I made that gif Zach talks about at 57:30. Even with SpaceChem everything looped so nicely, and the gif compressed really well to small sizes, it just seemed like a natural thing to do. You're welcome Zach!
11:22 "you can make a game, and someone can make money off of it!" Oh man, love how he turns this into a joke, not even bitter he's not the millionaire he ought to be. Such a lovely guy
Hey, Talks at Google: I love videos like this, but could you have the camera at a less-weird angle, or split screen between presenter and projector output? I'd love to understand better what's on-screen, and not feel like the connective tissue between my shoulders and head were cut.
I second this. I worked at a company that had similar talks and they'd actually switch the video to the presentation when it made sense, then switch back to the presenter the rest of the time. There's no reason Google can't do this too.
We often try to do this but this particular talk it was unfortunately not available (due to the specific room used and the equipment not playing nice). Sorry about that.
I suspect that this was something put on by the employees because they wanted to meet and talk with Zach, and not an official Google Thing With Real AV Equipment And People.
No. Filming a projector screen is always pointless. The sane solution would be to attach the presentation file. Since those presentations are already digital. But people still have this 1960 office impression of presentations...
@@MuradBeybalaev I think it's a combination of being non-techie-friendly, (or more like in cases like this, non AV-knowledgeable) and not having to know or equip specific particular brand-name video systems. When these companies invest in a particular tech arrangement it can become restrictive at best, or even crippling. The only comparison I can make is the music recording industry and Apple Logic Pro. around ten years ago everyone from entry-level GarageBand users to the big studios committed to Apple, and a lot of people are regretting those decisions now.
I've been playing a lot of Steam games and the part starting at 34:23 really resonates. Trying to find the "sweet spot" of games that aren't too easy for me or ridiculously hard has been a constant struggle. Interestingly, most Zachtronics games seem to be in that sweet spot. Even SpaceChem, where I got hopelessly stuck and couldn't finish, didn't turn me off on buying future Zachtronics games.
"What about games where the players' solutions sort of interact within a larger environment, or directly compete with each other?" Zach: "Those sorts of games definitely intrigue us." (smug look) 1 year later: EXAPUNKS
16:34 What the is he talking about? TIS-100 is the game that convinced me to buy his other games! I showed it to my highschool teacher and he uses it to get the kids to learn programming in a "fun" way :D It's amazing!
I thought I got into Zachtronics games when Infinifactory was in a Humble Bundle and bought the rest of their games on Steam, but it turns out I was already into them years ago. I was at the RPI event years ago when they showcased TexMechs and got to play it and it was awesome. I had completely forgotten about that. Small world comes full circle, holy shit.
Great talk, but I really wish I could see the screen! It's almost always completely whited out, or in poor focus, or cut off. Really frustrating video because of that.
KOHCTPYKTOP was, by far, my favorite of his games. (Then again, you needed to take an ECE grad-level class on VLSI design to really understand what was going on there at times...)
The educational stuff really is promising, please keep it up. Simply challenging people with engineering and programming like problems is indeed educational in and of itself.
What a cool guy - really wanted to engage, most genuinely, while being profoundly honest and humble in a useful, non-virtue signaling/Peacocking way. He wound up giving me some interesting thoughts on management gamification...
Zack is the man when it comes to games that need logical thinking. The games are so far from terrible, that if you'd stand near them you'd need a Webb mk.X to see "terrible" as a very tiny dot in the high GLy distances.
This really is the future of coding education. I’d have been a lot more interested in learning code as a kid if classes had been presented in a game format!
These mans games are the industries’ Opus Magnum. The games are infinitely factorially approachable, but they get so complex that you might as well be doing chemistry on a board in space while playing like 7 versions of solitaire. (Yes I had to plan this comment out)
I must be a super nerd because I liked the histograms. I wish we could access the slides because the light wasn't dim enough to see the slides in the video.
I'm interested in the universal solution for Конструктор mentioned at 55:01 (the slide is too washed out to see). Couldn't find it in a google search. I'm guessing it's like a programmable gate array.
