Zachronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate, engineering-focused puzzle

games that merge logic, creativity, and code. This studio was founded by Zach Barth in 2011, and it

has become a cult favorite among programmers and tinkers alike with titles such as SpaceCem,

Infinifactory, TIS 100, and Chen Zen I.O.

Most recently, Zachtronics released Kaizen, a factory story, in which players take on the role of an

American engineer hired by a Japanese manufacturing company in the 1980s to design assembly processes for various products.

Zach Barth joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk about the games he makes.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies

including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal.

Joe got a start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Gary's

mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies

and concepts. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily. I'm your host for today's episode, Joe Nash, and today I'm joined by Zach Barth, who has in the past created beloved puzzle games such as Opus Magnum, Shenzhen, I.O. Exapunx, under the label of Zachronics and the recently released Kaiser and under Coincidence Games. Zach, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm great. It's kind of early, to be honest, but I'm ready to go. Let's talk about software. Yes, absolutely. Sorry, the joys of cross-continental podcast scheduling, but thank you

for making it. So, I guess, we mentioned a bunch of games there in the intro, but for folks who unfamiliar with your games, can you explain, I guess, what your whole deal is? There's a genre named after you. What is a genre like? Let's start there. Oh, God. Yeah, there is a genre named after me. So I did not coin the term. I need to point out. I'm not crazy. I feel like it could be really weird to name a genre up to yourself. I actually push back on it really hard. But I also named our studio Xactronics, which is kind of damning. So Zach like is, I still hate that term. It's a, I love that. It's great. Oh, God. It's somebody from Rock Paper Shot going to do it, I swear not me. It's an open-ended puzzle game where you're given a set of tools and you're given a usually like criteria, so not like a thing you have to build, but like criteria for what an acceptable thing would look like. You know, like in the example, I think the overt programming games like Shinjanao are a lot about this, where it gives you like a test spec. And so you have to write software that satisfies a test spec. In fact, there's like a hundred different random variations, so it's almost more like elite code or something. But I think to a programmer, they're very recognizable and that they're like programming puzzles, basically. You can write any code you want as long as it solves the problem and meets the spec. They're not all literally about programming, although some of them are, but they all take the form of that. So that these open-ended puzzles where every puzzle has, you know, kind of like a programming puzzle or programming problem, every puzzle has a huge number of solutions. And you can just find a solution that works. And then you can go beyond that to find a solution that is often we have these like sort of secondary optimization metrics. So it's like maybe you're not just solving the problem, but you're trying to solve it in fewer lines of code than anybody else. Which again, to anybody who's familiar with programming problems and weak code kind of things, it's totally

familiar. And a thing that lots of programmers do all the time that don't even think of it as a game

necessarily. Yeah, that's definitely the element that I think it was TIS 100 came out during my

first year of university when we were learning assembly and like completely one shot me for that

reason. Like, as you say, I think most programmers find this, the optimization, I'm very addictive. But before we get into, I want to come back to the metrics and stuff. But before we get into that, I guess to round that out. So Zach likes and you said you had the studio called Zachtronics. That was, I guess, your previous incarnation, you've recently moved over to Quincylance games. So give us kind of a pocket history of your, I guess, the game development journey and where you're up to today? Okay. So right now it's 2025. I graduated college in 2008. And so that's quite a few years ago now, almost 20 years ago. I did a lot of game stuff in college, but for some reason at the time,

I was like, I worked at a game studio. I interned at a game studio, like my junior year of college.

And it was not a bad game studio, but not an interesting game studio. They did, they made, I don't want to

shit on them too much. They kind of divided their time between stuff for the government and

DLC packs for

AAA games. And so, like, the people on one part of the office were making some kind of, like,

...