> "TIS-100", which both give a similarly visual insight into how computers work. You know that TIS-100 was originally planned to be a very different game: > h

> "TIS-100", which both give a similarly visual insight into how computers work. You know that TIS-100 was originally planned to be a very different game: > http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/244969/Things_we_create_tell_people_who_we_are_Designing_Zachtronics_TIS100.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/244969/Things_we_create_t... 'The story of how TIS-100 came to Early Access this week starts where many development stories end: with an idea for a sprawling, grandiose game that proved too impractical to live. “Years ago, I came up with this game idea called The Second Golden Age,” says Barth. It was basically a cyberpunk thriller set in a future Middle East crawling with nanotechnology other weird future tech. “You'd be an engineer, and you'd be dabbling in all these different technologies; you'd be designing all these tiny little devices that could like, go into your bloodstream, and it'd be a super-cyberpunk engineering game,” says Barth. The idea was to build an open world filled with different kinds of puzzles for the player to solve, a bit akin to Myst. Multiple systems of puzzles would be in play -- all of the chemical engineering puzzles in SpaceChem would be akin to one distinct subset of puzzles in Golden Age, for example -- and players could learn things about the world and advance themselves by mastering various puzzle mechanics. as the player could explore a virtual world filled with different kinds of puzzles to solve. Recently, Barth took a shot at making his idea a reality. “We were really deep in production on Infinifactory, and I really wanted to ‘go indie’ -- even as an indie developer -- and make something on my own, to prove I could still do that,” recalls Barth. “Because now I don't make anything by myself, right? We have between 4-7 people on our team full-time, plus a bunch of external people. I wanted to see if I could make something -- not by myself, because I still didn't -- but at least with a smaller team.” So Barth set out to try and recapture something of his past by crafting his Second Golden Age with some collaborators, designing a game with a story and five different puzzle games within it before realizing "Oh god, I can't make another game. There's so much work here! It doesn't make sense, it will cost a fortune to make the art, I just...I don't have time for this." But out of that aborted attempt came a piece of game design that would become the foundation for a game he could actually make, a game about solving puzzles with assembly code. “One of the puzzles I designed [for Golden Age] was exactly TIS-100,” says Barth. “The original story of The Second Golden Age was going to involve, as you're going around this future city in the Middle East, you can stumble into this junk shop where you find this old computer.' (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIS-100&oldid=780520540#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIS-100&oldid=780... for a shorter summary).