Exapunks (2018)

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....

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.

Their catalogue is well worth buying.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Older, but I love me some Zachtronics.

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

Every zachtronics game is a gem.

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

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

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