Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by forgotpwd16 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #196

hyperbolablabla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very reductive take. 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 game…

How has Jai introduce ideas if it’s not even released? How can we claim to know what it did “right” when only a few projects have been built in it?

It may not have a public* release but, over the last decade (starting pre-Zig/Odin), Blow has discussed it extensively in his videos[0], enough that even ~10y was possible for someone to make a toy independent implementation[1].

[0]: https://inductive.no/jai/ [1]: https://github.com/Sharir/jai

*Although there has (always?) been a private alpha/beta release.

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

#222

Post by thrance » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:07 PM UTC

luke5441 wrote: post #213

thrance wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

In case you are ignorant. This is about the "things vs. people" finding. You can e.g. find it linked on wikipedia in the "Sex differences in humans" article. If it's biological or not is kind of hard to prove without unethical experiments.

I am not disputing that there exists differences in vocational choices between genders. Programming as a discipline is a textbook sociological example though: it was women's work when it was thought as "gruntwork", and then became men's work when it got prestigious enough, almost overnight (in historical scales). If ever there exists some biological predispositions towards programming, they are largely overriden by sociological factors, to the point that using biology to explain why programmers are mostly men today is truly ridiculous.

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

#223

Post by cubefox » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #100

pdpi wrote: post #63

If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick's Parabox or Baba Is You, cl…

Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince? [[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…

From the article:

> now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer

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

#224

Post by jayd16 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:08 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #77

leloctai wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources, successful indie games wouldn't be so disproportionately Scandinavian

> If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources 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.

Ok for a decade of a senior dev, that's still like $2mil. That's in the same order of magnitude as a small AA game.

Supposedly the dev budget for the last pokémon game Z-A was only $13 million.

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

#225

Post by magicalhippo » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

A side note, if you've played The Witness but not yet The Looker[1], you probably have been missing out.

I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

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

#226

Post by contrarian1234 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

harperlee wrote: post #164

contrarian1234 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Whether one is allowed to pose some particular questions is a political topic though!

curious what you mean. i dont actually take any side on the original question. i dont really know enough to have an informed opinion - and im a bit skeptical one could prove anything given the confounding variables

but the idea that you cant even a-politically pose a question about biology - i dont really get the logic there. seems antiscientific

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

#227

Post by bena » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

NathanaelRea wrote: post #215

EvilTrout wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. 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…

That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is. 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 a…

To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out.

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.

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

#228

Post by cloudhead » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:10 PM UTC

EvilTrout wrote: post #204

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…

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage. 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…

And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?

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

#229

Post by nothrabannosir » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #192

torginus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just a comment, that often when people say things that are within your own political belief system, that people often don’t consider them political. 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.

Sure, on the other hand sometimes people take a with-us-or-against-us position, and trying to remain neutral means you have become political.

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.

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

#230

Post by egypturnash » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:12 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #100

pdpi wrote: post #63

If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick's Parabox or Baba Is You, cl…

Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince? [[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…

searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End.

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.