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

#251

Post by mvkel » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:37 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…

I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.

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

#252

Post by socalgal2 » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

bzzzt wrote: post #83

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…

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.

It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.

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

#253

Post by debugnik » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #197

speedgoose wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate. I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently. For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. A…

Death of the Author. One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse fo…

You're conflating whether one should feel guilty for supporting an author, and whether the author's speech outside a work matters to understand its intended meaning.

The latter is the actual Death of the author, the former is usually called Death of the author by people who want to separate themselves from the authors they know they can be judged for supporting.

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

#254

Post by Stevvo » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

starburst wrote: post #208

Stevvo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of fun. In both Braid and the Witness, eventually you come across a puzzle you cannot solve and have to use Google to find the answer, because the game never bothered to even hint at how it could be solved. That's pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.

That says more about you than about the game.

Blow has actually talked about those puzzles in streams, said he regrets it because more players than not stopped playing the games at that point. It's the definition of bad design to implement some untested abstract idea without giving the player any hints.

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

#255

Post by whattheheckheck » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

GoatInGrey wrote: post #242

dagmx wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do people really believe that opinions on interpersonal communication count as politics now? I'm asking sincerely.

How is it not? Respect and how youre trying to influence someone to behave is exerting power. Telling someone how they should exert their power is political.

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

#256

Post by rcxdude » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

cloudhead wrote: post #228

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…

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

Fact of the matter is that code quality is a pretty small part of whether a game is good or not. It can be notable when it's good and it can sink a game when it's really bad, but there's a huge gap in the middle where it doesn't really matter that much (especially to the player).

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

#257

Post by dundarious » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

arduinomancer wrote: post #247

NathanaelRea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did Casey ever finish the video series?

If you mean Computer, Enhance!'s Performance Aware Programming series, it's ongoing, but the pace is slower than about 1.5years ago. Given how good it is, and how fastidious and comprehensive Casey is, I imagine it doesn't really pay for itself, even with an impressive subscriber count.

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

#258

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:40 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…

The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.

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

#259

Post by torginus » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:41 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.

I think an important distinction has to be made between personal values and opinions, and politics, both in the confines of this discussion and generally in society.

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.

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

#260

Post by jackling » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:41 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…

Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.

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.