I loved the education games when I was a kid. Just the idea of progressing through something with math or w/e lit up my brain. There was a game where you progressed up a mountain and got gems or something like that. Forgot about that. I even liked Reader Rabbit.
He made infinimer and I can't remember how it was accidentally leaked and then Notch stole the source code, and made Minecraft. Could you imagine if Notch would have had the decency of paying him or at least bringing him to the project. Zach would be a millionaire.
@Hatwox pretty much, Zach talks in other videos how his source code got leaked, and notch got a hold of it, and that was used in the minecraft prototypes. Shitbag notch never even acknowledged that, or gave some money to Zach. Zach sounds hurt when people asks him about infiniminer and just baffled at the idea that he should have been a millionaire maybe if he had royalties for the voxel engine. Who wouldn't be pissed if someone stole your shit, and became a pos billionaire.
Educational skill does increase just not as fast as fake game skills. I've gone back and played old zach games and what I remembered being hard wasn't and what was impossible wasn't. It might a break for years but you can make it. Those bonus update puzzles are still too damm hard.
then again, i've coded shit before, went back on the code 2 years later thought by myself "wow did i make that?", super dirty optimizations and that kind of stuff, sure you still kidn of remember what you did once you see it, as the problems you had to tackle were days of headache, you tend to remember those things and the little mnemonics you came up with just to make sense of it all i've been retroactively impressed with myself too, but yeah... sometimes i can clear puzzles i've been stuck on for days, think it's because i thought about it alot then wrap up the next 3 puzzles i never did before in 5-10 minutes each... so it's clear i'm in some kind of higher conciousness, but some puzzles are just perpetual hurdles it's mostly the ones that pray on my weakness in orginzational skills that cause me to overthink the complexity, and waste tons of lines on being dynamic when it could've been solved by having an exact hardcoded amount of moves with sometimes a condtion to just toss/ mov to nil/null to keep it going is enough actual functional programming is still harder, because you need to understand the problem so thoroughly, you can make it a 1-line formula that has all the conditions worked into it... but damn is TIS-100 daunting with the memory ssytem
Factorio belt balancing would be so pointless for my factory designs that I've barely explored it. Seems like it might be an interesting mechanic to pull out and use with more emphasis somewhere else.
"I don't know if other people have feelings about embedded systems" oooooh my god. so funny, but as a programmer, so so true. I just want to tell people about my cool system!
zach insopired me to at least before i die, publish my own logic puzzle game on steam i'm hooked on the logic puzzling genre, it may still be a bit niche but between baba is you and zachtronics games not much comes even close to programming logic puzzlers. ok , silicon zeroes is really, really good too, and actually the first i played in the genre but it's not as excruciatingly difficult as zachtronics games are on the endgame i do love the 2 logic puzzlers from tomorrow corporation too. i love tis-100 with a passion, but the memory system combined with the line limits are so insanely difficult if you don't become a wizard at optimizing your code shenzen made this even more a thing with the -/+ false/true syntax that actually holds the last condition even when jumping back, but it'still not nearly as bad as only jumping when accumulator is less than, equl to or higher than zero, it requires you to understand the problem so thorouhly you can avoid all the subtracts and adds back zachtronics games are so incredibly immersive when i comes to their little simulation systems
@@jarg7 it's the other real math problem to solve other than grocery for young people (even that is automated by cashier right now). we all know how it went, we won't learn stuff if we are not as invested/ interested in it.
the people who have the best idea for video games, are hardcore gamers themselves. this guy should hear some of my friends ideas for games. They are amazing.
lol. Infiniminer was written in c# using XNA, Minecraft was written in Java using the lwjgl JNI bindings for opengl. There is no way, Notch could have stolen *ANY* of Zach's code, since the languages are so different. Notch did "steal" the idea, as is evident by him calling it an "infiniminer clone" in the description of his first video "cave game tech test", but the code was completely original.
All Zach-games are astonishingly excellent. The man is a genius.
And then he made that turn based strategy thing that's just kinda bad.
