He was one of three students leading the interdisciplinary team of the CapAbility Games Research Project, a collaboration of RPI with the Center for Disability Services in Albany, New York.

His earlier, non-commercial, games included twenty that were published on his old website and "five good ones" which he transferred over to the new site.

For marketing reasons, Barth decided against Microsoft XNA with its capability to cross-publish to Xbox 360, and switched to OpenGL, which allowed him to target the three operating systems required for inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle.

[2] After completing The Codex of Alchemical Engineering and getting positive feedback from it, Barth came up with the idea of making commercial games.

Initially he looked to take The Codex of Alchemical Engineering to make it a full commercial release, but instead ended up producing Infinifactory and later TIS-100.

[6] In June 2019, the studio published the book Zach-Like that includes design documents and other reference material used by Barth and his team during the development of his games.

[12] With the release of Last Call BBS in July 2022, Zachtronics announced that that would likely be the last game they develop, as they "felt it was time for a change."

This gives a type of competitiveness to the game for players to find ways to optimize their solutions and improve their relative scores.

According to the author Barth, it was based on the earlier games Infinifrag, Team Fortress, and Motherload by XGen Studios.

[citation needed] Infiniminer was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious metals, and bring the findings to the surface to earn points for the player's team.

[16] However, as the game gained popularity, players gravitated towards the emergent gameplay functionality of building in-world objects, instead of the stated design goal of competition.

[21][22] In March 2011, Barth stated the possibility of making expansion packs to SpaceChem and adding a free update and editor which would allow users to create their own levels which could then be shared to other users, with the best ones being picked out by Zachtronics to be published and these were released on April 29 as the Shareholders' Update.