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

arstechnica.com

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

#341

Post by biophysboy »

bitexploder wrote: post #328
biophysboy wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He gets political.. Just as an example, he claimed that it was obvious that COVID was a lab leak in 2021. This is not obvious at all if you read Michael Worobey's rigorous work instead of rely on Blow's arrogant intuitions. I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.

Most of us are grossly unqualified to provide opinions on any domain save some hyper specialized domain we invest years of effort into. I always think about that when reading comments on the Internet :)

absolutely agree on this. Expertise is essential because it means familiarity w/ the domain methodology, not because you have a certificate

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

#342

Post by [deleted] »

torginus wrote: post #325
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Politics imo is the worst sort of tribalism No it's not. Politics is the negotiation between two or more people who want conflicting outcomes. > 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. The Republicans are led by white supremacists and they hate me for being transgender. Please stop carr…

I am not from the US. I don't have a horse in this race. Please do not imply I am somehow 'carrying water' for the Republicans, whatever might that mean. I do not have any negative feelings toward you for who you are, and I assume you're a competent individual, although I would prefer if we were having a technical debate instead of whatever this is. I apologize if I come across as impolite, but I assure you that has…

[deleted]

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

#343

Post by metaltyphoon »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #258
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…

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

I truly despise the damage those books did to the SWE as a whole.

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

#344

Post by jayd16 »

krapp wrote: post #41
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…

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…

Looking at this, there's some nice features in there, I guess. Likely the major features are about what it doesn't have. https://github.com/BSVino/JaiPrimer/blob/master/JaiPrimer.md

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.

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

#345

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

another POV is, business IT projects fail at a higher rate than video games do! the people who post about "shipping" are projecting: "at least my garbage is delivered frequently, which is key to being employed, not key to creating meaning."

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

#346

Post by [deleted] »

jackling wrote: post #338
jsheard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#347

Post by [deleted] »

jackling wrote: post #338
jsheard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#348

Post by calmbonsai »

magicalhippo wrote: post #276
calmbonsai wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. 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.

> I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed. That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...

I'll give The Looker a shot. I usually pick-up "some puzzle thing" around Christmas time.

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

#349

Post by kruuuder »

calmbonsai wrote: post #268
magicalhippo wrote: post #225

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/

I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. 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.

> I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles.

"All other titles" would be just Braid, no?

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

#350

Post by _vqpz »

20k wrote: post #336
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…

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

Cave Story before that even
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