
SpaceChem was critically praised, which led Barth to continue to develop more games under the Zachtronics label. It was also the first game where he took in a number of collaborators to help. The first of these was SpaceChem, which he developed the Zachtronics label for. Īfter completing The Codex of Alchemical Engineering and getting positive feedback from it, Barth came up with the idea of making commercial games. For marketing reasons, Barth decided against Microsoft XNA with its capability to cross-publish to Xbox 360, and switched to OpenGL, which allowed him to target the three operating systems required for inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle. NET, as Barth considers C# to be his favorite programming language. NET Framework for greater programming convenience. Four of these use Adobe Flash to make them cross-platform, in spite of Flash's development environment. His earlier, non-commercial, games included twenty that were published on his old website and "five good ones" which he transferred over to the new site. One of these was Infiniminer, the block-building game that influenced Minecraft by Mojang.
#Spacechem demo free
īarth's initial games were generally free browser games offered on his website.

In 2008, the team produced Capable Shopper, a shopping simulation game for players with various degrees of disability.


He was one of three students leading the interdisciplinary team of the CapAbility Games Research Project, a collaboration of RPI with the Center for Disability Services in Albany, New York. Barth studied computer systems engineering and computer science at RPI. Barth started creating games early in life and further developed his programming skills at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he joined the game development club. Zachtronics was founded by American video game designer and programmer Zach Barth in 2000.
