<story><title>What Works and Why: Opus Magnum</title><url>https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/27/what-works-and-why-opus-magnum/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>em3rgent0rdr</author><text>One thing I would like for the Zachtronics games is if the optimization mattered somehow other than just personal satisfaction.  Such as you get achievements, special equipment, or get to unlock special stages for meeting certain optimization goals.  Or since you are basically designing factories (or PCBs in the case of Shenzhen and TIS), maybe your creations earn profit based on their cost and efficiency?  And maybe you have to earn enough profit to win the game, in which case would have to revisit less efficient designs to improve them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ZeroGravitas</author><text>One of the standard approaches to this these days seems to be the 3 star system.&lt;p&gt;So you can complete a level and progress, but also have motivation to back and do it better.&lt;p&gt;Then these stars can be blockers to accessing later stages, so you may have to have an average of 2 stars from 15 levels to get to the next stage (which may be visible and locked, or may show up a &amp;#x27;surprise&amp;#x27; reward later on in the game).&lt;p&gt;One particular game using this method Nintendo&amp;#x27;s NES Remix also adds &amp;quot;rainbow&amp;quot; level if you do particularly well and I spent a while getting them all and enjoyed having that structure. I would guess this all takes a reasonable amount of effort to set up on the dev&amp;#x27;s side though.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Works and Why: Opus Magnum</title><url>https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/27/what-works-and-why-opus-magnum/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>em3rgent0rdr</author><text>One thing I would like for the Zachtronics games is if the optimization mattered somehow other than just personal satisfaction.  Such as you get achievements, special equipment, or get to unlock special stages for meeting certain optimization goals.  Or since you are basically designing factories (or PCBs in the case of Shenzhen and TIS), maybe your creations earn profit based on their cost and efficiency?  And maybe you have to earn enough profit to win the game, in which case would have to revisit less efficient designs to improve them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erik</author><text>If you play Zachtronics games on Steam your best scores show up ranked against any Steam friends that have played the level.  I&amp;#x27;ve found trying to out optimize my friends pretty rewarding at times.</text></comment>