"Our marketing was making the game shit out gifs that everyone would put on Twitter": Zach Barth takes us behind the scenes on Opus Magnum

pcgamesinsider.biz:

If you have dipped your toe into video games Twitter since October, you'll no doubt have seen Opus Magnum in action.

The sixth title from Zachtronics has been all over the social media platform with users sharing gifs of the game in action. Opus Magnum sees players performing alchemy with a mechanical infrastructure that's incredibly satisfying to watch.

This, the studio's founder Zach Barth, was the thinking behind Opus Magnum.

"Instead of a lift pitch for Opus Magnum, I would say just look at the gifs," he tells PCGamesInsider.biz.

"It's funny because if you try to describe it with words, it's not actually very exciting. 'You built an open-ended puzzle game where you make machines and do alchemy' – that doesn't mean anything, and that certainly doesn't conjure up the images that a gif does. The gifs are actually the closest thing to our elevator pitch. In place of these words here, put a gif."

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The gif aspect came about following the studio having a video exporter in 2011's Space Chem. That would automatically upload videos to YouTube and was something the studio tried to do again with 2015's Infinifactory but this didn't work out so the feature was ditched. After launch, a fan made a looping gif of their solution to a particular problem, inspiring Barth to find a new use for Infinifactory's video player.

"I went back into the code, pulled up the video editor that we had canned and converted it into a gif exporter," he says.

"We shipped it and it was amazing. Everyone was uploading gifs on Reddit and Twitter. As soon as we knew what we were doing in this game, we knew the gif thing would work, and it was going to be our primary marketing focus.

"Marketing at Zachtronics is an exciting thing because I don't