![]() ![]() And if there’s scrolling, you can’t see it all and it’s hard to debug. “If you make it so people can write any amount of code then it has to scroll. “Largely, that was a UI consideration that turned into a design consideration,” says Barth. TIS-100, which is about programming a fictional 80s computer, features a fixed grid of components to which you can only write a fixed amount of code. And a big question within that was how it would present the code players would write. We didn’t really want to make a game about that.”)Īs the game’s themes and its story, written by Matthew Burns, started to inform the nature of the puzzles, Barth began to think about how the game would relate to his previous Zach-likes. Sometimes they’d try to get each other arrested for fun. “We interviewed a bunch and mostly they stole credit cards and figured out ways of ripping off phone companies to get free phone calls. “It turns out that hackers are assholes,” Barth says. (As an aside, one problem with hacking that the team ran up against as they researched the field was hackers. What about a puzzle game about writing viruses like Stuxnet, which was designed to attack a very specific kind of industrial controller used in Iranian nuclear centrifuges in order to destroy them? A game about writing programs that unfold, multiply and deploy themselves to make changes to the physical world.Īnd so, in Exapunks, you write viruses that order you free pizza and remove the peanuts from candy bars. Players write programs - viruses by any other name - that execute themselves and work to manipulate the computer’s memory locations in order to wipe out competing programs.īarth, worried about the game’s fortunes riding on having enough players to provide matches, didn’t want to make a multiplayer game, but he was nevertheless inspired. At the other end there are pure programming competitions in which the battlefield is the computer itself, such as Core War. At one end of the scale there are games in which players program AI routines for little bots that go into battle against each other. It turns out that adversarial programming has a long history. “He’s not a big fan of the Zachtronics formula, which is funny because he’s worked on all of them,” says Barth. The first broad concept for the game came from Keith Holman, Zachtronics’ technical director, who thought it’d be great if, instead of puzzles, players could compete to program against each other. But he retained his ambition to make a hacking game that was filled with references to the 90s hacking scene that he once coveted, fleshed out with zines that players would read alongside the game. As he headed into his college years Barth started making games instead. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever.” As someone who was into computers, hacking seemed to present a cool way to do stuff on them.īut he never became a hacker. He’d seen Hackers and he wanted to be one. “You can say we keep making the same game over and over again, right? Because that’s kind of true, but in the same way that an FPS studio keeps making FPS games, you import a lot of assumptions from your previous games and they become your starting point, and from there you think, ‘How can we make this fun, it’s own thing?’”Įxapunks’ starting point was Barth’s high school dream. “I don’t want to say it’s an established genre, because not a lot of other people are making them, but in my mind part of what we do is to innovate on the formula,” he tells me. Across SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, and now Exapunks, they present challenges with no single solution, just a themed set of constraints and the instruction to make something work within them. The point is that he makes a very particular kind of puzzle game. “Zach-likes, or whatever,” he says, maybe just slightly reluctantly. That’s what Barth calls them, by the way. And even now, creative director Zach Barth isn’t totally sure he and his team got it right.īy Barth’s count, Exapunks is Zachtronics’ seventh commercial game, and six of them have been Zach-likes. Its format is the result of hard decisions about how much space you get to write your code in, how much freedom you get to solve its puzzles, and how it’s presented on your screen. Specifically, it’s a game about programming viruses and sending them into networked systems to monkey around with data, set in a great alternative 90s Wired cyberworld of PC cases flashed with black and red decals and zines set in Apple Garamond.įor its makers, though, Exapunks is a game about limitations. It’s pretty obvious that the excellent Exapunks is a game about hacking. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. ![]()
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