just made the game about japan in the 80s you know because i'm really interested in the time period i think we can really evoke it in an interesting way like in the office we're all kind of like intrigued by this as somebody who like grew up in like the 80s and 90s i don't know just the idea of japan was very intriguing right and obviously like in real life it's like no it's just like a bunch of people who live in a place like it's you're being weird by like obsessing over it but there's still this like vision of it and like watching like movies from like the 80s and stuff and it just like really evokes a thing and so i don't know just like wanting to make that game and wanting to like explore that story and just like focus on this time period and you know like people make historical tv shows all the time and historical movies and so it's the same kind of thing right it's like they're not always accurate but just kind of evoking the idea of a time period in a place is like a thing that is sometimes really interesting to do.

54:37You get to explore aesthetics of things. I mean, in some ways, you're kind of like reducing real life to like this weird Disney version of it whenever you do like historical, you know, I don't know, like historical romances are about this like all the time. It's like, what if we turned like the 1700s into a time of like beautiful, sexy people and not just everything smelling like shit like it probably was in real life, you know? I don't know. That's what we do with history is we turn it into different things. And so just really coming back to this wanting to like wanting to make this game and kind of geek out on it a little bit and so when it came time to pitch some games to astra this was one of them and they liked the idea and it kind of fit with what they were thinking you know it's they're backed by a non-profit like a math non-profit and so they need stuff that's kind of like family friendly right and so this kind of hesitate to use the word cozy but like this kind of cozy story about like a guy going to work at of job and it's you know maybe there's like a little bit of like light romance maybe not it's just like very cozy and safe and nobody's gonna feel weird about putting this in a school yeah for sure so they just they like that we liked that and so just kind of all aligned that's awesome yeah but then it was originally gonna be a 3d game i had no idea what the gameplay was i'm like you're gonna build products and i don't know anything else i knew it was gonna be about building products probably out of cubes because we wanted to make it physical the original idea for so 20th century food court is about assembling stuff but like you don't assemble it spatially it's more it's almost like when we were developing the game we talked about it being like a sort of like the algebra of products which is cup plus purple soda equals cup with purple soda and then you can put a lid on it and stuff and it's like this representation of like adding these things together and coming up with like you add like two symbols you get a new symbol but it's like every puzzle has its own little set of symbols and how they transform when you manipulate them with these tools so it's actually not spatial at all it's just like symbolic manipulation it just looks like food and that was originally what we were going to do for building products like oh like a keyboard musical keyboard is like a plastic body plus like eight keys plus four black keys and like you know it's like it's like an algebraic thing but it like wasn't it was hard to follow that logic for a lot of things right it is and like a lot of stuff hides what's in it that was actually why we settled on food is because food very with the exception of like burritos food almost always shows you what it is like a burger you can look at the side i mean i love like burgers and puzzle games because you look at the side you can see all the stuff stacked up on it and so food exposes itself in a way that most things don't so when we came back to this topic it's like okay this needs to be somehow we need to be able to like show you what you're building the idea of like we're gonna make stuff out of blocks and originally i was thinking it'd be 3d but again 3d has that problem where you don't know what's inside and there's like too many dimensions and too much like too much freedom honestly and so that was how we settled it like okay you're going to make pictures of things like we'll we'll kind of like take all the products and put them at an angle where you can kind of see all their components that go into them and it feels like assembling electronics but like obviously things are they don't have any like inside you know you build a vcr it's just flat right so it's like obviously most of the magic of a vcr is on the inside not the outside but we're going to kind of reduce it to the outside and just assemble a picture of it and so that was yeah that was the compromise we landed on but originally we were thinking it was going to be like a 3d block building game or something with machines and it didn't end up like that at all on that second style stuff and you know talking about being 3d one of the things that i mean and i may be misremembering some past electronic games but there's it seems to me there's a lot more animated art and voice acting than previous games is that all a consequence of the publisher or is that just a stylistic change like i'm used to the story being delivered via emails right like this is a very different delivery mechanism just in shenzhen really that's the only one with emails really exapunk well that one has like people come to your door and you talk to them okay i don't even think they're actually emails in exapunks there's a chat room there's an ai that talks to you but that's like in a little window that pops up and then there's like cut scenes of people coming they're simple right they're just a picture of a person but they come and talk to you and those are fully voiced in exapunks there's a lot of voice acting in exapunks i need to do some replays here is what we're learning well shinjin io we We made Shinjai-oh in four months.