@@ImperatorZed if you buy his book, he explain this transition, they lost their soul a little bit then learnt from it
I made that gif Zach talks about at 57:30. Even with SpaceChem everything looped so nicely, and the gif compressed really well to small sizes, it just seemed like a natural thing to do. You're welcome Zach!
He's exactly as joyful and eccentric as I expected the creator of such amazing games to be.
11:22 "you can make a game, and someone can make money off of it!"
Oh man, love how he turns this into a joke, not even bitter he's not the millionaire he ought to be. Such a lovely guy
To be fair the joke sounds really bitter
Not to say Minecraft isn't a brilliant game, but Zach is clearly a more talented game developer than Notch.
@@max3446 Talent is not an achievement
Hey, Talks at Google: I love videos like this, but could you have the camera at a less-weird angle, or split screen between presenter and projector output? I'd love to understand better what's on-screen, and not feel like the connective tissue between my shoulders and head were cut.
I second this. I worked at a company that had similar talks and they'd actually switch the video to the presentation when it made sense, then switch back to the presenter the rest of the time. There's no reason Google can't do this too.
We often try to do this but this particular talk it was unfortunately not available (due to the specific room used and the equipment not playing nice). Sorry about that.
I suspect that this was something put on by the employees because they wanted to meet and talk with Zach, and not an official Google Thing With Real AV Equipment And People.
No. Filming a projector screen is always pointless.
The sane solution would be to attach the presentation file.
Since those presentations are already digital.
But people still have this 1960 office impression of presentations...
@@MuradBeybalaev I think it's a combination of being non-techie-friendly, (or more like in cases like this, non AV-knowledgeable) and not having to know or equip specific particular brand-name video systems. When these companies invest in a particular tech arrangement it can become restrictive at best, or even crippling. The only comparison I can make is the music recording industry and Apple Logic Pro. around ten years ago everyone from entry-level GarageBand users to the big studios committed to Apple, and a lot of people are regretting those decisions now.
I've been playing a lot of Steam games and the part starting at 34:23 really resonates. Trying to find the "sweet spot" of games that aren't too easy for me or ridiculously hard has been a constant struggle. Interestingly, most Zachtronics games seem to be in that sweet spot. Even SpaceChem, where I got hopelessly stuck and couldn't finish, didn't turn me off on buying future Zachtronics games.
"What about games where the players' solutions sort of interact within a larger environment, or directly compete with each other?"
Zach: "Those sorts of games definitely intrigue us." (smug look)
1 year later: EXAPUNKS
16:34 What the is he talking about? TIS-100 is the game that convinced me to buy his other games! I showed it to my highschool teacher and he uses it to get the kids to learn programming in a "fun" way :D It's amazing!
Kinda reassuring that Zach doesn't have any idea what he's doing either, he just, you know, does what seems cool.
As humans have done for millennia
Truth be told, I learned more from your playing your games than my 5 years in college. I "completed" all of them. Big fan
I thought I got into Zachtronics games when Infinifactory was in a Humble Bundle and bought the rest of their games on Steam, but it turns out I was already into them years ago. I was at the RPI event years ago when they showcased TexMechs and got to play it and it was awesome. I had completely forgotten about that. Small world comes full circle, holy shit.
I was at that event too! Small world indeed.
Great talk, but I really wish I could see the screen! It's almost always completely whited out, or in poor focus, or cut off. Really frustrating video because of that.
KOHCTPYKTOP was, by far, my favorite of his games. (Then again, you needed to take an ECE grad-level class on VLSI design to really understand what was going on there at times...)
True.
a flash game? What a shame.
@@putinstea theres an archive of his flash games on steam called ZACH-LIKE
Zach's games are brilliant even though they are not for me! And they have such beautiful presentations as well. Opus Magnum blew my mind away!
The educational stuff really is promising, please keep it up. Simply challenging people with engineering and programming like problems is indeed educational in and of itself.
What a cool guy - really wanted to engage, most genuinely, while being profoundly honest and humble in a useful, non-virtue signaling/Peacocking way. He wound up giving me some interesting thoughts on management gamification...
Zack is the man when it comes to games that need logical thinking.
The games are so far from terrible, that if you'd stand near them you'd need
a Webb mk.X to see "terrible" as a very tiny dot in the high GLy distances.
