I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great.
(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)
This is so fascinating to me, because when I really get a piece of creative art, like I thought I did with both Braid and The Witness, I usually feel like I get some insight and empathy with the person who created it. Yet every time I read or hear from Jonathan Blow ... I do not feel that. So, I guess I've been challenged by art again, hooray!
I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that.
There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.
"All other titles" would be just Braid, no?
http://number-none.com/blow/prototypes/index.html
It's very different from his more recent stuff, but charming.
If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed.
That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...
It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles. (just look up a walkthrough at that point - the game's not so awesome to be worth spending hours stuck)
All the more reason to try the Looker!
* spoiler *
I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!
That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
I loathed Myst, so had avoided The Witness for the same reason you played it; I'll maybe give it a try now.
This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.
I'm getting "bring your adventure" vibe, similar to The Witness.
Take Thomas Was Alone for example - seemingly simple platform puzzle game with deep and engaging story where you're more interested about characters than new mechanics and puzzles.
In contrast The Witness could be scraped to core puzzles and released as an iPad game for $5.99, but the whimsical island and scattered pseudo intellectual voice clips make it so much more giving you opportunity to pause and think about life.
This seems very similar. A sokoban puzzle game with an entirely optional plot line that leaves a lot for interpretation by the player.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...
Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]
Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...
He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.
I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory.
Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.
> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713018435458495)
> ...his company was the public face of that grant, my involvement in it isn't common knowledge. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713113473398888)
Seems like this was all sorted out by early 2019 - and nearly 7 years have passed since! Plenty of time for a person to change from somebody you'd be happy to associate with to somebody you might not.
> Some people have mentioned they couldn't tell from this thread whether these games are used with permission. For clarity, yes, we agreed to this in mid 2016 and signed a contract in late 2018/early 2019. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115707937686651789)
Interesting, and thanks for the sources. I was under the impression that it was the same fund as that announced in 2010 [1] but the date in [2] plus the apparent timeline does align.
"I'm not sure he would be today" is a strawman and just Hazelden's own current views of Blow, but I doubt there's going to be a direct quote (or even better, a new grant from Thekla) to back it up. But yes, 7 years is a long time and the political landscape has changed "somewhat".
[1] http://the-witness.net/news/2010/03/announcing-indie-fund/
[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-witness-studio-offering-us...
> I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.
Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked
> But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.
What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?
Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.
2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.
3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.
4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.
Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.
Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.
Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.
Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.
More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.
Am I supposed to take this seriously?
I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
I say that as someone who once made him angry myself when I live-commented in one of his streams because I had a rare disagreement. I was maybe not in shock but at least startled by his reaction. I had presented my disagreement relatively casually.
Now, my impression is that he's tuned down his considerably and developed a more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".
I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.
Can it really be considered “relatively benign” when an extremely famous public figure is calling for people who disagree with them to be shot?
There are people in this thread comparing Trump to Hitler. I don't think Trump is the US finest president but those of my family who weren't slaves for the Germans were slaughtered.
The fact that people throw comparisons that are false on some massive scale around and it's completely normalized is an example why losing touch with reality is not only a problem of the right
The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.
He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...
I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.
They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago.
Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.
John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.
I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.
I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.
Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.
But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?
Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.
Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.
But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.
Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“
On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.
Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.
That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)
Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.
One, but it was something like three years late:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...
There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch.
Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.
If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago?
Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?
its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.
Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.
And then made a whole game in his own language.
I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.
As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution
But what is neutral to someone is not inherently neutral to others. Or even if it’s neutral to them, it’s still a form of political expression.
I think the lack of this distinction has led to much, and very painful and bitter online discussion, whereas people in a tribalist political mindset try to pigeonhole others based on a throwaway statement into either a friendly or enemy camp.
I broadly agree with the value that competence is more important in politeness or vibes, especially in people who build critical infrastructure - in fact it is a very very welcome property of these people that they care about things on a level that seems unreasonable to me.
This is true basically of everything critically important in life. One example is security. Everyone enjoys the privilege of using a web browser to visit any website and not have their PC compromised thanks to a variety of measures created by people who care intensely about these things.