58:49I don't even know how. We can't do anything in less than a year now. Kaizen took us 18 months when it was supposed to take 12, right? Like we've gotten very slow and like kind of overdoing it on the art, I think a little bit. But yes, Shinjin was like four months start to finish. I mean, we spent time adding extra content, but it was very quick. But the extent of story artwork is that it's like we have little postage stamp size portraits of the characters, right? And it's all in emails and stuff. And so it was very cheap. no voice obviously there's it's such a minimal game with exapunks we started with so there's that so opus magnum we had like cut scenes where there's talking heads that like their own little portraits and they like pop in and talk to each other so that was a little bit but still no voice but that was still like a little bit of a an elevation there's like backgrounds of rooms that they're in and characters talking and then in exapunks we did a little bit of voice acting and we found that we actually got a really good return on voice acting because it's like I don't know, like the voice acting in X-Punks was probably like$20 ,000, right?

59:45And so for a game whose budget is closer to like a million,$20 ,000 is nothing. And I think it really, players responded pretty well to it. We were able to get good performances out of these like real actors who can do like real voice acting. And it just kind of elevated the game a little bit. And so everything after that, we did voice acting. Mobius Front, which no one played, has fully voiced cut scenes in that. Eliza's a visual novel that's fully voiced, like tons of text. it's like a fully voiced visual novel last fall didn't have any because it didn't really make sense to put it's like an old computer like it doesn't you're not gonna have a lot of voice acting and the games are weird spooky noises in x bug bugger or have you how you pronounce it yeah exactly yeah the forbidden path is what we call it yeah yeah so we we had all these tools in our toolbox when we went back to do kaizen we're like oh yeah definitely we'll do voice acting for this do voice acting cut scenes i think we went overboard a little bit with some of the art and the cut scenes, like they all take place in places.

1:00:40But that was also the point of the game, right? Is that we wanted to capture this sense of place. Like, you know, our artist who did all the story art was in Japan drawing and painting like old factories and stuff like that. Like these buildings still from the era that still stand. And so I think for a game that like one of its kind of like big strengths is that it's almost a little bit like a fake travel log. In my mind, like it's, I don't go on a lot of trips internationally because it's expensive and they're hard to put together. And it's hard to see stuff, even when you do go places. I think that these games are kind of like a little bit like it's like going on a vacation a little bit.

1:01:13And so, yeah, we can take you back in time too, which is like really hard to go on vacation back in time. I always think that'd be the coolest thing. That's like, I'm not a guy with a lot of fantasies, but I fantasize about being able to go on vacation back in time. I think aside from the part where everything like gets you killed and smells like shit. Right. If you're like a femoral. Yeah, that would be like the coolest thing, you know? Lend in, don't let them know. Don't, you know, here's money for the time period. it you know like it would just be like the coolest thing ever to go i'd probably be too afraid to go on a trip back in time though i don't there's so many places that i'd be afraid to go in the world now i'm trying to imagine what the zach what the zach like mechanics are set in this yeah yeah but in some ways like that's what kaisen is is like take a trip back to the 80s you know and you get to see some stuff that looks like the place and yeah i don't know see the food yeah nice that's why so many cut scenes and kaisen take place in like bars and stuff yeah well yeah Yeah, I mean, that also fit in perfectly.