"I hate talks">has to be dragged away kicking and screaming
This talk makes me feel like I know Zach a bit - and I think I like him as much as I suspected I would.
This really is the future of coding education. I’d have been a lot more interested in learning code as a kid if classes had been presented in a game format!
He literally talked about how hard it is to do that in this talk though
I respect this guy so much!
These mans games are the industries’ Opus Magnum. The games are infinitely factorially approachable, but they get so complex that you might as well be doing chemistry on a board in space while playing like 7 versions of solitaire. (Yes I had to plan this comment out)
I must be a super nerd because I liked the histograms. I wish we could access the slides because the light wasn't dim enough to see the slides in the video.
The poorly muted joy in Zach's voice when he says "its pretty good for an educational game" is so infectious
Zach is infinifactorily more clever than he makes out to be.
gtw123 you are the Infinifactory master.
I've literally purchased just about all his games and that's saying something since I don't buy a lot of games.
Yeah incredibly humble
I'm interested in the universal solution for Конструктор mentioned at 55:01 (the slide is too washed out to see). Couldn't find it in a google search. I'm guessing it's like a programmable gate array.
This is ridiculous, why wouldn't you show the slides next to the recording?
If he didn't exist
Minecraft wouldn't Exist
My favourite Game Creator!
The Godfather of Minecraft
I loved the education games when I was a kid. Just the idea of progressing through something with math or w/e lit up my brain. There was a game where you progressed up a mountain and got gems or something like that. Forgot about that. I even liked Reader Rabbit.
If I'm going to be stuck in a bunker for the rest of my life, SPACECHEM will be my only game and that's fine.
I find it funny when people say that infinifactory is a ripoff of minecraft. If only they had an ounce of knowledge...
Everytime Zach hears that he dies inside a little
Nobody says that
what a great talk. wish he had more time.
23:17 Zach Barth defines Shenzhen I/O.
Is a slide deck available somewhere? Slides aren't visible in the video
anyone have a link to their secret alt-website?
37:45 just because people did not finish it doesnt mean its hard maybe they got bored and didnt wanna continue or any other reason
Speaking of interface design... why does that tape dispenser have a built-in microphone?
WAIT, ZACH MADE THAT MINECRAFT PREQUEL??? HE WORKED AT VALVE?????? WHAAAAAAAT
He made infinimer and I can't remember how it was accidentally leaked and then Notch stole the source code, and made Minecraft. Could you imagine if Notch would have had the decency of paying him or at least bringing him to the project. Zach would be a millionaire.
@Hatwox pretty much, Zach talks in other videos how his source code got leaked, and notch got a hold of it, and that was used in the minecraft prototypes. Shitbag notch never even acknowledged that, or gave some money to Zach. Zach sounds hurt when people asks him about infiniminer and just baffled at the idea that he should have been a millionaire maybe if he had royalties for the voxel engine. Who wouldn't be pissed if someone stole your shit, and became a pos billionaire.
Yes. Increase your numbers to take on enemies with higher numbers. I agree, this not game design it's a rejection of game design.
digital literacy is important and so is contributing to the betterment of society by application of that literacy
where can i download konscriptor and other games source??
Educational skill does increase just not as fast as fake game skills. I've gone back and played old zach games and what I remembered being hard wasn't and what was impossible wasn't. It might a break for years but you can make it. Those bonus update puzzles are still too damm hard.
then again, i've coded shit before, went back on the code 2 years later thought by myself "wow did i make that?", super dirty optimizations and that kind of stuff, sure you still kidn of remember what you did once you see it, as the problems you had to tackle were days of headache, you tend to remember those things and the little mnemonics you came up with just to make sense of it all
i've been retroactively impressed with myself too,
but yeah... sometimes i can clear puzzles i've been stuck on for days, think it's because i thought about it alot
then wrap up the next 3 puzzles i never did before in 5-10 minutes each... so it's clear i'm in some kind of higher conciousness, but some puzzles are just perpetual hurdles
it's mostly the ones that pray on my weakness in orginzational skills that cause me to overthink the complexity, and waste tons of lines on being dynamic when it could've been solved by having an exact hardcoded amount of moves with sometimes a condtion to just toss/ mov to nil/null to keep it going is enough
actual functional programming is still harder, because you need to understand the problem so thoroughly, you can make it a 1-line formula that has all the conditions worked into it... but damn is TIS-100 daunting with the memory ssytem
Google is the kind of company that hangs bare LED light bulbs above a projector screen.