If the crash testing on my car was done by people who sought out some amicable middle ground so as to not upset engineers who have to redo the frame of the car after a test gone horribly wrong, and accounting, who gets the bill for it, I would be sweating bullets every time I had to drive anywhere.
Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism - the idea that people must be sorted into totally disjunct groups who are the bitter enemies of each other - thankfully doesn't translate into practice. Two people might root for sports teams that are eternal rivals, one person's favorite food might be hated by the other, they might disagree on what the important issues are, or what should be done about them, but thankfully that doesn't necessarily stop them from being the best of friends.
That's why there's a blanket ban on discussing politics in every place where people are expected to maintain amicable civility towards each other - family dinners, the workplace, gatherings with friends and acquaintances etc., with everyone usually getting antsy whenever 'politics' is brought up.
I don’t know which of the two happened here, maybe both, but if we’re mentioning one let’s also mention the other.
Edit: just read some tweets and I think I know which one it is XD you were underselling it.
That is 2021 mentality, and the world is over it.
I don't know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period.
By "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.
I've gotta disagree. By "political correctness" people generally mean to not saying or doing anything that could be perceived as offensive. Especially against collectives perceived to be vulnerable.
For example, in the tiny paragraph above I've absolutely respected my fellow humans, but it can be considered offensive because you can suppose I might be looking to justify prejudiced attitudes.
For an even more evident example, political correctness has to do with the political climate and identity (as you mention: sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else, as well as referring to "those groups"). That is very much detached from treating fellow humans respectfully.
I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
Here's a good article that's basically a summary of events (as well as teaser for a book): https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/from-our-lab-to-theirs-...
I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
Compared to the mainstream AAA game cost it's less than minimal, it's pocket change.
And it's not like somebody handed him that money, he made it creating and selling games earlier.
Supposedly the dev budget for the last pokémon game Z-A was only $13 million.
Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework.
People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?
Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
This "not caring", from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.
You have a very incorrect view of both of them if you think this is the kind of thing they are arguing against.
Some examples that come to mind from my personal experience.
- Compile times. 1-2 seconds vs the typical build times in a C++/Rust game can be a game changer
- Massive compile time capabilities.. you can have an entire content pipeline executed at compile time, all written in Jai
- Builtin Type reflection.. another gamechanger in games for editors and such
- Very easy to debug, the minimalistic approach means the code is not heavily transformed by the compiler thus really easy for a debugger to follow and still performant. Example: loading the same gltf file in my engines in Rust and C++ debug mode is MUCH slower than debug mode in Jai.. again, game changer.. you hit build/run and you're back in the game in few seconds.
- Very easy to learn
- Very ergonomic in its minimalism
- A lot of small things you instantly miss when jumping to other language.. one thing on the top of my head.. the ability to have struct members "overlay" other specific locations.. so you could have a Matrix4 struct with Vector members "forward" "right" "up" etc
- The builtin "context" based "temp allocator".. perfect for games, anything that is needed for a frame goes in there with close to zero allocation time and it gets reset every frame at zero cost
Jai has a HUGE potential if it can survive Mr. Blow's ego.. which is a big big ask.
I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.
I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ
I didn't say anything about hating working on the code, but every example of game code I've seen has been a mess, even in games that are considered well designed. So I have to disagree - the process and finished work often are separable. What are ports if not an example of that?
- Lower compilation times for debug builds. - Better debug messages. - A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in. - Standard input API for cross OS development. - AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax. - A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed. - The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
You can write games in C or Fortran, so why write games in C++? You can write things in C++, why make Rust? Basic worked, why make Python or Ruby?
Why does it need "features" that make it "superior"? It should be good enough that he didn't want to use C++, so he made a new thing...
As to why Rust, there's actual historical information about why Graydon wanted to make it and why Mozilla decided to fund that work after it was started.
Jon has said the intent was that Jai would allow him to make more games, because C++ held him back so much. So, yeah, it would need to be superior to C++ in at least this way, and by at least enough to justify the effort expended, writing C++, to develop Jai.
A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).
Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...
I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade ago.