1:02:04You know, you said you were worried about romanticizing and whatever, but I think it does a very good job. I mean, the characters will also just outright talk about, you know, being normal people, but I think it does a very good job of just portraying working life and what, you know, schedules are like and stuff. And yeah, it was very evocative. On the technical side, so I believe traditionally, you mentioned C-sharp and that I think traditional games have been like your own framework with SDL2. Is that still the case in the coincidence era? Yeah. So we, with Spacecam, we started using XNA because it was 2009 and that was the thing to do.

1:02:36So we started using XNA, but really quickly we realized that that's not going to work on anything other than Windows back then. And we have Linux fans, we have Mac fans. And so we switched to writing our own. Turns out XNA wasn't doing that much anyway. And so we made our own version of XNA basically that used SDL. And so we did that for Spacechem. We used that again on Ironclad Tactics. But we started, so XNA is all just like immediate draw calls, like the sprite batch is like the thing they call it. I think that's what they call it there too, because we still call it our sprite batch. But it's basically like you turn a bunch of 2D drawing calls into like a dynamic mesh, and then you draw it using the GPU.

1:03:17And so we did that as like our XNA replacement. That's how XNA works under the hood, I'm pretty sure. But one of our programmers, this guy Keith that I worked with for a very long time, he had this idea. Or it's like, well, what if we built a scene graph dynamically? I don't even know where he got the idea. He was doing a lot of Haskell and functional programming. And so it's like, what if you did graphics as functional programming, where instead of having the side effect of drawing, you just return an object that gets plugged into a tree, that gets returned, turned into an object, and gets plugged into a tree further up.

1:03:49And so you make all these function calls, and you end up with a tree that was constructed of things that all get drawn after you've built the tree. and so this was called like scenes like a scene graph but rather than like a scene graph like a lot of scene graphs like in unity has a scene graph too a lot of them do but you create an object and it stays there so you create an object once and then it stays there until you remove it or change it and it just gets drawn every frame and so we were generating a scene graph every frame which is nice because you don't have to keep track of like the state it's just like oh god like what's in the scene graph when did i last update it whose job is it to remove this or update it.

1:04:23Like these are all things that I don't want to, these are all things that create bugs in software, right? If you create an object and you don't know who is in charge of it, that's a bug, you know, just waiting to happen. So by returning a scene graph, building a new scene graph every frame, you're, it's kind of like drawing your game every frame. You always know stuff's only going down if you want it right now. It's kind of like an immediate mode thing, except you're generating a scene graph to describe it all. And so we did this, SpaceCam started off of being like XNA and then turned into this scene thing.

1:04:51And we had this like horrible hybrid where like some stuff is drawn with these scene graphs and some of them is drawn immediately ironclad tactics was drawn entirely with scenes and so entirely with this like scene graph thing and two of the educational games we made were same thing entirely done with scenes the performance on it was terrible like for making like little 3d games it was actually like we spent a lot of time drawing text because we had to assemble these huge scene graphs for like text and we try to build like oh this is an object that like describes like a block of text we don't have to have a bunch of little characters in the scene graph which is like one text block thing and it's just like i don't know it just kind of got out of hand and then around that time was when unity was picking up so this is like 2013 and so for one of our educational games we were like should we i feel like it must have been like our other programmer who was like way more into like using tools that other people were using like so we had two programmers keith and colin and so keith was really into making his own weird shit that's like the guy doing haskell and colin was just like he worked with me on visio and he likes c++ and he was very into like using tools that other people were using that are like, like things that are contemporary.

1:05:52And so we had this, they used to like argue about programming and stuff because they had these two totally different philosophies. And so I had to have been Colin said like, we should use Unity for a game. So we did. And it was messy because we didn't know how to use Unity. And you just get all these objects created all over the place. But like, we made a game, we shipped it. And best of all, we were able to put it when, when Amplify switched from Android to iOS, we were able to just like make an iOS build and it was easy. Whereas trying to port all of our C Sharp games into iOS was like impossible, right?

