Zach Gage
stfj.net · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Zach Gage is a game designer and artist whose site hosts his experimental games, art pieces and design essays.
What HN saysHN links it for Lose/Lose, the game that deletes files, plus Scoundrel and his problem-solver design essay; commenters treat him as a notable indie developer.
16HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
7stories submitted
232story points
1 year agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Lose/Lose, a game that deletes files as you kill aliens11 people · 11 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 2Building games that can be understood at a glance2 people · 221 points · first shared 2018 · 61 comments on HN
- 3Index21 people · first shared 2022
- 4Scoundrel.pdf1 people · first shared 2025
- 5DesigningForProblem Solvers1 people · first shared 2023
What HN people wrote when they linked it
risingsubmarine · 2025-09-26
By techdweeb youtube channel : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A3LoKK1hAk
I love solo card game variations like this.
See also, Scoundrel by Zach Gage. http://www.stfj.net/art/2011/Scoundrel.pdf
bb010g · 2022-11-12
This reminds me of a classic zach gage piece, Temporary.cc: http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?year=2009&project=art/2009/temporar…
Pulcinella · 2023-02-15
An interesting addendum to this is this piece by Zach Gage (another indie game developer: Spell Tower, Really Bad Chess, Card of Darkness).
http://stfj.net/DesigningForProblem-Solvers/
TL;dr Gage believes constructivist learning can be good in real life because you can have a teacher to tailor and guide the learning, but is not so good for video games (especially for tutorials) because you don’t have that.
Laremere · 2022-01-06
See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
"Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted."
yissp · 2021-05-26
I thought of lose/lose http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
knolan · 2018-11-20
Reminds me of lose/lose
http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
corvus_sapiens · 2015-09-20
There's also this arcade-style shooter which kills a random file for each enemy. A bit riskier.
http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
tintin · 2011-09-28
Unless you are programming something like this: http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ (Space Invader deleting files on your drive) ;)
geek_at · 2022-01-06
> See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
> "Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted."
That's awesome! Reminds me of a little virtual tamagochi I programmed in college called Virus.
Virus would only represent itself as a file called for example Toby.virus and it would wander around in folders (only 2 levels deep) and you could give him ascii files with a ".food" extension that includes strings and depending on the size of the file the virus would get full.
If too full it would lave ".puke" files with some of the strings from the food file. And otherwise randomly leave ".poop" files around you'd have to clean up to make virus stay healthy.
You could see its stats in the ".virus" file.
I even implemented mating and light genetic traits that can be passed down
Good times