In particular I believe the SOA stuff is gone, my impression (I don't have privileged access) is that SOA is one of those ideas where you think "Oh! This changes everything" and for the next week or two every time you do something you realise SOA would make it better. But a year later you find yourself unwinding some of that SOA mania and you realise eh... this isn't such a great idea that it deserves to be a key language differentiator. It's not useless but it's also not fundamental so maybe write a library or something.
There are a few other data structure tricks which can hit people this way, I remember I had a brief period where I wanted to solve everything with Bloom Filters and then I got better.
In terms of languages you can go try yourself today, the closest might be Ginger Bill's Odin. Shared scepticism for both C++ and modern language trends, syntax is reminiscent though far from identical. I'd be surprised if you hate one but love the other.
Edited: Somehow I removed "no longer" from my initial sentence during editing, which inverted the sense, now fixed.
So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).
[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]]
Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
I'm saying that, if you removed the Parlour, the Billiards Room, all the Mora Jai boxes, and all the other puzzles that aren't directly related to finding room 46 (including everything after the "tutorial"), you'd have a lesser but still memorable game. Inversely, if you took just the boxes, and the parlour puzzles, and the darts puzzles, you'd have a fun but unremarkable little time waster. I really enjoy spending hours on some the more insane sudoku puzzles featured on Cracking the Cryptic (even if I often end up abandoning many of the harder ones), but have zero patience for supermarket sudoku books.
"1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.
There's a lot of people for whom what you're talking about is in fact a huge draw. Everyone likes different types of games, and that's fine; I don't really think we're at risk of losing one to the other :)
I'd also put forward that you can still make open-world games with 100s of hours of content that are still truly exceptional - look at Red Dead Redemption 2, for example.
Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.
The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.
The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.
† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?
> now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer
[1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
Like a fascist would! /s
I see many individual games (or even just standalone puzzles, even just puns!) of his and I'm genuinely envious of how clever they are.
It hurts to think about what he could have created if he was still around.
Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...
I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.
Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something.
So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.
That being said, it's a free country (sort-of). Go ahead and devote "a few weeks" to build "the same thing". We'll be patient.
Show us how it's done big guy, it's only a few weeks of your time.
lol
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/
For all that is holy, please don't read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.
ref: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 and: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454
I assumed they were friends as there are several videos of them conversing. The parent comment pointed out that Sean agree's with the negatives about Jon, which could not mean much, but the fact that Jon's negative as described in the Dreknek are really bad indicates to me that Sean likely doesn't view Jon as a good friend anymore. This is surprising to me because I really did enjoy one of their videos where they try and solve a problem together.
The fact that Sean agrees with this critical take of Jon is further evidence of how much Jon has changed since the pandemic.
STB Is the intial's for Sean T Barrett, who also created a software library with the same name.
I don't really get it.
He's made two well received games, now a third one and an entire programming language, and anytime I tune in to his content he seems like a competent programmer with the kinds of opinions you'd expect from any kind of craftsman: sharp and borne out of their own personal experience. I never hear anything that strikes me as inflammatory.
What's there to fuss about? If you disagree with one of those opinions, great!
Maybe this is just what experiencing the world solely through the internet does to people. Makes them prickly and uncalibrated.
Many years ago, during the peak growth of internet cancel culture, Jon made the mistake of saying an uncontroversial truth about occupational interests heavily correlating with gender.
They took that and twisted it into “he thinks women are inferior.”
Since then, they look for any reason to hate on him. It’s political tribe brain rot as usual.
Check out The Witness subreddit. For a game those people claim to love, they seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of the narrative philosophy.
As far as politics go, in the past he mostly seemed kind of small business owner libertarian (which, fair enough, he's sunk a lot of his personal wealth into running a game studio). He's seemingly been getting increasingly grouchy about the e.g. state of software development and society in general for some time, and over the past year or so he's started expressing explicit Trump support/appreciation. Possibly exacerbated by the development of this game and Jai dragging on, apparently getting burned by what he considers bad hires (bet he's not easy to work for tho...), and such. Though I would say it feels like it's mostly hot takes on streams or X, not necessarily very coherent politics.
