The Steam store page for Manufactoria 2022 is up, along with a new trailer! Check it out...?
Silicon Zeroes is now proudly a part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality! Get it along with over 1,000 games and projects for $5 or more to support the NAACP and Community Bail Fund.
I’m looking for an artist for my new game! Details in the link :) Edit: I’ve filled this position. Thanks for reading!
Silicon Zeroes 1.2.0.1 - Bugfix Release
Fixes:
- Custom puzzle descriptions should load properly.
- Instruction Selector rendering fixed.
- OS X builds no longer crash if the ‘community’ puzzles directory does not exist.
Silicon Zeroes 1.2 - now with custom puzzles!
The weekly update is out, with one big addition!
- Highlight: user-created puzzle support is in! Full documentation here.
- Features:
- Added cow grafitti.
- Removed ‘The Alternate Approach’, to preserve its status as a proper easter egg.
- Tweaked tests for Delay Branch.
- Bugfixes:
- Secret puzzles can now trigger Ne Plus Ultra.
- Extremely large Numbers can no longer be stolen from the Credits.
This release is something of a beta for user-created puzzles; I have plans for much more, including Steam Workshop and leaderboard support. If there’s anything you’re particularly interested in, now’s your chance to ask!
One Month On
It’s been one full month since Silicon Zeroes came out. Since release, thousands of people have played the game, a rich community has developed, and the very best players have mastered the systems in ways I never imagined. Pretty good, I think.
I’ve been working on Silicon Zeroes since May 2016. In that time, the game went from a very crude prototype to a full-featured game, with a story, art, sound, and music. Over four thousand commits and thirty thousand lines of code, dozens of playtests... There are still more features that I want to add, but at this point, the game is solid.
I want to thank the community for helping me move the game forward after release, and in particular to thank Francisco Demartino, without whom the Linux version would be much much more broken, and the Discord server, who’ve broken the game in more ways than I can count.
Finally, thank you to everyone who’s enjoyed the game. Here’s to more fun with hardware for time to come!
Silicon Zeroes 1.1.3!
This week is a smaller update; mostly catching up on bugfixes and smaller tweaks, as promised.
- Features
- Tweaked a few puzzles’ ideals and tick limits, the latter upward.
- Colored disconnected modules red on the minimap, to help finding isolated ones.
- Clarified 'Cows’... so to speak.
- OS X uses shift-(cmd-)-z for redo, instead of (cmd-)y.
- SFX for opening/hiding the puzzle description & minimap.
- Bugfixes
- The steam leaderboards’ x-axes should be much clearer.
- Non-US keyboards should have working/reasonable hotkeys.
- The ‘Faux-Reg’ achievements will now trigger immediately after beating the puzzle, instead of one puzzle later.
- ‘Maze’ displays its tick limit in the description.
- ‘Finale’’s ideal is beatable, again.
- Secrets no longer missing a perfect sparkle.
It’s coming up on a month since release, and most of the low-hanging fruit for fixes and improvements are cleared up. The remaining projects are larger, so to give myself time and space to work on them, I’m shifting to one release every two weeks. See you on the next one, and have fun!
A new video about the game, this time from the splendid Scott Manley!
My players have become... incredibly powerful. Perhaps, too powerful?
#goodbug
Silicon Zeroes 1.1.2 Out!
This was supposed to be a small release revising areas where people were getting stuck. Instead, I ended up gutting and reworking most of a board. Oops!
- Highlights:
- Board 3 (’High Speed’) revised and reworked. Four new puzzles (’Clock’, ’Maze’, ‘Back’, and ‘Splitcount’) added; some uninteresting (’Delay Write’, ‘Stages’) removed; various other fixes and reorderings. If you were stuck here, now’s a good chance to give the board another shot!
- New ‘Hard’ puzzle: ‘Cows’, on board 1. Those who want to get going fast can skip the entire rest of the board, just by beating this puzzle. Everyone likes a challenge, right?
- Features:
- ‘Ideal’ renamed to ‘Goal’, to reduce confusion when getting better solutions than the ‘ideal’.
- Mousing the bottom-left of modules works as soon as Delay is introduced, rather than only being enabled once the auto-clock is unlocked.
- Added a guide to resizing the game when windowed, in Options.
- Fixes:
- Reset leaderboards for puzzles changed in last weeks’ update, to fix some carried-over scores.
