Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 654 posts

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#181

Post by bzzzt »

klausa wrote: post #124
bzzzt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.

I think for games like Blue Prince, specifically, it’s not a false dichotomy. Those are made in tiny teams. You can either spend more time tinkering with the gameplay mechanics and experimenting with the game parts; or you can put on your software engineer hat and make the code better (or, spend even more time to learn how to make the code better in the first place!). This gets less true with scale of a team, and wit…

Of course programs will be worse when non-programmers are in charge of programming. That doesn't mean they shouldn't but lots of indie game attempts fail because the programmer (educated or not) doesn't have a clue about when to refactor and make sure the design of the system matches the intention of the game. You can only tinker until a certain point, after that you're just creating new bugs by fixing other bugs.

ID software once was a small team and they built complex games by writing tight code which was modular and very clear. Lots of their '3d era' contemporaries failed because their engines were sloppy, complicated, buggy and slow.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#182

Post by thrance »

torginus wrote: post #78
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC. As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution

I've seen some weird takes of his around COVID.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#183

Post by miltonlost »

pendenthistory wrote: post #129
mariusor wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?

You are calling the majority of the US "far right". You're calling people fascist for voting republican. You are the extremist.

Calling a dog a dog is not extreme. VOting for a fascist makes one a fascist.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#184

Post by _bent »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #92
tialaramex wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash . I'd fail code reviews for a lot of what was done, and there are cracks in the façade where a player will hurt themselves as a result - e.g. there's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too f…

That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable. 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.

It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#185

Post by miltonlost »

IAmBroom wrote: post #175
jabbywocker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Reddit link didn’t load for some reason and the other day be didn’t include anything racist, homophobic or transphobic. What it did cover is definitely a simplistic view ignoring the cultural nuances that might lower women’s participation in stem, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as sexist.

He suggests women are biologically less capable than men in STEM. But I note you didn't include misogyny as a problematic belief.

I wonder what his take on the differences of IQ among races are. Bet it's also as "enlightening"

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#186

Post by djeastm »

armitron wrote: post #137
perching_aix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a basic biological fact > looks inside > opinion He literally tells you that it's his bellyfeel: "I believe it is likely that (...)". Come on...

[flagged]

>the same opinion being an uncontroversial fact in biology,

I'm confused is it opinion or fact? Can't be both, can it?

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#187

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

torginus wrote: post #78
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC. As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution

Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That's probably a good thing. I doubt he's as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He's said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.

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.)

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#188

Post by fzeroracer »

thrance wrote: post #180
contrarian1234 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The idea that there could be biological dispositions to using a computer , the least natural thing I could think off, is well and truly absurd. Anyone still "interested" in this topic is coming from a place of unsubstantiated vice signalling, and completely uninterested in hearing any actual biologist's take on the subject, in my experience. Let's not forget that the first generation of programmers was mostly women,…

It's really quite funny too, because women were a huge population of programmers and computer science graduates all the way up to the mid 1980s, when the ratios began flipping in favor of men. The biological argument would assume that either something changed biologically from 1980s onwards to make women less predisposed to be programmers, or (the more usual argument I see) 'that they were just doing the gruntwork' which usually exposes them as who they are.

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#189

Post by [deleted] »

torginus wrote: post #78
piker wrote: post #10

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does ta…

Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC. As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution

[deleted]

Re: Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

#190

Post by lowdownbutter »

pandemic_region wrote: post #35

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.

spoilers
Post reply on HN