I guess I sort of took his advice, except I started a game studio instead of joining a crappy one and then never went back to Microsoft. We go out to lunch for our first "mentorship session" and his is advice to me is, I shit you not, to quit Microsoft, find a crappy game design job, and then come back to Microsoft after a few years. That same creative director found me another game designer in MGS to act as a mentor and help me figure out if and how I could shift to a more design-focused role at Microsoft. Story of my life.Īctually, that's kind of a depressing story, so I'll leave you with a better one. So there I am, sitting in a conference room, completely outranked by MGS executives wondering who the fuck I am and why I was there. There was a meeting scheduled inside MGS to talk about plans to bring Minecraft to Xbox 360, and our creative director (who also worked with the XBLA team) thought it'd be a good idea to bring me along, since I had made Infiniminer and that might be relevant. I was a programmer, but everyone on the team knew I wanted to be a game designer (especially considering I had designed and launched SpaceChem by that point). Toward the end of my career at Microsoft I worked briefly on a team inside Microsoft Game Studios making games for Windows Phone 7. Thanks for all the great questions! I'll leave you with one final story, which I don't think I've ever told before: it's time to ask me ANYTHING!ĮDIT: It's been 10 hours, so we're probably done here. We just released Infinifactory, which was previously in Early Access and is now available on Steam! That's merely the occasion, though. MetaboSIM, HabiTactics, and FAKTR, three educational games for tablets, two of which involve pooping as a game mechanic.TIS-100, an absolutely inexplicable game about assembly language programming that includes a 14-page manual instead of a tutorial.Infinifactory, a snazzy 3D factory-building game that plays like a version of SpaceChem that wasn't made by an asshole.Ironclad Tactics, a card-based tactics game that nearly bankrupted us.SpaceChem, a programming game about fake chemistry that somehow made enough money to fund a game studio.Infiniminer, the game that started the "block game" genre without making any money whatsoever.Over the past seven years I've worked on a bunch of interesting indie games, like: I'm Zach Barth, the creative director of the game studio called Zachtronics. Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook!įacebook Twitter Instagram Calendar Please check out our Rules and FAQs.Email us at Step-by-step guide to doing an AMA.See more on our comment removals policy here.Attempting to bypass this rule by adding a ? to a non question will result in a permanent ban. ![]()
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