1:06:23We ended up actually having to, in order to port our C Sharp educational games to iOS, we made it so that we could host our engine in Unity and then kick off a build. And so we made like an object that gets dumped into the scene that like dynamically renders itself using all of our old scene graph stuff. And like the performance on it was awful, but we saw with unity we're like okay this is really cool you can like make a build and run it anywhere which for us has always been really hard and so we did infinifactory a 3d game in unity i think that's maybe part of the reason why it was 3d is that we felt really confident making a 3d game because we had a 3d engine that we were already using for 2d games and so we did and i made tis 100 in unity using their at the time new ui system and the thing we realized is that the tooling on unity is definitely you just end up with stuff in the scene and you don't know how it got there or what it's doing there if you change a file you might i was always really afraid of accidentally changing a file and even though we had everything in text mode and could diff it and check it in you still don't really know what all the changes are you make a change it changes like a million lines in this huge text file that has all your shit in it like you don't really know what you're changing and so there is the uncertainty of not knowing exactly what's happening with the game we had some like build reproducibility issues where like sometimes textures would get detached like every time we'd make a new build of the game, I'd have to make sure that like one of the characters didn't turn purple.

1:07:41Because like, for some reason, like the texture reference kept getting messed up. I still have no idea why, right? I still have to be on the lookout for that whenever I make a build of Infinity Factory. Yeah, so there's that it was expensive to use Unity, like the licensing fees on it were quite high, and they were switching to stuff that was even higher. And then the big thing that made Keith refuse to ship another game in Unity is that when we got to the end of Infinity Factory development, it was slow. And so he was trying to figure out how to profile it and making it faster. And it was like almost impossible.

1:08:08Right. And we're not the first people to run into this with Unity. You know, the thing that people say about Unity, Unity makes it really easy to start a project and really hard to finish a project. And it was true for us. TIS 100 had abysmal performance. The performance was so bad that a developer from the Unity team contacted me because game programmers love my games. I was like, hey, can I take a look at your source code? I can help you make your game run better since it's a Unity game and I work at Unity, etc. I sent it to him and he's just like, yeah, you could try capping the frame rate to 30 frames a second, that was the only thing they could think of, right?

1:08:38Because I wasn't doing anything wrong. It's just that their UI system was really, really inefficient for some reason. I have no idea why. And the performance was abysmal. And it was a game that was trying to look like DOS. It was crazy, right? Between those two experiences, Keith refused to ever use Unity again. And I was like, at that point, I don't know. I was like, how could we possibly make a game without unity like the tooling is so good but i don't know i was just when somebody takes you hostage stockholm syndrome yeah i was stockholm syndromed and using unity because like we had built up some tooling in it and it was just like i was so used to it but he's like no we're not going to use unity anymore and that was when i went to work at valve so i actually ended up using unity at valve before they killed unity at valve because they have their own engine that they want people using instead of unity but when i came back from valve to work with keep again he had spent like the 10 months that i was at valve writing his own game engine and it was based on casey miratori's stuff with like the handmade hero okay writing a game engine from scratch and see that like you don't need anybody else's shit you can just write your own game engine from scratch in c presumably using sdl but he had implemented like live reloading in c and all these things and so keith had watched all this and then keith was working in c but i told him there's no way in hell i'm using c or c plus plus and so we built up our own version of that in C sharp.

