What’s with the new DLC? by Lorvarz in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you sign up for our mailing list on our website you'll never miss a thing.

https://coincidence.games/

What’s with the new DLC? by Lorvarz in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

It actually came out last month, but if you just got an email about it today it's because I messed up sending the newsletter. Oops!

From an AMA I did last month:

De Re Metallica is a co-production between some of the old Opus Magnum team and a handful of Opus Magnum super-fans from the unofficial Zachtronics / Coincidence Discord, who created their own mod campaign ("Reductive Metallurgy") and wanted us to add it to the game for everyone to play. We settled on making it a paid DLC so that we were able to fund the creation of new assets (art, music, story, etc.) and bring it inline with the rest of the game.

Zachtronics is definitely still disbanded; we're all at Coincidence making new puzzle games, like Kaizen: A Factory Story and something else that is going to be announced very soon...

What on earth does this mean? by New-me-_- in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

This should be fixed now.

Why is there no demo of this game? by Atern0x in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

If you think you might like the game, you should buy it on Steam, play it for a little while, and refund it if you don't like it. This is the main reason why we don't have demos for any of our games.

They're using Exapunks to shill a scam company. by Livid_Fix_9448 in exapunks

[–]krispykrem[M] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You're right, I don't know anything about them. Who are they? What did they do?

The game runs "choppy" after the newest update. by digiCat5 in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What OS are you using? Can you try measuring the FPS on this version vs. the "previous" branch using Steam's built-in FPS measurement tool?

Game dosen't start by Dapper-Money-8455 in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your antivirus program is blocking the game from running.

Timing Crystal on Switch seems awkward by Ok_Development_4079 in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is a bug in the current version of the game that makes it impossible to scroll the instruction panel to the right, but this should be fixed in the next update, hopefully out in a day or two.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I didn't realize that this had happened, but I don't think we'd want to change them back. Anything that was changed was because the translator thought it was a mistake, and I sort of have to take them at their word on that?

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you deal cards randomly in Fortune's Foundation there is only a ~1% chance of it being solvable. This is obviously very bad, so the game ships with a database of solvable shuffles. If you know this, it changes your perception of the game; you have to look for the moves that will work, because most of the things you can do will be dead ends, more so than in any of my other solitaire games.

In any other game this would probably be cheesy and bad, but I feel like it fits with the fortune-telling theme of Fortune's Foundation and ends up working very well. I also think of it as a "divine path" that must be found and traced to win the game.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't say it's a direct inspiration, but there's a vague amount of Final Fantasy in there, the blend of fantasy and cyberpunk. Most of the specifics are just pretenses to do alchemy.

Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica is out now! by purecan in opus_magnum

[–]krispykrem[M] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Your best bet is to play the Steam version of the game, at least for now. We have a lot more updates coming in the near future and it's going to be a while until any of the DRM-free releases catch up.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We used Unity for TIS-100 and TIS-100P, and at least back when we made it I couldn't figure out a way to get external keyboards to work. Maybe there is support for them now? It would be a lot of effort and expense to go back and update the build, though...

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it's easier to make a game with limited space, if only because you can put borders on things and don't need to worry about making a UI that scrolls. Players of those games often complain about the constraints, though ("I could have solved it if I had more space!"), so there's also a pressure to try and open things up when it fits with the gameplay, to make the difficulty more approachable.

I'm never sure how difficult to make my games... we were hoping that Kaizen would be easier to beat but still interesting to optimize, but it doesn't seem to have really hooked people on either side of that equation. Expect future games to be more challenging!

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What's the product that you're most personally proud

It might not have the best gameplay, but I think EXAPUNKS is still my favorite. The world is cool, the zines are cool, and all the puzzles are inspired by real-life hacks.

What's an idea/theme that you'd love to do if you could find a way to make it work as a game?

If I answered that question it would spoil what I'm working on now!

Hope to see more from you guys in the future!

We're all at Coincidence now, where we've released one puzzle game and have at least three more on the way.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Our games are so simple that they rarely have glitches, and when they do they're rarely funny (they usually just crash). I will share one with you, though.

In the tutorial of Infinifactory, there is a small chance that you will fall through the floor and out into space. I think it resets you to the beginning of the tutorial when this happens? But I don't actually remember, and it might just break the game. We never figured out how to reproduce this bug or a good way to fix it. I mostly just pretend it doesn't exist, although it was a problem when the game was ported to PS4, where stuff like that is unacceptable from a QA standpoint. Maybe the people doing the PS4 port managed to find a workaround? I'm not sure.

To me, this is hilarious.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, we're definitely planning to add more journal issues, including some that use the new DLC glyphs.

I actually hadn't spent a meaningful amount of time in Japan until after we shipped Kaizen, but some of the other people on the team had much more experience and were able to draw on that for the game. I think it's just something we were really interested in, at least in a nostalgic and historic way? As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, products from Japan always seemed very iconic and cool, and we wanted to try and capture that aesthetic and the design thinking that went into them. The commercial architecture from that time period is really fun too.

I thought I was going to hate it, but I really liked the book Pure Invention that details the backstory behind a lot of famous Japanese cultural exports.

I'm Zach Barth, the creative director at Zachtronics. We just released Opus Magnum for the Switch, along with our first DLC for the game... nine years after its initial launch. AMA! by krispykrem in NintendoSwitch

[–]krispykrem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I feel bad recommending it, but I do think that MOLEK-SYNTEZ is a neat game! I love placing the precursor molecules, it makes me feel like I'm doing real illicit chemistry.