Preview: Silicon Zeroes

Written by Dave Gamble on 8/28/2017 for PC  

I am becoming ever more enamored with Indie games. Courtesy of cloud-based vendors like Steam, self-published games are having the same market impact that self-published books have made due to easy availability on cloud-based outlets such as Amazon. Which is to say, the ability for independent developers and small studios to speak directly to the end consumer without the complexities and barriers incumbent in the now obsolete physical-media distribution chain has opened the market for niche products. And that's to say nothing about the mega-bucks required to get a game on a shelf in the old, physical world in the first place. It has been an enormous boon to consumer and developers alike.

As a personal example, I am enjoying the burgeoning market for what I call Programming Puzzles. My first experience was with a game called TIS-100, which at its core was an assembly language type of programming puzzle/simulator. Having eschewed the world of low-level programming early in my career in favor of learning C and Windows 3.1, I have always felt that I had missed out on a rite of passage. Or a nightmare of esoteric and difficult drudgery - I’ve never really made up my mind on that. TIS-100 proved to me that I had made the correct decision - it didn’t take too many levels of increased difficulty for me to reach my depth. In the same manner, my decision to enlist in the US Air Force rather than the Army or Marines has been validated over and over by every FPS I've ever played.

I'm lookin' at you, ArmA.

My next enlightenment came from SHENZHEN I/O, a game authored by the same developer as TIS-100. SHENZHEN was similar to TIS-100, but added diverse microelectronic modules to the mix. Having spent a decades long programming career, during which I never did anything more that put data on monitors, I have always harbored an interest in writing code that would make things happen in the real, physical world. I finally was able to break that barrier by playing with Arduinos, but the cost of pieces/parts became prohibitive. SHENZHEN I/O was the perfect alternative, even though I ran out of brainpower long before SHENSHEN ran out of puzzles. That limitation was mine, however, rather than being the fault of the game.

Having reviewed SHENZHEN I/O, it was not a big surprise to receive an email from PleasingFungus Games asking if I would be interested in looking at a game inspired by that title. Naturally I jumped at the chance. The game is called Silicon Zeroes, although it is more concerned with placing electronic components into a circuit that exhibits specific behavior in memory than it is in actual coding. Knowing well that this would be a bigger mental challenge for me than the coding puzzles, I approached it with a little more trepidation than I had for either of the previous games.

As it turns out, I was correct in this personal assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. I made it through the tutorial levels, albeit by the skin of my teeth. The first “real” puzzle was my downfall. As of this writing, I still haven’t completed it to my satisfaction. As a testament to the excellent design of the game, though, I have not yet given up trying. I remain optimistic. After all, I was able to figure out how to do subtraction when the only mathematical component I was allowed to use as an adder. The puzzle that I am working on now is easy enough to fathom, it’s simply a matter of getting the timing of the components in the correct order, and making if-then operations without code. I’m sure the secret lies in the default no-op behavior of some of the components, but more experimentation is going to be needed before I can condense it all into a working and efficient solution. As with SHENZHEN, it is possible to build a solution that is adequate, but far harder to build one that is efficient as possible. As they say, never do with nine components what can be done with five.

And no, I do not know anyone that has ever said that - it’s a literary device.

While still stuck on the aforementioned puzzle, I looked ahead to see what other interesting challenges and components are in my future. I didn’t have to go far; I had a choice of three puzzles to do, so rather than stare stupidly at the one I couldn’t quite solve, I looked at another one. It looked to be even more difficult, but it did demonstrate the next level of processing, which is to read memory for an Operation (in this case, the Op Code is ‘0MEM’, which means ‘set the provided memory slot to a value of 0’) and add components to perform the required function. In the event, I implemented the optimal solution on the first try. There’s hope for the more problematic one yet! If I can get past that one, I can start obsessing over the next question, which is how to determine if an integer is odd or even without anything more complicated than addition.

In the introduction I mentioned that I like Indie games (and Early Access) partially because of the ease of talking directly to the developer(s). I needed to do that in this case because I reached the end of the tutorial-level puzzles and couldn’t find the next level. The answer was too embarrassingly easy for me admit to, but the point remains valid: I received a quick and mercifully judgement-free answer directly from the guy that’s building the game. Using (or abusing - this is an ‘eye of the beholder’ kind of thing) the easy access to the developer, I fired off a few more questions simply out of 1) curiosity, and 2) an interest in what it takes to bring a game to market. I was interested in where the current iteration of the game is with regards to the development roadmap, how many folks were working on it, and anything else that he thought might be interesting to share. First of all, the game is pretty close to being released. He is working on a level editor, but it probably won’t be ready by release date. As an aside, I will say that this exhibits the utility of both a “soft” distribution path that allows for constant and seamless updates, and the idea of Early Access. The always-on updates allow for expedient bug fixes and enhancements, while Early Access (which this game may or may not have - I didn’t ask) allows for more testing to catch those little things that don’t crop up in limited testing.

As far as staffing, it really is a one-man show, although he does have an artist working on beautification and cut scenes, and a musician working on music and sound effects. These are the last two things to be done before release.

I was curious as to how he got into game development - this is something I too would like to do. I’m not going to paraphrase his answers - they stand on their own:

“About myself... I've been interested in game development since high school, where I wrote text adventures on my TI-84. (7 lines of text, 16 characters wide - very tight!) In college, I started making Flash games - that was where I made Manufactoria, inspired by one of my computer science classes. Manufactoria was a pretty big hit for a flash game, with a few hundred thousand unique plays. Silicon Zeroes is something of a spiritual sequel to Manufactoria - the mechanics don't have anything in common, but the format of the game is very similar.

I tried to make it into indie development back then (with Starhaven, which has interesting mechanics explained very poorly). Didn't have it any luck, so I went to Silicon Valley and started working a day job at a startup. Most of my game work in that period was on the open-source game Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - I became one of the top developers and got asked to give a talk about the game for last September's Roguelike Celebration.

In 2016, I left Google and decided to take one last shot at commercial game development. Been living off my savings ever since. Hopefully this works out, but if it doesn't, at least I can say I tried!”

I have to confess that I found the Google experience to be enlightening because some of the text in the game is quite contemporaneously pertinent to current goings-on with Google.

I very much like the direction he’s taking with this game; it appeals to me in the same way as TIS-100 and SHENZHEN I/O, but does so in its own unique way. This game should hit Steam in the next month or two, and I recommend grabbing it when it does. Oh, and that comments area under this review? I wouldn’t be upset if someone that figures out how to tell an odd number from an even number using only an adder were to, you know, put the solution in a comment!