Zachtronics' Shenzhen I/O is a game for people who code games

Last month, Zachtronics launched the Early Access version of Shenzhen I/O, a game about running away to China to join an electronics company, design circuits, and write code.

It's a spiritual successor to TIS-100, the coder puzzle game that Zachtronics quietly launched last year. That title was the definition of niche -- it describes itself as "the assembly language programming game you never asked for" -- and it was virtually invisible to everyone outside of the specific audience it was aimed at: programmers.

"Niches are big nowadays,” developer Zachary Barth told me last year. “There's a lot of programmers, it's easy to reach them because they're all playing computer games for the most part, and they all have money! So it's not a bad niche.”

When I interviewed Barth and fellow developer Matthew Burns last month, they confirmed that TIS-100 went on to outsell Zachtronics' far more approachable 2015 puzzle game Infinifactory by a factor of roughly 2 to 1. However, since TIS-100 is currently $7 on Steam compared to Infinifactory's $25, Barth says it was "kind of too cheap to be super-successful."

Shenzhen I/O is Zachtronics' attempt to build on the success of TIS. The game is aimed squarely at the same niche coder audience, but it has a more approachable interface, a cast of characters, and a higher price tag (Shenzhen is currently $15).

Shenzen I/O invites players to "Read the manual, which includes over 30 pages of original datasheets, reference guides, and technical diagrams"

The two devs seem excited about the prospect of building up a core audience of people who yearn for games about solving puzzles through programming. Barth compared it to the "Spiderweb Software model," referencing developer Jeff Vogel's knack for surviving and thriving by making games for a niche audience (in Vogel's case, isometric RPGs).

“I guess this is sort of a solution to the discoverability problem, right? To make something that is really unique and that you have an audience for,” said Barth. “I can put out the word and it only takes a couple weeks for a lot of people to return and come back and be engaged and excited about it.”

By many accounts we’re living in the wake of an indiepocalypse, so any insight into how small studios survive and thrive in 2016 is worth chasing. But there’s more to learn from the story of Shenzhen I/O's development, I think -- lessons about how people tell stories about themselves through the things they create.

“How we tell the story is the puzzles themselves,” said Burns. “The puzzles themselves are the products. And then the products themselves illuminate the world that you live in.”

More on that in a moment. First, let's talk about sales: Barth says Shenzhen has been seeling faster than its predecessor (and just about any Zachtronics game, apparently), reinforcing the notion that it's possible for game developers to carve out careers making the sorts of games they love for the people who love them too -- even if those games happen to be about working at fictional Chinese electronics firms designing fake security cameras and light-up vape pens.

Let's talk about using light-up vape pens as a narrative device

The game tasks you with coding and engineering products for clients. Sometimes, those are games and game accessories. Other times, they're fake traffic cameras or sandwich makers.

At one point Shenzhen I/O challenges players to create radio-controlled LED vape pens for a musician Barth calls “Cool Dad”, and it turns out if you want to know where Shenzhen came from, Cool Dad is key.

Cool Dad links Shenzhen I/O to The Second Golden Age, the ideal open-world programming game Barth dreamed up years ago and then took a shot at creating during a lull in Infinifactory’s development.

That effort didn't pan out, but it did lead to the development of TIS-100, which Barth described last year as a sort of standalone version of what he’d originally envisioned to be a discrete set of puzzles in Golden Age. A key element of this massive puzzle game he’d envisioned was that players were expats in a strange land, often solving puzzles to build things at others’ behest. Those things were artifacts that would then tell the player something about the world they were exploring, and the characters they were serving.

“In Second Golden Age most of the things that you were doing, they were artifacts. Maybe you'd do some chemical synthesis, but you're designing a designer drug for a person to use,” Barth said. “Even Cool Dad; we created this character called Cool Dad who's like a musician, but like a dubstep Kid Rock. He's really popular; nobody really likes him, but he's really popular.”

Now, in Shenzhen I/O, the player steps into the shoes of an engineer who moves to a near-future China in order to make things. It is, as Barth puts it, “straight up the story from The Second Golden Age,” and Cool Dad also makes his presence known in Shenzhen by putting in an order for a truckload of light-up vape pens.

“You know when you go to a concert and they give you the glowsticks that light up with the music?” Barth said. “Cool Dad did that except they're all vape pens, so it's just like an audience full with a thick haze of vape smoke and everybody is vaping, but then the vape pens are flashing to the music. It's very -- People pay a lot of money for that shit in 2026.”

Since Shenzhen I/O players learn about the game's world through email conversations with coworkers, they never meet Cool Dad. They never communicate directly with him; the only way they learn about him (if they care too at all) is by putting together the thing he wants, and thinking about why he wants it.

This is, incidentally, the same approach Zachtronics took in designing the puzzle.

“You just kind of work backwards, right?” Barth said. “We came up with the idea for the vape pen first. Right, we're like, ‘What would Cool Dad give away at a concert that proves how awful he is?’”

There’s something worth highlighting here, this notion that game designers can turn even seemingly banal items like disposable concert tchotchkes into intriguing puzzles. According to Barth, Zachtronics often designs such puzzles by working backwards -- figuring out what makes sense for the world, then stepping backwards through the puzzle-solving process.

“So we had this idea, and we say, ‘Okay, so it's like a vape pen. What can you do?’” Barth said. "I think specifically for this one it was like, ‘How can you make a vape pen more interesting than just a vape pen?’ You (Burns) had just been to that concert….”

“Yeah, I went to the Hatsune Miku concert,” Burns chimed in.

“They gave you light-up things that go with the music or whatever. So I thought, ‘Oh, that's electronics,’” Barth continued. “ So if this were a real thing in this real universe of being at the Cool Dad concert, they'd need to be able to turn the LED to a certain color and flash it and do all this stuff. So from there [our puzzle design process is] pretty straightforward: Let's design this product for real. What would you do if you were actually designing this product? You'd have a radio that turns it on and off -- Then we just built the puzzle to be that.”

That also means that when a Shenzhen I/O player solves a puzzle, they’ve also designed something that approximates the functionality of a real product in the real world. They get an intimate understanding of what that thing is, how it fits into the fictional world of the game, and what the characters in that game think about it. That inin turn sheds light on who those characters are and how they feel about spending their lives building things for others, like a light-up vape pen to be mass-produced and used for effect at a Cool Dad concert.

How playing Shenzhen is like working in big-budget game dev

"To sort of be involved in this peripheral way with something larger like that, to me that echoes experiences I've had working on AAA games," says Burns, who has credits on multiple Halo and Call of Duty games. "Like you've played this really small part in this weird thing that's this cultural phenomenon somewhere else and you did this thing for it. Making a vape pen for some famous concert, that kind of thing. For someone who works on a big AAA game it's like, 'I did the sound effects.'"

"Yeah," chimes in Barth, with a laugh. "Like 'I modeled all the bushes in Mass Effect 3.'"