![]() The Codex of Alchemical Engineering saved players' progress but not their specific solutions - however you could export the text instructions for that machine to be shared elsewhere (to this day, Barth is still not sure why he coded the game this way). It was the Kongregate community that sowed the seed for the GIF function. "Some people were making money, but I was like, 'No, I don't care about that, I'm making these for fun, for myself.' Which is weird now and sounds crazy even coming out of my mouth, because I'm all about the money now apparently. "I didn't want to make money making indie games," he recalls. Initially only available through Barth's website, players encouraged him to publish Codex through Kongregate, suggesting he might make more money that way. Like Opus Magnum, this revolved around building a machine that took elements and combined them together. For its origins, we need to go back to The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, a Flash game Barth and his colleagues developed before the studio had even formed - "the first hardcore Zach-like, if we can call it that," he says. Instead, Opus Magnum - actually the second Zachtronics title to include a GIF feature - is built upon learnings from past games. Before the game even had graphics, it had GIFs" "We built it into Opus Magnum from the beginning. "Can you imagine being that kind of game designer?" "No, that would be terrible," Barth laughs. Was it a goal of the studio to develop a title that was inherently GIFable? spoke to founder Zach Barth earlier this year about the art of making such complex puzzle games instantly understandable, aided by the use of GIFs. In fact, all of its titles have now been made free to educators. Opus Magnum is one of many games from developer Zachtronics rooted in scientific subjects, with a view to exploring subjects like chemistry, industry and (in this case) programming. In just one looping image, you instantly get a sense of what the game is about: creating machines that automatically assemble different components together into the required structure. The alchemical puzzler has something of a viral quality with fans sharing their solutions to each of its puzzles via social media and forums in the form of GIFs. There's no Steam Workshop support this time, but there is a way to import and export puzzles, so there's still room for infinite permutations of TIS-100 challenges.It's likely that your first encounter with Opus Magnum was something like the image below. The game was functionally complete at the time I previewed it, and the changes since have been quality of life improvements and additional puzzles. Much like Infinifactory, TIS-100 entered Early Access in a more or less complete state. Even solving the problems isn't enough, you've got to solve them efficiently to get a shot at setting records or earning achievements. All of these constraints conspire to make the problems you have to solve all the more complex.Įven basic tasks like storing values are complicated by the system - often times, you can devote entire nodes just to storing a couple of values long enough to finish a computation. There's only a few instructions, just a couple of registers, and each "node" can only hold a limited number of instructions. The puzzles themselves pit you against difficult programming tasks that require you to work around the crazy architecture of the TIS-100. As you solve the various programming puzzles, you uncover more and more about just how unusual the system is. ![]() ![]() It's a machine with more than a few mysteries, but its corrupted programming is preventing you from making sense of them. TIS-100 is the story of a weird, old computer that used to belong to your uncle. I'll just go ahead and assume you didn't read my TIS-100 preview and I'll do a quick recap. ![]()
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