1:09:55And so we have live reloading in C sharp. It was all we'd switched entirely to immediate mode stuff. So no more scene grass, you just call draw and just draws something, right. And we switched to all immediate mode GUIs. So like the way you do a button is you draw a button and then the function that draws a button returns true if the user clicked on that button right then and there. And so it's all like an immediate it's hard to describe immediate GUIs because like I can't show code while we're talking about it. But if you look it up, you'll see that like the flow of the program is also the flow of drawing your ui is also the flow of logic for it right like you can like the idea that like a button the function that draws the button returns true or false based on whether they're clicking the button right now i think that makes it obvious right yeah and so this was for our games have so much ui in them like tis 100 all ui right that this paradigm works really well for the kind of stuff we do and i was worried about like oh is it hard to dynamically lay out stuff it's like no you just do a little bit of math and then you put it where it needs to be when you draw text you just measure the text and you can lay stuff out wherever you want and so we that's how we wrote games that's how we did opus magnum everything beyond it when we went to coincidence we managed to get a license to keep using our old like engine code basically we we don't really have an engine we just copy the last project and delete all the game code out of it and then use that as the starting point and we've done that like probably like 10 times now to get to kaizen but that's how we write all of our games now and it's it is like superior to anything we've ever done before right i guess we haven't shipped a 3d game since we started doing this so maybe that's a little telling right is that we we like kind of have 3d support but we've never actually used it and right but it's like i don't know like most of the game ideas they make don't make sense in 3d like a lot of them are like kind of cad experiences we we have 3d in last call bbs i take that back in ship wizard we have a little 3d visualization of all the like pads and the silicon like of your the integrated circuits you're building it's this little 3d view and we wrote a software renderer for that like we're manually sorting all the polygons i mean we wanted it to feel like an old kind of like an old shitty 3d thing from like the like 90 early 90s and so yeah we wrote a soft like i mean we're not like rasterizing it ourselves we're drawing the clouds with stuff but it's like kind of like a software renderer kind of thing and that's the only time we've shipped 3d in recent years but that's what we do now okay cool yeah i mean i guess i was i was going to ask if the nature of the engine constrains what you're making but i guess it's probably the way around that the engine the engine is what it is because that's the games you like making right yeah exactly and like if we wanted to make a 3d game hypothetically we can right and we just have to you know we have we have like depth buffer support and stuff in our engine like keep added it hypothetically for the future but we've never shipped anything with it and so i don't but again like it's none of the stuff i have teed up as 3d just because we don't we don't have any 3d office artists in the office and everything gets really expensive when you start doing it in 3D, right?

1:12:45It's pretty easy to hack stuff together in 2D. You're making games about programming. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess to switch back to the business of making games for a minute. So I think a lot of game developers would find the idea of rebranding, especially from a niche where you're so well-known into a new one, quite a daunting task. How did that go? Did you manage to bring all your audience with you as everyone found you again? Oh, I have no idea. Probably not. I don't know. I was always kind of skeptical that most people don't know who Zactronics is, right? People have heard of Opus Magnum, maybe, but they have no idea who made it.

1:13:20And I think that's true for most games that I think like as a person in the games industry, of course, we know everybody who makes everything. But I think gamers in general are a little bit more selective about like which game creators they know about. I think a lot of people know like the name Blizzard, right? There's some game studios that everybody knows, but I don't think we're not Blizzard, you know, we never were. so I think that most people probably don't pay attention that way honestly I think most people they would just see Opus Magnum pop up like on their Twitter timeline or whatever and that's how they learn about it and play it and they never know what a Zachtronics is at any point and so I don't think it hurts us there and I think all the people who were into Zachtronics enough to know us are probably like subscribed to our mailing list and have I have ways to tell them that we have a new studio and like obviously that's not true because I still get emails all the time at Zachtronics from people being like oh I hope you make another game one day and it's like yeah we did it's out now we have a new studio and they're like oh wow cool and it's like okay i failed in that department so i think obviously the switchover has not been perfect but honestly we didn't really like we didn't really have a choice if i could have seamlessly kept using the name like i probably would have even though i'm not like i think it's embarrassing right like i literally came up with it when i was a child you have also just launched a physical game called zach attack though this does have to be said oh yeah i mean i still put my name on stuff you know and we were we've been very forward with like my name and the marketing stuff because it's like i don't know it's like that is my name yeah but we were given the opportunity to continue using the zackronics name but it did not make sense expensive opportunity i imagine yeah yeah yeah an insulting expensive opportunity i don't know yeah it's my name right and so i feel like if you don't own something you don't really control it it's like okay unless we own the name zackronics i don't want to borrow it because then it's just going to be it's going to cost more in the future if things go well, you know, and it's just like, fuck it, we're a new studio, we have a new ethos, we run things differently.