- Various tests’ time limits changed to be in line with puzzle descriptions.
- Equals modules behave consistently when ‘?’ is passed to an input after the first two.
- Re-added missing UI to Corrupted Memory display.
- Placing a control point under a module no longer causes crashes.
- Added a log file: <GAMEDIR>/log.txt on Windows and Linux, ~/Documents/SZ_Log.txt on OS X.
Next update should be focused on bugs and tweaks, since there’s a bit of a backlog on those. If there are any small issues that particularly irk you, I’m listening!
Monday's update may be slightly delayed, due to the new puzzle count having crept up from 1 to... 5?
Board 3 (”High Speed”) is almost unrecognizable at this point. Which is probably just as well, given the situation before!
Silicon Zeroes 1.1.1 Changelog
Our second weekly update is now live on almost* all platforms!
- Highlights:
- Linux support is now live! Please check it out and let me know what problems you encounter :)
- Revised puzzles: Collisions (returning to the mainline progression) and Parallac (now an optional puzzle). The tests are much more consistent now - if you’ve already beaten them, try out the new versions!
- Revised puzzles: Delay CPU, Reg Hazard, and Finale. The timing for input/output selectors has been changed to make these levels more interesting - again, please try out the new versions!
- New puzzle: Backup, a ‘nightmare’-difficulty optional sequel to Parallac. Enjoy!
- Relevant leaderboards have been reset.
- Features:
- Ideals for some late-game puzzles have been adjusted to be more challenging.
- Screenshake has been cut to 30%.
- Arithmetic on space characters is consistent with other letters.
- Odds and Divide have had their time limits increased.
- Secrets now have sound effects.
- Bugfixes:
- Wire color is preserved when passing through the same register repeatedly.
- Failing to load cursors should no longer cause crashes on launch.
- Various smaller fixes and tweaks.
This update focused heavily on the late-game; the goal for next week’s update is to focus on earlier parts. If you got stuck somewhere, let me know where - that’s where I’ll add more puzzles.
Enjoy!
*The Steam Linux demo is slightly delayed, but will be out later today.
Silicon Zeroes 1.1.0 Changelog
As promised, Silicon Zeroes’ first feature patch is out today!
- Highlights:
- Steam leaderboard support! Mock your friends for their inferior solutions, or compete with the rest of the world!
- New ‘easy’ puzzle “Fastcount”, in ‘The CPU’.
- New ‘hard’ puzzle “Odds”, in ‘Asides’.
- New ‘nightmare’ puzzle “Parallac”, in ‘Sam’.
- New achievement: “Fame: Beat board 2.”
- New achievement: “Three More Things...: Beat Faux-Reg variants 1, 2, and 3.”
- Features:
- New animation for beating and unlocking puzzles.
- Opcode selectors upgrade in a more intuitive and consistent way when transferred between puzzles.
- Module scoring no longer counts ‘duplicate’ Number modules.
- Wire coloring for registers and selectors now works in a hopefully more useful way.
- The game defaults to fullscreen on launch.
- Screenshake is halved at lower resolutions.
- Play/pause/ff hotkeys changed to “p” in OS X, to not conflict with space-clicking.
- ‘Escape’ in sim returns to editing rather than immediately going to the puzzle select screen.
- Palette scroll is saved between panel openings.
- Tick limits have been ‘flattened’ to correspond more closely with clock periods.
- Some puzzle ideals have been tweaked.
- Bugfixes:
- Textures should no longer vanish on Windows.
- Modules should no longer ever end up overlapping each-other (and thus impossible to place) when transferred between puzzles.
- Discovering a secret while zoomed out now works correctly.
- Non-native fullscreen resolutions work again on OS X. KNOWN ISSUE: cmd-tab is disabled again, sorry!
- Resizing the window while memory is scrolled won’t leave memory ‘stuck’ at an invalid scroll.
- Starting in fullscreen and then switching to windowed no longer allows you to resize the window smaller than 1024x768.
- Augends and addends have been reordered.
- You can no longer mouse over a head that doesn’t exist.
Enjoy!
Bonus feature for Monday’s update: animations for beating a puzzle!
Major update coming Monday!
Features include Steam leaderboards, a few new levels, and a wide variety of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements.
I’m quite biased, but I suspect it’s going to be extremely good.