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

#331

Post by __alexs » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

jstimpfle wrote: post #296

__alexs wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in participation within STEM between men and women is not well explained by biological differences. Blow has repeatedly claimed that it is actually the primary factor and seems actively disinterested in other explanations. This is "controversial" in that it's a position that is not well supported by evidence and he has repeatedly used his platform in the past to make unsupported claims to the contrary.

Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not lik…

Given the success of women in sports such as ultra marathoning, medicine etc I don't think it is that conclusive that women are not willing to put the hours into difficult and isolating activities.

There are a great number of studies of the social aspects of gender differences in work but I don't have a single authoritative source for you.

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

#332

Post by jstimpfle » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #314

christophilus wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jai is a real thing that others are using. I wouldn’t say Jon is an ideas guy. He executes.

Who is using it today? edit: Oh so others are not using it...

He wrote this whole game in it. Apart from that, a couple dozen or hundreds of beta-testers. Not sure whether the language ever gets released, maybe he's too worried about having to maintain it and not being able to change it anymore.

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

#333

Post by tstrimple » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #60

krapp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. 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…

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…

I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

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

#334

Post by soniclettuce » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

bena wrote: post #250

tialaramex wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell language was Muratori teaching with that he doesn't have a sort ? Even C provides a halfway useful comparison sort in the box† and they're so cheap they don't even supply the O(1) growable array type † It's named qsort, but despite the name it might not just be Hoare's "Quicksort". However it also won't be somebody's half-remembered bubble sort.

He's using C++ as closely to C as possible. Part of the purpose of the series of Handmade Hero is to build a game from the ground up with no dependencies. So I don't think he's bringing in stdlib So he could use that, but goal is to be someone who doesn't necessarily need to do that.

Is he writing assembly for his syscalls too, or is it like, "no stdlib, except for real annoying parts"

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

#335

Post by tialaramex » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:45 PM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #230

tialaramex wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 likel…

I cheated the Gallery. The art is by one of Tonda's big inspirations, and whereas Tonda thinks he's great I think he's terrible and should knock it off. After maybe an hour I got one answer myself, looked up the rest, continued playing. I consider two of them reasonable puzzles, one is a bit crap and the final one is the worst thing in Blue Prince which overall is an excellent game.

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?

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

#336

Post by 20k » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:47 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…

Braid didn't start the indie boom, Garry's mod did

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

#337

Post by ex-aws-dude » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

iamwil wrote: post #292

arduinomancer wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Casey ever finish the video series?

He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.

Still, its completely ridiculous to rag on other programmers practices so much while you can't even finish your own project

Its like everything these guys rant about you could add on the tagline "...yet the world keeps spinning and we all keep shipping things"

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

#338

Post by jackling » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #33

martin_balsam wrote: post #30

This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1] [1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...

That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.

Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?

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

#339

Post by jstimpfle » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #327

jstimpfle wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the opposite explained? I haven't read literature on the topic, and I'm by the way also somewhat of a sceptic of science on such topics, as a layman. But it seems super obvious that girls/women on average are not wanting to spend their teenage years in the basement programming geek stuff, like many boys/men do. In my experience, here in Germany, and you can probably extrapolate to the West in general, it's not lik…

They are encouraged in surface level, performative ways. The actual communities are incredibly off-putting. edit: speaking industry-wide. of course there are "not all men" type spaces in local communities.

For all I know, being a male programmer myself, with a significant proportion of females in all my programmer circles so far, I can attest the exact opposite. Every one of those circles has been welcoming and inclusive.

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

#340

Post by mrgoldenbrown » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

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

He's a Trump fan. Is he stupid enough to believe Trump's illogical promises, or does he see through them and is OK with all the unconstitutional and immoral crap he's done? Either way he's political.