That's meant to show that we're pretty much done with it," he explains. Unlike a lot of projects, especially veterans of Early Access, Barth says that by and large once its titles are out no more work takes place. It's the game we would have released if it was ten years ago and Early Access wasn't a thing. There's sometimes confusion as to the quality level, but our fans have learnt after four games this way that you don't have to feel stupid buying an Early Access Zachtronics game on Day One because it's not going to be bug-riddled and poorly-designed. We just use it as two words that we can use to communicate that to people. It's not that we don't want to hear your feedback, it's more that that period of taking user feedback and using it to heavily modify the game is over. "At some point when we think we've pulled in all the good feedback and the stuff we can do with the time we've been allocated to the game, then we have released it. "For us, when we put Early Access on something, it says: 'This is a game that we are comfortable releasing, which means it's almost finished, but it's not finished' and that's important because if people have feedback, compliments, complaints, stuff they want to see more of, or stuff they want us to add to it, they can feel comfortable telling us that and we're open to that and we want to hear that and we want to incorporate that into the game to make it better. It's up to how you use it to communicate," Barth says. I'm not sure if this is controversial or not, but Early Access is two words that you can slap on your game and that's it. Valve's alpha launch programme has, historically at least, been ruled by big and ambitious survival games. While not unheard of, releasing puzzle games onto the platform is somewhat unusual. Opus Magnum, much like TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O, was launched via Early Access. Oftentimes, this ends up a bit like programming, but sometimes they're more physical like Infinifactory." The tools and the challenges are specifically designed separately so you can apply the tools in any number of ways. In all our games, we give you a set of tools and we give you challenges with those tools. "Sometimes you might get lucky and there could be two ways to solve a puzzle. "In a traditional puzzle game you're giving a solution that's missing pieces and you have to put the pieces back into that solution to make the solution the designer intended," he explains. That title, Barth says, solidified the process by which him and his team design puzzle games. The game is a spiritual successor to one of Barth's previous Flash projects, 2008's The Codex of Alchemical Engineering. For us, marketing was making the game shit out gifs that everyone is going put on Twitter. A lot of indies think it's very important to pay someone a few thousand dollars to email YouTubers and Twitch streamers about your game and I don't want to do that. "Marketing at Zachtronics is an exciting thing because I don't really believe in it. As soon as we knew what we were doing in this game, we knew the gif thing would work, and it was going to be our primary marketing focus. Everyone was uploading gifs on Reddit and Twitter. "I went back into the code, pulled up the video editor that we had canned and converted it into a gif exporter," he says. After launch, a fan made a looping gif of their solution to a particular problem, inspiring Barth to find a new use for Infinifactory's video player. That would automatically upload videos to YouTube and was something the studio tried to do again with 2015's Infinifactory but this didn't work out so the feature was ditched. The gif aspect came about following the studio having a video exporter in 2011's Space Chem. In place of these words here, put a gif." The gifs are actually the closest thing to our elevator pitch. 'You built an open-ended puzzle game where you make machines and do alchemy' – that doesn't mean anything, and that certainly doesn't conjure up the images that a gif does. "It's funny because if you try to describe it with words, it's not actually very exciting. "Instead of a lift pitch for Opus Magnum, I would say just look at the gifs," he tells. This, the studio's founder Zach Barth, was the thinking behind Opus Magnum. Opus Magnum sees players performing alchemy with a mechanical infrastructure that's incredibly satisfying to watch. The sixth title from Zachtronics has been all over the social media platform with users sharing gifs of the game in action. If you have dipped your toe into video games Twitter since October, you'll no doubt have seen Opus Magnum in action.
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