Comments on: Thoughts: Infinifactory

By: Thoughts: Möbius Front '83 | The Scientific Gamer

Thoughts: Möbius Front '83 | The Scientific Gamer — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 11:01:26 +0000

[…] history with those; I started out loving the early Zachtronics puzzlers such as SpaceChem and Infinifactory, but the more of them Zach cranked out (he’s up to something like seven or eight of them now) the […]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Jul 2015 19:12:06 +0000

Another problem with SpaceChem was in fact just cause it looked like programming. If you work in software development you know what I mean: SpaceChem tools looked like a developer tools but goals were as far from dev goals as possible. Modern developers generally doesn’t care about environmental limitation. It’s hard to find a problem modern PC won’t handle. In real programming code readability and transparency is much more important than performance. Not so in SpaceChem. SpaceChem is all about being a programmer in 1980′s. Build a world with 64kb of memory, something like that.

My attempts to write readable modifiable algorithms in SpaceChem were laughed upon. 13% of people did it faster, man, and you’re saying you’re programmer?

Those stats make me happy wargames don’t have those kind of comparisons. Usually when I launch them I suspect devs have a very specific user input in mind. It’s best for all they jut allow us to win through ineffective solutions.

By: Rolly

Rolly — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 23:55:22 +0000

Once you start having to deconstruct stuff and feed it through the *redacted* and rebuild it again it gets to be just a touch painful. My solution for the second last one was failing due to a sequence error which I couldn’t be bothered to fix so just ran it at the slowest speed.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 12:15:33 +0000

Infinifactory does the same thing where it shows you the histograms saying 80% of the people who solved this puzzle did it with a better solution than you. Which is why I roundly ignore them. Infinifactory is a game with fewer “cheat” solutions than SpaceChem, and so finishing a level at all is a big achievement.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 14:21:58 +0000

Oh god. It returned. You made me play SpaceChem and now you strike again.

SpaceChem gave me nightmares. Satisfaction from solved puzzle was always eclipsed by dozens of minutes of self-deprication and feeling dumb. And after taking a break you have to start over to learn all these tricks and standard constructions again.

And even when you solve it the game laughs at you and says that there are hundreds if not thousands of people who thought of better solution and therefore are much more accomplished human beings. I’m freaking senior developer and this game about alchemy denounces me. Nah, I say! Nah!