Zachary Barth is an indie game developer who creates games under the banner Zachtronics Industries. Barth is known for building engineering puzzle games[1] and for the creation of the "Block World" genre of procedurally generated block-based mining/world deformation and building mechanics[2] used by games such as Minecraft, Fortress Craft, CraftWorld and Ace of Spades.
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In interviews with indie games websites, Barth said that he started creating games early in his life, but only learned the required skills at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he joined the game development club.[3][4]
Barth studied computer systems engineering and computer science at RPI. He was one of three students leading the interdisciplinary team of the CapAbility Games Research Project, a collaboration of RPI with the Center for Disability Services in Albany, New York. In 2008, the team produced Capable Shopper, a shopping simulation game for players with various degrees of disability.[5]
Barth has a programming position with a large software company and runs the one-man operation Zachtronics Industries in his spare time. For SpaceChem, his first commercial production, he took in a number of collaborators.[3]
His earlier, non-commercial, games included twenty that were published on his old website and "five good ones" which he transferred over to the new site. Four of these use Flash to make them cross-platform, in spite of Flash's "terrible" development environment. The other one is based on .NET for greater programming convenience. SpaceChem also used .NET, as Barth considers C# to be "the best language ever invented". For marketing reasons, Barth decided against XNA with its capability to cross-publish to Xbox 360, and switched to OpenGL, which allowed him to target the three operating systems required for inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle.[3]
Before SpaceChem came out, Zachtronics was known for creating the game genre set by Infiniminer, the block-building precursor game of the monster hit Minecraft by Mojang AB.[2] Although individual elements of the gameplay mechanics of Infiniminer existed before, it was this blend of blocky charm and world building/deformation that endeared users to it.
The gameplay mechanics and visuals that Barth conceptualized have subsequently been used in other games such as the Xbox 360 game Fortress Craft,[6] the upcoming Xbox 360, Windows Phone 7 and PC game CraftWorld[7] as well as the freeware multi-player online game Ace of Spades[8].
Infiniminer is an open source multi-player block-based sandbox building and digging game, in which the player is a miner searching for minerals by carving tunnels through procedurally generated voxel-based maps and building structures. According to the author Barth, it was based on his earlier game Infinifrag, Team Fortress, and Motherload by XGen Studios.[1]
Barth wrote Infiniminer in his spare time and released it in steps of incremental updates during April–May 2009. It quickly garnered a following on message boards around the internet.
Infiniminer was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious metals, and bring your findings to the surface to earn points for your team.[9] However, as the game gained popularity, players decided it was much more fun to build things than to compete for points.
Zachtronics discontinued development of the game less than a month after its first release as the result of its source code leak. As Barth had not obfuscated the C# .NET source code of the game, it was decompiled and extracted from the binaries. Hackers modified the code to make mods, but also started making clients that would target vulnerabilities in the game as well as build incompatible game forks that fragmented its user base. Barth who was making the game for free then lost interest and dropped the project as it made development of the game hard to push forward.[3] The source code of Infiniminer is now open and available under an MIT License.[10]
The game is particularly notable as it is the original game that the hit indie game Minecraft is based upon (and subsequently FortressCraft, CraftWorld and Ace of Spades). The visuals and mechanics of procedural generation and terrain deformation of Minecraft were drawn from Infiniminer.[11] According to Minecraft author Markus Persson, after he discovered Infiniminer, he "decided it was the game he wanted to do".[12] As a result, if one plays Infiniminer, one can note that the visuals of blocky graphics and carving out voxel blocks as a miner are practically identical.[13]
As Minecraft became popular, Infiniminer was overshadowed and faded into obscurity. Barth's feelings about Minecraft are complicated. As Minecraft became hugely successful, he stated that he finds it "flattering", "cool" and "awesome", because it was based on something he made.[3]
Zachtronics Industries is also known for its puzzle game SpaceChem in which the player creates Rube Goldberg chemical pathways similar in style to visual programming.
SpaceChem has garnered praise with the gaming community and is currently the sole game on the recommendation page of Team Fortress creator Robin Walker, with him declaring it as "Pretty much the greatest game ever made".[14][15]
As of March 8, 2011, Barth stated the possibility of making expansion packs to SpaceChem and adding a free update and editor which would allow users to create their own levels which could then be shared to other users, with the best ones being picked out by Zachtronics to be published and these were released on April 29 as the Shareholders' Update.[16] Barth hinted at the prospect of a sequel and also stated that it would be fantastic to have SpaceChem on a future Humble Indie Bundle.[3] The game was included in the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle charitable sale in early October 2011.[17]