1:15:13You know, Zaktronics really was me top down dictating everything. That's not what coincidence is, right? Coincidence is everybody does whatever they want. Sometimes I dictate stuff, sometimes I don't, right? In 10 years from now, maybe people will know coincidence like they knew Zaktronics. I have no idea. It doesn't, whatever. You just got to make the games, right? The games are what draw people in. If Kaizen had a weak response, it's not because people didn't know where zaktronics went or that it's a zaktronics game right it's because kaizen didn't like shock people into buying it from like either changes and you know the game wasn't good enough or tastes have changed or who knows right silksong it's all silksong small yeah so i don't want to do the horrible thing of asking you what's coming next but we've established that kaizen got some ideas from last call bbs which is very important to me because in terms of your noted previous ideas that didn't see the light of day, I am dying to know, are we getting submarines?

1:16:04Are submarines happening under coincidence? Oh, no. That game... I don't know, we built it, it didn't work. I actually really have zero desire to make anything that's like a survival crafting game. Especially now, it's been done to death. When we started that game in 2016, that was kind of a fresh genre. Everybody does that now. Every game is like that. There's lots of Bellatro-like games too. but sometimes the survival games have a lot of games in them yeah sure i don't know this is the thing i wrestle with a lot still if i was making just buckets of money just by doing the thing that came naturally to me this would be really easy right because i just like i'm just going to keep doing the thing that comes naturally but like the stuff that comes naturally to me has always been good but not good enough and so i'm always wondering it's like oh should i be doing something different should i be mixing in different stuff and even when we talk about in the office a lot of times it's like well how do we kaizen did okay how do we make a better game and then the answer is always like oh we could add more mechanics from other popular games and it's like at one point i got kind of fed up with it it's like no like why are we not focused on trying to just make the best games in our style that we can why is the answer always that to make a better game it has to be less like what we do and have been successful doing and the reality is that i'm constantly torn over this and i'm never like so like i'm not so full of myself that i think that like oh i have this vision that needs to be realized it's like no i'm just kind of making games over and over again we're so far past the point where i'm making like my dream game or whatever but like at the same time like i'm not to a fault i have to like do my own thing i'm just not interested in stuff that doesn't like find my ego in that way or whatever and so this is what this is why i'm not cut out for software i think to make like real good software you actually have to be like really low ego and like you have to not care about what it ends up being like creatively because you're just trying to do a job and you just need to do the best version of the job and like i wish I was that person, but I'm not, right?

1:17:52Like I, for a big part of what I do is, is being creative, right? I spent a lot of time thinking like, oh, like it's too bad I couldn't fit in at Valve because I'd be making a lot more money if I was at Valve. But like the reality is that the reason I couldn't be at Valve is because the opportunities for creative are like pretty thin, right? Like they make a game and it has, their games are bigger than my games, right? But like way more people work on those games. And so the amount of like creative input you get to have on a project like that it's just a lot lower and if i if i think back to all the people i worked with at valve they were all people their strength was not unbridled creativity right their strength was that they're all like extremely competent game developers right but me like i'm not extremely competent i'm extremely creative right and so that's what this that's what the game is for me right like that's what this is i think it's so obvious at this point that it's like i just have to like accept it right that like my strength is creativity and putting that into practice in like this weird kind of feel.

