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Comment by em3rgent0rdr | Hacker News Reader

One thing I would like for the Zachtronics games is if the optimization mattered somehow other than just personal satisfaction. Such as you get achievements, special equipment, or get to unlock special stages for meeting certain optimization goals. Or since you are basically designing factories (or PCBs in the case of Shenzhen and TIS), maybe your creations earn profit based on their cost and efficiency? And maybe you have to earn enough profit to win the game, in which case would have to revisit less efficient designs to improve them.

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One of the standard approaches to this these days seems to be the 3 star system.

So you can complete a level and progress, but also have motivation to back and do it better.

Then these stars can be blockers to accessing later stages, so you may have to have an average of 2 stars from 15 levels to get to the next stage (which may be visible and locked, or may show up a 'surprise' reward later on in the game).

One particular game using this method Nintendo's NES Remix also adds "rainbow" level if you do particularly well and I spent a while getting them all and enjoyed having that structure. I would guess this all takes a reasonable amount of effort to set up on the dev's side though.

Well, part of the appeal for Tom is that you can just blunder your way through the campaign: "And that’s reason 6: you don’t have to optimise. If I had to do this to progress, I probably would have quit in frustration."

I'm reminded here of Wario Land on the Gameboy: you could finish the game by speeding through levels, but the time you spent collecting treasure directly influenced the prize you got at the end. Maybe that would be a good compromise for gamers driven by external milestones rather than personal ones.

> "I probably would have quit in frustration."

In actuality, I actually quit in frustration about 3/4ths through the game because I realized I could just blunder my way through the rest of the game.

Eventually I got tired of the game after I stopped caring about optimizing, and then wondered why I should bother completing the game other than for the sake of completing it. Yes there was a storyline to the game which should be completed, but the storyline was disconnected from the essense of the game (which to me was optimization). I would have felt more purpose in finishing the game if the optimization mattered somehow, like for instance if it affected the storyline or progress of your character somehow.

I don't think it is a matter to me of "external milestones" vs "personal milestones", but more about engagement and immersion in the story and world of the game, which I suppose is something I am after in addition to simple mental exercise.

For comparison, another Zachtronics game "SpaceChem" does a great job in linking the optimization into the game and storyline though the following simple mechanism: in order to defeat bosses, your factory had to meet certain timing requirements. To me, that requirement made all the difference in terms of immersion.

One of the problems with rewarding optimization is that at the time of game design, the designers don't know how well the problems can be solved. They'd have difficulty balancing it, and there would end up being arbitrary cutoffs for "optimized enough."

Interesting that you brought this up...shenzhen I/O actually had to release some updates after they found some puzzles were too difficult to complete, not even optimized!

I suppose one of the downsides of modern day indie game-dev is not having playtesters. But surely with early access these difficulties could be figured out.

Still I'm not necessarily suggesting that failure to optimize should block the player's progress. Rather that the optimization affects the game somehow.

I had the opposite experience: Infinifactory was great because even my kludgiest creations got to the point of giving a warm fuzzy "I made dis!" emotional payout... which is what drove my interest in optimizing against friends.

In contrast, some of the less-friendly (and less-intuitive) limits in the "boss battles" of SpaceChem simply turned into big painful dead-ends, leading to me abandoning the game on the final level. (And swearing I'd get back to it... someday.)

I think the distinction speaks a little bit to the spectrum between "problem solving" and "puzzle solving". Both games are solidly in the former camp, but Infinifactory feels far more like a creative unique exercise.

Plus, I kind of need more of the life-lesson: Getting something "ugly" that works and then iterating is better than holding yourself to an emotionally-safe but difficult standard that keeps you from getting work done :P

Great points. I do admit I did feel a great sense of satisfaction from many of the "ugly" designs that merely worked, and there is good in that, as I'm sure many tools we rely on fall into that category!

Fun fact revealed in a GDC talk: Even Zach Barth himself did not feel motivated to complete the final SpaceChem level. He just designed it to the point where it "looked solvable" and then turned his playtesters loose on it.

( https://archive.org/details/GDC2013Barth at 19:20)

If you play Zachtronics games on Steam your best scores show up ranked against any Steam friends that have played the level. I've found trying to out optimize my friends pretty rewarding at times.

For me, it functions as an instant obliteration of self-pride at having completed a level.

Yeah, me too. I kinda wish that you could turn off the "graphs" at the end of the levels.

I believe "hermit mode" does this.

The Steam integration is nice if you have a couple of other people who also play these games because you get to compare your best with their best.

Personally I managed to keep up with the global optimums early on in the shenzhen campaign but as it went on my solutions were progressively worse than the population. (Or least the portion of it left still completing those puzzles.)

The personal satisfaction is still the main driver of course, I think having the base binary "solved or not" solution is a good way to gate progression as you can choose to optimize as you go through or do a success pass and then revisit for optimisations which suits different play styles. (Personally I like to optimize as I go).

You could try to improve on the best known metrics for each level: https://www.reddit.com/r/opus_magnum/wiki/index

Right, and I am aware of this and think it is great that people are trying to find the best solutions and compete in the real world. But I was instead suggesting to have the optimization matter in the game's world.

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