Game designer Zach Barth has a new venture by the name of Coincidence. Instead of being a traditional game developer like his first studio Zachtronics, he says this studio is more of a "flexible business framework" that lets small teams work on solo or group projects, video games or otherwise.Coincidence also revealed Kaizen: A Factory Story, a puzzle automaton game about creating and optimizing factory lines in 1980s Japan. In the announcement, Barth said the company hoped to bring "the open-ended design were known for to a broader audience without compromising on depth or complexity."Kaizen is its first official game project, following the contracted edutainment work Add Astra for an elementary school teacher. The game will be published by Astra Logical later in 2025 on Steam, and "twist your brain into beautiful, efficient knots."Building a game studio is a puzzle all of its ownBarth's game industry career began with the founding of Zachtronics in 2000 and free browser games on his website; one of them, the block-building title Infirmer, inspired Mojang to create Minecraft. Zachtronics' first commercial game was 2011's SpaceChem, which tasked players with using a visual programming language to create chemical modules on assembly lines.While it's tried its hand at wargame and strategy titles, puzzle games have largely been the studio's specialty. Over the years, it became known for Infinifactory, Shenzen I/O, and Last Call BBS. Its final game was 2022's The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection.Speaking of cards, Coincidence also has two physical card games under its belt, The Lucky Seven and Chemistry Set. Barth designed both of them and collaborated with artists and fellow designers Jonathan Stroh, Jay Ackerman, and Drew Messinger-Michaels, and the two games show how serious Coincidence is about not being wed to a particular medium.That freedom may give it more flexibility at a time when developers are closing down or cutting staff on a regular basis, and let it pick and choose when to start up a new team or end an old one, potentially without conducting layoffs.Game Developer spoke with the Zachtronics team numerous times over the years, the last of which was a 2020 interview with designer Matthew Seiji Burns about its then-upcoming visual novel, Eliza.