Zach Barth, who is Zachtronics, have decided to stop making games. As he recently got full time employment, he finds it impossible to have a full time job and continue making games, so have decided to focus on work.

This is indeed sad news, as Zachtronics have produced some truely innovative and original games, which has influenced a lot of games and arguably created a new genre, the programmable games. not to mention that he created the small game Infiniminer, witch a certain Notch ripped of creating Minecraft.

But while inifinmier was important as the grandaddy of al voxel based surival games, his best games are the original puzzle / coding games such as SpaceChem, Exapunks, Infinifactory and the very sublime Opus Magnum (which i personally have as one of the 10 best games ever made).

It is not all sad news, as he is working on his last (and this will be the last) game: Last Call BBS - https://www.zachtronics.com/last-call-bbs/
This is not only one game, but consists of 8 different games in one package. so while it is sad to see Zachtronics go, at least there is this last game to look forward to.

Oh. So he was making game because didn't have a full time job?

I tried SpaceChem before, but could not got hooked by it. And, his other games looks difficult so I didn't really interested in playing them. I think I got his game laying around in my humble bundle library, I'll give it a shot sometime.

Spacechem is more a flow control semi-programming game with extra emphasis on not not running into other particles while working. I couldn't get into it either.

Probably one of the harder parts is you don't realize you are building up your factories/processing plants and you have to save them to reuse later thus it's important to specify the input/output expectations as they carry over, unless you want to re-build everything every time.

I'd played to about where you have to overload multiple plants to blow up to stop a machine from destroying the main facility, and that was interesting, but after that it got way to convoluted to keep up on. Somewhere near chapter 6 i think. I just gave up.

Infinifactory i quit and played multiple times, getting to where you're floating in space trying to make giant control ship systems and not only can i not see how i'm suppose to attach said items but the view of space kicked in my fear of heights and i physically couldn't play it. the 'OH SHIT I'M GOING TO FALL' going every few seconds didn't work out.

TIS-100 is a cute programming game, you get about 16 instructions on multiple chips to do a bigger problem either singular or parallel. Personal experience the sorting one is one of the hardest puzzles to do because of how much you have to divide the job due to instruction length limitations.

ExaPunks was fun, you program little tiny robots that move files copy files, search for things and communicate with eachother to solve problems, going from ordering free pizza to crashing an MMO and taking over the server to get rare items.

Shenzhen IO i think is their best work, though Opus Magnum is beautiful i haven't really played that one yet. The more 'physical objects' it gets the more issues i have since it's just how my brain works.

You ought to give the much more accessible Infinifactory
and Opus Magnum a try. ;)

I like Zachtronics games (most of them; at least; my favorite is probably Shenzhen I/O and my least favorite is Opus Magnum), and it's sad to see the end of it. I'm also sad to hear that they didn't sell enough to prevent him from having to get a "real" job. However, I'd like to know what makes you think this: Before I ever even heard of gog, and therefore ever heard of Zachtronics, I played (and even dabbled in creating) plenty of programming games. Omega was the second game I ever bought for my Amiga (the first being Pool of Radiance). I suppose if you want to give him credit for at least popularizing a genre it's puzzle-based programming games (rather than competitive strategy games, which most of the prior games were), although there isn't much difference between that and programming competitions.

[edit: fixed forum link breakage]

Their games were always a bit too high IQ for me

probably for the better , didnt really like them anyway

Well certainly it's not easy. A number of the earlier puzzles are usually but when you have to start cycle counting to make timing things right work it's a bit annoying. Like making all the 'phones' ring at the same time with the same text message, or with infinifactory sending a bomb through a teleporter, but it's only a 1x1 block so you have to send it in as parts and then reassemble it on the other side.

Spacechem as mentioned earlier was especially annoying, because lines start going everywhere and you can't graph good usable plans because you have to make sure not to touch particles together. Then timing of things never quite align right and debugging previously good factories became big enough a pain.

Although a number of other puzzle games such as Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion humans isn't much better.

The video game business can be volatile, so I can respect his decision to focus on his full-time job.

That said, I'm not big on puzzle games, so only few games I would consider buying.

The only one I played so far that's actually difficult is SpaceChem. With the others, actually solving the puzzles isn't that hard, so you end up spending most of your time optimizing the solutions in various ways so you can at least get in the top 10% of the graphs. That's what I do anyway. Speaking of which, it would be nice if Zach would do a final update for the games where it included the collective online graph data so far, which could be used offline for the graphs if/when the score servers go down.

The free ZACH-LIKE book & prototype games bundle is on steam. Making those type of games popular is a better way to describe it but I would call the gameplay from what I've seen as iterations on timing processes which are then put in a polished environment i.e the chemical factory for spacechem or an Alchemists lair for Opus Magnum.

Superhot was the same in that regard where a simple game mechanic had a larger world built around it.

So, according to this article, the "full time job" thing isn't remotely true. Zach Barth already spent a year in a teaching job, and didn't much care for it apparently.

"I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form", and "I’m particularly interested in freelancing and weird side projects". The actual reason is that the Zachtronics team wants to do other stuff. After over a decade of mostly doing puzzle games, that's understandable.

No wonder, anyone very creative will probably have a hard time doing the same thing over and over. Can't even imagine how well most games sold but they are kinda niche, so the financial incentive may not be great as well.
Those "weird side projects" peek my interest though.

BTW, I've posted this before but will leave it here as well. Spacechem has a Android version that can be played with you GOG game key. The controls are a bit outdated and iffy.
The serial Key can be found in the GOG instalation directory (Windows goes like C:/GOG/SpaceChem/registration.key) and the APK can be download on the old Zachtronics page, it's a little dificult to find so here's the link

Meanwhile, I've never even touched a Zachtronics game.

I own "Infinifactory" and "Opus Magnum", both of which I enjoyed, and both I never finished! :D
Very creative, and very brain-melting later on.
"Opus Magnum" also is artistically marvellous and breathtaking!