On Fun/Gamification of Education/Work @32:00 @47:00
Factorio belt balancing would be so pointless for my factory designs that I've barely explored it. Seems like it might be an interesting mechanic to pull out and use with more emphasis somewhere else.
It isn't important to see the speaker's face, but it is important to see the slides.
2:34 fedora spotted
Attach the presentation file next time.
"I don't know if other people have feelings about embedded systems"
oooooh my god. so funny, but as a programmer, so so true. I just want to tell people about my cool system!
I think his games will spawn off other types of factory-like automation games.
Hello From Turkey!
43:00 I have 150 friends on steam, not even one owns a zachtronics game on steam. I got my brother to try infinifactory though :)
The only games I play are all made from you or your company 😄
Infiniminer was the inspiration for Minecraft, it ain't no terrible games, notch just sprinkled some magic on infiniminer and it turned into Minecraft
Zach is great!
I got a infinifactory first 100 patch. beat spacechem too, twice.
I do want to play the game about starch metabolism though
I loved histograms in Portal 2 haha, funny that he said thats not rememberable
43:00 I am a histogram fan and I am upset 😅
Legend
This guy is cool.
zach insopired me to at least before i die, publish my own logic puzzle game on steam
i'm hooked on the logic puzzling genre, it may still be a bit niche
but between baba is you and zachtronics games not much comes even close to programming logic puzzlers.
ok , silicon zeroes is really, really good too, and actually the first i played in the genre but it's not as excruciatingly difficult as zachtronics games are on the endgame
i do love the 2 logic puzzlers from tomorrow corporation too.
i love tis-100 with a passion, but the memory system combined with the line limits are so insanely difficult if you don't become a wizard at optimizing your code
shenzen made this even more a thing with the -/+ false/true syntax that actually holds the last condition even when jumping back, but it'still not nearly as bad as only jumping when accumulator is less than, equl to or higher than zero, it requires you to understand the problem so thorouhly you can avoid all the subtracts and adds back
zachtronics games are so incredibly immersive when i comes to their little simulation systems
Have you tried Prime Mover? Perfect example of how a great logic game can be made very small, simple and achievable.
Great mind. Would love to hear you talk at Codam Coding College!
P.s. i bought your game and it's just great.
oh hello there tedx.
Living my dream
Funfact - he thinks 1000 times faster than he talks.
He also talks faster than I can think.
DnD is best math educational game, prove me wrong
Dungeons and dragons? How so?
@@jarg7 it's the other real math problem to solve other than grocery for young people (even that is automated by cashier right now). we all know how it went, we won't learn stuff if we are not as invested/ interested in it.
For the 1 or 2 others that think his voice sounds familiar:
KYRSP33DY
his game is like dark souls for puzzle game.
He is talking tooo fast, one hour non stop. I wanna the same 'vitamins' :) like it.
It doesn’t seem like he has a lot of confidence in his games.
Artists are very self conscious about their work.
the people who have the best idea for video games, are hardcore gamers themselves. this guy should hear some of my friends ideas for games. They are amazing.
algorithm
Zach and Notch are the modern video game equivalent of AC vs DC Tesla Vs Edison.
Without Zach, you wouldn't have minecraft as most of the code was originally STOLEN from Zach's infiniminer.
lol.
Infiniminer was written in c# using XNA, Minecraft was written in Java using the lwjgl JNI bindings for opengl. There is no way, Notch could have stolen *ANY* of Zach's code, since the languages are so different. Notch did "steal" the idea, as is evident by him calling it an "infiniminer clone" in the description of his first video "cave game tech test", but the code was completely original.
dont ever talk about lua like that ever again.