But the indie game scene and many of his former associates are very left wing, and with the political climate, esp. in the US, also being what it is he's quite the pariah in many places now.
If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc.
If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.
However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.
We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language.
I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.
He's somewhat Musk adjacent in his need to be viewed as smart (but I guess he does so least have way more programming chops than Musk, so I'll give him that).
Regardless, if arrogance drives people to make new tools then we should be grateful for that arrogance.
GitHub is littered with pet languages that people have made, and doubt their reasons are simply about being "eye-wateringly arrogant".
Moving past that, people paying attention or wanting to use the language, usually means it appeals to them. Jai has fans and supporters, because they are able to look past or are not concerned about his personality quirks, but are focused on the quality and usefulness of the software produced.
He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that's how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).
If/when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don't cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.
I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, and that's OK. I realised a long time ago that ego/arrogance isn't a great quality and it's far better to have a strong network of friends and supporters, and that doesn't happen if you're an arrogant prick.
And yes, he built the language (which is totally un-needed) because the "idiots" who made all the existing languages, didn't make one as good as in JBlows brain. Despite the fact that there are 1000s of games which are far better than anything JB has made written in C#, C++, Java, Rust, etc. Did Larian need to write a new programming language to make Baldurs Gate 3?
Only JB is arrogant to think that only a new language is good enough for him to make a game with. A game that is just a modern spin on Sokoban and where he paid a bunch of other game devs to use their puzzles! You could write this shit in three.js and it wouldnt look or feel any differently.
I don't know why the conversation always devolves into this. How it goes is "John cares about quality, everyone else only cares about money"
Choosing to prioritize art, story, and gameplay over raw execution speed does not mean you only care about money. It means you care about having a good game. That doesn't mean you can't do both, but if you have a time restriction, it's a completely reasonable trade off to make. Especially if your users won't even notice.
I would rather devs make games for people playing them, not for web devs who have Electron baggage.
The issue is JB has seemed to push custom engines as not simply an artistic choice but the utilitarian choice as well.
One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
There's a pivotal moment where (assuming you find it at all, which isn't a given) your entire perception of the game world flips around, and walking back through environments you've already explored you're now perceiving them in a completely new way. The closest thing from fiction I can think of is the big reveal in Fight Club, in that it puts the entire plot in new light, except in The Witness the flip is basically unrelated to any of the "content" of the game. Very very impressively done.
It's weird that people seem to really have latched on to some off-the-cuff remarks Blow made on stream about not being an atheist (even though he also called out the false dichotomy between naive atheism and literal interpretation of Christianity). Blow has been open about his experiences with meditation practice and its influence on his game design, and I think it shows. I'm not personally a huge fan of the type of games he makes, but the thing he seems to be aiming for in his use of the medium are interesting enough that I'm definitely going to pay attention.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
I think Blow achieved what he wanted, which I guess makes it a good game in a sense but also it wasn't an experience I enjoyed or can easily recommend to others.
I've watched a few of Blow's programming streams which usually spanned both Jai and sokoban development, this was years ago when the sokoban game was clearly an unpolished development mule for the language.
It never seemed like a wise use of resources to try polish that turd of a game concept, certainly not for 9 years. Am I wrong?
personally I've never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he's comming from which is what opinions are for
But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don't make you feel like you are remotely debugging a crash on saturday night while everyone else is having fun. You either get that or not.
The Witness also has the sublime revelation in it that makes it more memorable than most games. I don't even remember the god's name in TP, but I can envision clearly every Witness locale.
Has there ever been anything on the level of Myst/Riven published in the last 20 years?
This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White".
(correct me if I'm wrong)
I always got the impression it's been mostly Blow and a partner working on Jai and this new game.
What’s cool has been to watch him grow from this young adult who made a game about time to this beast he is today. Hats off my guy. Now finish your programming language!
I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.
His job recommendation: "there are so many things you can do, go to SpaceX!". Better life advice would be to learn your fundamentals (computer architecture, fp, algos) and be knowledgeable about the direction the industry is going instead of finding some niche and pouting at everything else.
