“I’m not a perfectionist,” turns the guy making niche puzzle games into a wreck that means being obsessed with efficiency. And I feel a wave of comical anger. If, like me, you’re clicking around and sprinting through the very good engineering puzzle game Kaizen: A Factory story, you’re probably a fan of previous works from the same developer. The creators of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory may have disbanded the old studio Zachtronics and chemically played it as a game of chance, but Zach still has large traces. I caught up with designer Zach Baath and gave up from boredom about perfectionism, the automation game like Factor Rio that he gave up from boredom, and how he was able to create stories about Japanese factories in the 1980s.
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Save the story about the abandoned Factorish game later. First, a little bit of the background. Kaizen: Factory Story is a puzzle game where you watch TV sets, toy robots and gachapon machines in your workspace. Using arms, drills, welders, blades, riveters, and whole trucks, you need to create a machine that fuses all these pieces into the final form of each product. As a new Japanese person, you are entering this world of lean manufacturing. There, all the small steps could mean cheaper, faster or smaller solutions. It sounds like a dry setting, but it’s a great place to set up your engineering puzzle.
“All of our engineering games have this theme of optimization, right?” Bath says. “You’re constantly improving your score, and you’re making this ongoingly better like a real skill? And it seemed to fit very well with that vibe.”
While working on the game, Bath purchased all the books on the Toyota Production System, a method of factory production pioneered by car companies in the 1980s. The more he reads, the more he realizes it is perfectly suited to their game. Even the term kaizen refers to the Japanese business practices that he taught me to “continuously improve” every step of the production line.
“So, in technology, everyone is always wearing kaizen,” says the designer. “It means different for different people, but one thing that means is the idea that everyone working on the assembly line is empowered to advocate for quality and efficiency.
“And you’ve got a daily meeting like, “Hey, you know, it takes a really long time to do this step. Maybe if we reposition these things, we can be faster.” Or… when someone sees a defective product down the line, they are even more wrong on the line, so they are given the power to stop the line.
“And it’s this idea that you’re constantly improving the process because everyone is engaged in the process of improving it. And yeah, that certainly applies to our work, but I think it’s actually kind of standard now.”
But there is a risk to seeking that constant efficiency. Perfectionist trap has stopped playing through past games from this crowd as it searches for faster, smarter solutions into early puzzles rather than continuing on the next level. I think Bath himself is having this problem. If the studio is now shaking with a machine that makes games about as much as weld coffee machines together in the most affordable way.
No, after all. Because they can’t afford to waste time sweating on every little detail.
“We’d say we have our own culture, and that’s pretty practical, right? I’m not a perfectionist,” he says, flareing my nostrils. “I don’t know, it depends on the per person. But we’re not making enough money to make games all the time, so we were always in a position to have to make games.
“Our game is kind of cursed. We have had success, but only if we keep cranking out the game very quickly. That’s basically allowed. So we had to take a very practical approach.”
Still, there are similarities here, even if it is not intended. Kaizen’s story follows many factory workers who are shuffled from place to place in a higher order of the company called Matsuzawa Manufacturing, constantly assigned to new assembly lines. Home appliances. Entertainment machine. Mass-produced clothing. There is little room for downtime. But even applying this to a random game would continue.
“The story of the game, that’s really not a comparable thing to us,” Bath says. “It’s really about trying to get the characters to be in time and do their thing. A lot of our stories aren’t about people going on adventures, but about bunches of different perspectives.
As a result, it is a very calm story, told in the calmness of the Life of Life Documentary. Imagine someone filming how they’re making long-standing TV documentaries, stripping them of terrible music, shooting them like a quiet YouTube video about whether the artisan is still making certain things in the old fashioned way, and passing them all through a visual novel blender.
“It’s a strangely calm game. There’s this kind of non-fiction side. So it was a tough job for (writer) Matthew (Sage Burns) to do, and what we’re going to finish is the characters we’re talking about manufacturing.
We don’t exactly talk about what happens next in a coincidence (probably another game, Duh) asks about one tangentially related trend in a PC game: an endless automation game. Your Factorios, your Shapez’, your satisfaction. Bath’s designs often feel like a boutique’s self-contained antidote to their grand and endless craft sims. However, players’ drives are often similar. I want to find the most efficient way to make something. When I look into how he feels about those games, it sounds like he’s being asked a lot about them.
“I had meetings and things with bigger people in the industry, but a lot of stuff is, “If you can make a game like Factor Rio, you can make a lot of money.”
“And if you want to make a game like Factor Rio, it’s not difficult to see how to do it because everyone else does. It’s a genre of games that is functionally identical to the factor.
But that didn’t stop them from trying at least once.
“A few years ago we tried to make a game like Factorio,” he tells me. “It was very different. It wasn’t about conveyor belts or anything like that. You build submarines and things you explore, you build factories and things. So it was like a craft game. 1 puzzle. “
“Can I spend a year or two or three on this game with a high tech tree? The whole meat of the game. I’m not very good at making any kind of games. Most games look really boring and you have to work on it for many years. Puzzle games are really cool. Your own little world.”
It is this dedication to the purity of puzzles as a form that thinks that you will make a game of chance with a chance sacctotronics. Kaizen: The Factory Story proves that when necessary, these niche puzzles continue to weld and rivet in thoughtful ways.
(TagStoTranslate) Kaizen: Factory Story (T)Astra Logic (T)Cursed (T)PC (T)Puzzle (T)Simulation (T)Strategy
