Zachtronics Puzzles
If you're a fan of Zachtronics games: surprise! I managed to sneak my puzzles into a few of them. Each of these was included in a post-launch update of its respective game.
TIS-100 is notorious. It features an in-universe reference manual for its strange para-assembly programming language, and players are encouraged to print it out and keep it on hand as they play. The graphical capabilities of the fictional TIS-100 are... limited... and its implementation details are just as delightfully obtuse as the rest of it. I wrote a puzzle that generated random paths in a strange format for the player to parse and display. Fun fact: the initial version I submitted of this puzzle ran so poorly on older computers that Zach had to ask me for a patch. Oops. (Solution above by Reddit users Csaboka and Hersmunch.)
My second puzzle included in the game's "TIS-NET" update is a bog-standard computer science problem made tricky by the TIS-100's sparse arithmetic functions. I found it a good deal easier than Spatial Path Viewer, but it was placed near the end of the second campaign. Zach knows best, I suppose. (Solution above by Steam user Seltdude.)
SHENZHEN I/O is the spiritual successor to TIS-100, featuring elements of integrated circuit and microprocessor design. From what I've read, people consider this to be the hardest level in the entire game, but it wasn't meant to be so: the version I submitted featured weird tank controls... you know, on second thought, it might have been even harder. Bonus: this other submission I worked up with a pal that implements a bizarre utopian voting scheme. Do me a favor and don't use that one in real life. For your cult or whatever. (Solution above by Reddit user Titandrake.)
Opus Magnum, despite how this GIF looks, is one of Zachtronics's more approachable games in which players build clockwork contraptions that arrange alchemical atoms into fantastical compounds, in the case of this puzzle some kind of battlefield remedy. I based it on the real compound tar camphor, known in modern times as naphthalene. You can check out my twenty(!) other levels here on Steam, many of which were modeled after real-world chemicals, and none of which were deemed fit for inclusion in the game.(Solution above by Reddit user biggiemac42.)
Last Call BBS is Zachtronics's swan song, a collection of smaller games including — duh — a couple "Zachlikes." The best of the bunch is the Gigeresque cellular-automata-'em-up X’BPGH: The Forbidden Path. If you can figure out the bizarre diegetic interface, the game itself is simple and short. So go on, work the immortal flesh! (Solution above by Discord user 18111398.)