Puzzle masters return with a new studio and compelling manufacturing challenges.
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Kaizen: A Factory Story makes a game of perfecting 1980s Japanese manufacturing
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I had thought Zachtronics had folded with Last Call BBS. So he's doing it again under a new name.
Oh well, I can't complain.
Oh well, I can't complain.
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This triggers me in good and bad of my IT yrs.
As someone that's did entry life of a college grad in the lower IT sphere of assembly line work with various specialized OEMs and IBM Mainframe work, it gave the best work performance development. Lean Manufacturing was the big term from Kaizen and making improvements to efficiently reduce production time waste and line assembly available of who handles what.
Turns out, I was the golden egg in this job for 2 out of 7yrs of excelled performance until they decided to throw me and the assembly team I was with into the rotten cart for the Morning Shift that does OT at 4AM in the morning + Morning Shift Pay Reduction. My Vamperic deeds said no more!
Anyhow, back to my LEGO assembly and making these cool mecha!
As someone that's did entry life of a college grad in the lower IT sphere of assembly line work with various specialized OEMs and IBM Mainframe work, it gave the best work performance development. Lean Manufacturing was the big term from Kaizen and making improvements to efficiently reduce production time waste and line assembly available of who handles what.
Turns out, I was the golden egg in this job for 2 out of 7yrs of excelled performance until they decided to throw me and the assembly team I was with into the rotten cart for the Morning Shift that does OT at 4AM in the morning + Morning Shift Pay Reduction. My Vamperic deeds said no more!
Anyhow, back to my LEGO assembly and making these cool mecha!
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It was not a browser game, it was a downloadable executable.
On the (unofficial) Zachtronics Discord, Zach Barth posted this message:
Most previous Zachtronics games were announced less than a month before release, but their publisher wanted an earlier announcement date for this one.
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That’s what I thought, but from the trailer it seems like much of the game involves building stuff besides mecha.
(The frowny face is hyperbole. Still looks like a potentially fun game.)
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You sure it's not Voltron?
edit: looking closer... the color scheme reminds me more of Voltron, but yeah...no lions to be seen.
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As a fan of all his old titles, that was my understanding as well. Ending Zachtronics and the release of Last Call BBS were framed like "I'm stepping away from games". It sounds like this game is also being made with the old team so it's all a bit odd. Change of heart or maybe something was no good in the legalese surrounding the previous studio/team iteration?
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He has to know the name alone inspires a certain amount of PTSD in those of us actually in the field of manufacturing since that era. Will I have to attend Tier 3 meetings?
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So much time spent with my laptop on the couch in my parents' apartment as I was helping out after mom's retina surgery, programing tiny little robots in Exapunks.
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He probably had an idea for how he could cut 3 cycles and one conference room out of the development loop.
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Back in June 2022 he said:
So it sounds like he did want to step away from games, but discovered that teaching is not what he wants to do, and that what he really wants to do with his life is to make essentially the same game every year. (And it's a very good game, so I'm happy for him to keep doing that and I'll keep buying it). By that point he'd already committed to shutting down Zachtronics, hence the new company.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Are defect rates built in (rework, rejects, assemblies which come out at the far ends of the bell-shaped curve) and is that part of the optimisation process of winning the game?
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Maybe I can convince my workplace to allow some play time of this like how kids played Oregon Trail in elementary school. It'd be more productive than some meetings I've had where no one shows up.
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Nice find and thanks for sharing the background context.
Good for him and I’ll happily line up to buy “the same game” every year too!
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The plant manager calls a meeting in the Obeya Room, where they remind everyone of the importance of genchi genbutsu!
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punksmurph
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
You are asking me to play a puzzle game that designs an efficient system? All of a sudden my work getting an MBA is paying off (along with the promotion and raises I got).
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Zach + the others at Coincidence have been releasing games over the last few years since the Zachtronics closure - card based games (The Lucky Seven and Chemistry Set) and a math video game (Add Astra).
Highly recommend checking them out as cool solitaire games, intuitive but deep games.
Highly recommend checking them out as cool solitaire games, intuitive but deep games.
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This guy is responsible for so much brain breakage trying to wrap my mind around some wild ideas. Never again.
...you can play the pachinko machine that you make in the game?
Ah, dammit.
Edit: I love the inkan marks on the completed mission list. Nice touch.
...you can play the pachinko machine that you make in the game?
Ah, dammit.
Edit: I love the inkan marks on the completed mission list. Nice touch.
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Hehe I was hoping someone would bring this up.
It’s like a mecha Rorschach inkblot test.
Through my lens of the 80s Transformer toys, I see Optimus Prime’s general stature with Ultra Magnus coloring and the breast plate (and coloring) from Rodimus Prime.
In other words, it’s all the nostalgia feels wrapped up in one bot and thus pretty clever marketing to target at least one (old) segment of the gaming population.
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There's so much Zachtronics vibe here. I was sad that Last Call BBS was going to be their, um, Last Call, but I will totally play the heck out of this when it's released. The Zach-like style is crack for the puzzler brain.
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The debugging looks all Andon (stop the line) for Genba.
(TBH I'm all andon for genba.)
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The circumstances of you playing were quite meta, given one of the levels in Exapunks
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Teaching sounds cool and all, until you realize what teaching high schoolers is like in reality. Add in the fact that a computer science course is inherently expensive to teach because you need computers, half the students aren't even interested in being there and no one has your back for anything, and it's quite demoralizing. Add in a curriculum that changes with the wind depending on what's the dogma of the day and it's a wonder there are any teachers at all.
I'm 99% sure they went their separate ways to try things out, then realized the grass was not greener. And Zachtronics games were probably still giving him more money than teaching ever did with far less frustration.
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It's like "the incredible machine" meets "fruity loops " software
talk about childhood memories
talk about childhood memories
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