Zach Barth and his team at Zachtronics don't exactly do the whole game marketing malarkey by the book. Pop over to the website for the studio's latest game Infinifactory and you'll find a single screenshot with minimal information. The game is due out in the next couple of months, yet trying to get assets to spruce up this article proved fruitless. "You can get your trailers and screenshots after we launch," Barth laughs. It's perhaps not entirely surprising. With Infinifactory, Barth is essentially looking to build the next generation of Minecraft -- a game that, as is widely known, was originally built as a clone of Barth's own game Infiniminer. And Infinifactory is meant as a quasi-sequel to Infiniminer, comprising of what Barth describes as a "next-generation block engine." Wanting to guard your secrets, after watching another game take one of your previous concepts for a $2.5 billion run, doesn't sound all that crazy on the face of it. I spoke with Barth about Infinifactory, and how he plans to go one better on the block-building genre. What is Infinifactory about? You've kept details very thin on the ground about the game. Barth: Yeah, it turns out that it's a pain in the ass to put out information about this stuff. You have to take screenshots, you have to make sure they look good - it's really hard to take attractive screenshots in games. I've never had a good time doing that. I guess with SpaceChem, all the screenshots kinda looked the same. Barth: Even then, I was like, "I have to get the perfect visual balance and representation of what's going on, and try to hint the right things about the gameplay. It was just impossible. When people are just playing it, they take screenshots of whatever they think is interesting, but when you've made the game, it's really hard because all you see is the content. I hate putting together trailers too. We're not even planning to do a trailer anytime around Early Access, because it's just such a pain in the ass.
"Fuck it, we can do whatever we want! I can make this game if I want to! I have the moral high ground! No-one can say that we're cloning Minecraft."
You have YouTubers now who will do that for you! Barth: Yeah! And they're going to do a better job than us, right? I don't know what's cool about this game. I've seen everything for months. They'll pick out exactly what they want to show. In a lot of ways, it's a lot more earnest, it's easier for me [laughs] and it's going to be better! Video is not our speciality - we make games. You've still not told me what this game is about! From the single screenshot you've put out, it looks like a 3D representation of what was happening in SpaceChem. Barth: Are you familiar with my older games, like Manufactoid? It's not very good, don't play it. It's very old, I made it years ago. This is basically a 3D version of that, made to not suck. You built these factories out of conveyor belts, pushing arms, welders, stuff that sticks blocks together, and you build a factory that creates a product. It's different from SpaceChem in that... I mean, I've been trying to quantify the difference between the two. On the one hand we don't want to say, "It's just like SpaceChem," because it's not. On the other hand, we want people who like SpaceChem to think, "Well I'm going to like this." Trying to find that medium has been tricky, because a lot of people like SpaceChem, and the audience for this game is going to be similar to that audience. The people who like SpaceChem the most, are still going to like SpaceChem more. If we just wanted to make a game for the SpaceChem audience, we'd just make SpaceChem 2. This is something different. One of the big things when it comes to the mechanics, is that blocks can push other blocks. In SpaceChem, if you tried to stick two atoms together you'd lose, right? So one of the fundamental things in this game is that you can use blocks to push other blocks. It's one of the major mechanics that everything else kinda unfolds out of. The screenshot also reminds me a little of a 3D Factorio - have you seen that? Barth: Yeah, I guess that's more of a resource-harvesting game? A lot of people have said, "I love Factorio, I'm going to love this!" This game is nothing like Factorio [laughs] It's not about resources, in the same way that SpaceChem really wasn't. It's a puzzle game about building. What made you go back to the "Infini" name? You had Infiniminer, of course, which was famously the inspiration for Minecraft, so is this new game meant to be in the same world? Barth: It does take place in the same world. After Infiniminer, probably about six months after I stopped working on it, I was out walking and thought, "You know what would be awesome? Infiniminer meets Manufactoid!" We'd already built this idea of how to build things out of blocks in a 3D world, so I realized, this could be a really cool game. But then I just didn't make it [laughs] After we did Ironclad Tactics, we were looking back at our ideas of what we wanted to do. We'd been thinking about making another game that was about building, and we'd been thinking about making another puzzle game, because after making Ironclad, a lot of people were asking for that. We're kinda the only people out there making puzzle games like this, so we decided on this. So the Minecraft stuff happened, and you've already talked about that before. Now you've announced this game, and I immediately see some press outlets referring to is as a mash-up of SpaceChem and Minecraft. When you see that, how do you feel about it?
"I'm running a company and people are depending on me to make decisions that make us successful, and so it's like, I can suck it up. Sure, it's like Minecraft meets SpaceChem, whatever."
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