1:18:46And so those are the kinds of things I want to do, right? And so yeah, you're asking about what's coming next. Right now, I am working on a bunch of puzzle games, because that's the thing I can do. And I know that at least to some degree, it'll be received well by people. It just works like you just have to do the stuff that works. And it's an opportunity to be really creative while I'm doing it. I love the systems I think are very interesting. We the games we have coming up are experiments, like if you liked that kind of experimental nature of Last call like our next two games are going to be smaller rougher and like experimental systems like exploring like what are like new i don't hesitate to say models of computation but what are new kinds of systems that we haven't really done before that explore this kind of computational puzzle space right and that's yeah because that's what i like doing definitely my favorite bit about last call like the forbidden path was awesome that was like a very cool how would you feel about a bigger version of that oh like a better a better system that's less like random and like more deep and absolute dream absolute dream yeah that's that's not what we're working on but i but but you should i'm working with a writer on one of our upcoming projects who i was a fan of many years ago and i don't want to announce it too i've never talked about this with anybody but so i'm not going to announce too many specifics but i'm working with a writer and so he's very creative also So we started working together.

1:20:09I'm like, pitch me a bunch of ideas for video games. And he's like, I've never made a video game before. And I'm like, this is the kind of video games we make. These are how like our puzzles work. Pitch me a bunch of games that work with this. So he pitched me 12 ideas for games. They're really good, right? And so one of them, I could imagine being a kind of forbidden path. What if that was like expanded into like a real game and stuff? And so I'm tempted to make that one. So you saying that you like that game a lot makes me think like, oh, maybe there's something to that. maybe I should do that yeah I don't know if cellular automata hits what was going on there but like ultimate observation computation was when you said that I was just that straight way where my head went I just thought that was a really good example of that but that's very exciting yeah it's not that often you get to interact with systems about like stuff that grows yeah right like obviously like cellular like it is cellular automata but I think it's like not I'm not like a I think like some people are like kind of math nerds that like really like cellular automata and it's like for me the thing that's really interesting is like what kind of information do you need for something that grows?

1:21:07That was where Forbidden Path, I think, is actually one of my favorite little designs because it came from years of trying to think of how to make a game about cellular differentiation because I've always been really fascinated with the idea of like, how is it that a person like grows into the shape of a person, right? It's unbelievable. It doesn't make sense, right? I think some people might think, oh, well, that means that it can't be understood. It's like, no, it can be understood. Like, I want to understand it. I want to make a game that distills that so people can understand that concept of how things can grow into these complicated shapes.

1:21:41And the more I learned about it, cellular differentiation is just so weird. And it still doesn't make sense how chemical gradients. How does a chemical gradient turn into this beautiful specimen of a man that you're talking to right now? It doesn't make sense. But I don't know. I think that's a good prompt, right? It's like magic, right? That's the thing. I feel like I always fall short of it. Kaizen certainly falls short of it. maybe that's the problem but i want to make a game that's about an engineering system that's entirely fictional so it's like magic or something right like but like and people a lot of people want to make a game like what if magic was real but they always fall back into like game design stuff where it's just like oh you'll just it's like making spells and skyrim it's like oh it's an area spell and it does fire but it's like that's not really systematic right and so that's the thing that i always want to do and that's been the inspiration of a lot of my games like one of my very first flash games the bureau of steam engineering yeah but that was like a pretty like steampunk played straight kind of thing but before that i was like what if there was like magic what if you had like magical steam mix you know i'd seen somebody made like a role-playing game setting that was about that and so i wanted to like how does magic work if it's real and that's always been like a thing that i kind of keep coming back to these systems that are they're not real systems but they have the belief the verisimilitude of like a real system yeah there's The system of logic and rules is just beyond, yeah.

1:23:00Yeah, and so anything like that is like the ultimate thing that I'm like chasing after with a lot of these games. And I almost always fall short of it because it's really hard to make stuff that's completely made up, yet somehow system, systematically functions as if it was real and coherent. Like it's hard to, I don't know, it's just hard to carve out those spaces, right? But like, that's always the dream, right? Yeah. Well, I think that is a fantastic place to end. Zach, thank you so much. If folks wanna, and they're not already on your channels, and they want to hear about these upcoming games, where's the best place for them to go?

1:23:30Oh, God. I don't know anymore, right? Social media is dead. You can follow us on... I think really the best way is we have an email newsletter. If you go to coincidence.games, you can sign up for our newsletter. And that's the best one because I only send out stuff to... Because I have to pay... I've actually gotten it down to a dollar whenever I want to send out an email. It used to cost a lot more, but we self-host and do a bunch of stuff with that. But I only send out emails when there's earnestly something exciting going on, right? Like something to buy, something cool coming out soon. I don't spam it.

1:24:01And so that's the best way to find out about stuff because like you'll be guaranteed to get the email, right? Whereas if like, if you follow us on Twitter or Blue Sky, you might see something, but you might not. And you might see a lot of other nasty shit if you're on Twitter too. Whenever I log onto Twitter to check our Twitter, it's always just like, what is any of this stuff, right? I think our email is the best way to go at this point, especially for like your audience, right? Like email is, I love email. I don't know. Do you love email? I love email. I am a big fan of a newsletter. I do like a newsletter.

1:24:33Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of like people in the kind of programming tech space have switched back to loving like email newsletters because like. Give me a newsletter, roll RSS feed, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get them roll. I love email because it's kind of like an RSS reader without having to check an RSS reader. It stuff comes to you and it's like the stuff you want, you know, usually. Somehow I got subscribed to like It's like an industry Oh god, it's like Pipes and Valves Like the Pipes and Valves industry newsletter And so I get all this stuff about I think it's useful for you to be honest No, because it's like really hyper specific About pipes, you know It's very weird And so I guess aside from stuff like when you get signed up For stuff like that by accident Big fan of email though, do you zero inbox?

1:25:14No, never No, I'm a demon, my inbox would No, I don't have a single email account that's got like less than 100 000 emails on it oh no well i mean you can archive them it's just how many are in your inbox no i don't like to it has to if it has to happen as process or it's not getting done like just naturally yeah don't listen to them everybody listening to this podcast zero inbox that's it everyone's unsubscribed it's done i've killed it yeah zero inboxing is the best one of the best things i've ever done in my life right it's just it's so yeah it's like version control i had a i ran i had 10 episodes of my podcast and you'd be shocked and how many indies came on and we're just like what's version control or like oh we should use version control but we don't we just live edit files on our web server and it's just i mean this could be a whole other podcast because like version control in games is horrible though like it is cursed like it's the options are all bad what you get lfs like what are you are you locking file like it's all the buy when you get to we just use git well i guess if you have a lot of people we have really small teams right so how are you handling big binaries they're not that big okay fair enough pngs like i don't know they're like a couple megabytes that's not that big anymore we actually did well we used to use bitbucket that we were on their free plan they dropped their limit to like one gigabyte for like all of your repos or something to add it together can take up one gig of space so it really seems like they're trying to like kill their free plan off but so that was a problem but as long as you don't have like big caps on it like our games are actually kind of small like source code's tiny we only upload like compressed audio we only upload pngs and stuff we have other backup solutions for like all the source files yeah and so they're not you imagine like a 3d unity game like they're punished by git right like i guess i don't know we we infinifactory was all in git right that was actually quite a few people yeah because like the assets are usually not that as long as you're not like i don't pngs like it's a good compression scheme right and like you can do other you know stuff if you want i don't know like yeah we did i don't know it was i mean that was not like a super high-res like if you're making a game that installs and is like 150 gigabytes like yeah you have problems right but use like perforce or whatever everybody manages it's fine right like that's what i used when i was at valve they perforce when i was at microsoft they had perforce it's fine you don't need git like i don't know like it's yeah branching sucks how much branching do people really do i don't know i mean i guess less when it sucks, but people manage.

1:27:34Apparently not game devs. Not as much as they should. Alrighty. Well, thank you so much, Zach. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thanks.