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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

#561

Post by tialaramex »

egypturnash wrote: post #497
tialaramex wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Pri…

I booted it back up for the first time in ages and managed to spawn the Gallery, then found hints on the Internet. Then managed to spawn the room it gives you a key for and that one was amusingly trivial to solve, so that was good. Also I discovered there are mods for it out there and I may have to figure out how to get them working on my Steam Deck so I can just completely quit worrying about having enough steps/gem…

Obviously as with Minecraft this is just a game, and so however you enjoy it is fine, but I will say that conquering the resource needs is itself IMO a fun aspect of the game. In Bequest mode (the default, if you aren't aware of modes you're in Bequest mode) the game intentionally gets gradually easier

There are things that are just intentionally crazy hard, Day One Dare Mode is an example, lots of people had no idea that was even possible but it is and so somebody of course did it. But Bequest mode over a period of interactions is supposed to be a fun normal way to play this game and IMO is a lot of fun. Still, do whatever you enjoy.

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

#562

Post by tialaramex »

dismalaf wrote: post #528
tialaramex wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that of course Jai's tooling is also written in C++ As to why Rust, there's actual historical information about why Graydon wanted to make it and why Mozilla decided to fund that work after it was started. Jon has said the intent was that Jai would allow him to make more games, because C++ held him back so much. So, yeah, it would need to be superior to C++ in at least this way, and by at least enough to justify…

It was a rhetorical question. I think anyone should be allowed to make any language they want for whatever reason they want. And IMO C++ is painful enough to use that nothing needs to be "better", more ergonomic is good enough for huge productivity gains.

My understanding of "better" would include better ergonomics.

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

#563

Post by kunos »

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…

> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?

Some examples that come to mind from my personal experience.

- Compile times. 1-2 seconds vs the typical build times in a C++/Rust game can be a game changer

- Massive compile time capabilities.. you can have an entire content pipeline executed at compile time, all written in Jai

- Builtin Type reflection.. another gamechanger in games for editors and such

- Very easy to debug, the minimalistic approach means the code is not heavily transformed by the compiler thus really easy for a debugger to follow and still performant. Example: loading the same gltf file in my engines in Rust and C++ debug mode is MUCH slower than debug mode in Jai.. again, game changer.. you hit build/run and you're back in the game in few seconds.

- Very easy to learn

- Very ergonomic in its minimalism

- A lot of small things you instantly miss when jumping to other language.. one thing on the top of my head.. the ability to have struct members "overlay" other specific locations.. so you could have a Matrix4 struct with Vector members "forward" "right" "up" etc

- The builtin "context" based "temp allocator".. perfect for games, anything that is needed for a frame goes in there with close to zero allocation time and it gets reset every frame at zero cost

Jai has a HUGE potential if it can survive Mr. Blow's ego.. which is a big big ask.

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

#564

Post by socalgal2 »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #299
torginus wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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…

> The Republicans are led by white supremacists and they hate me for being transgender

This is utterly false. At best you can claim you’ve heard of a few homophobic racists who happen to be republican . I’ve met just as many who happen to be democrat

Just to easily refute one of your 2 claims. Non-white republicans demographics is growing, not shrinking

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

#565

Post by asystole »

scuff3d wrote: post #312
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…

Jon can be really interesting to listen to, especially when he's talking about Jai. But he can also be such a fucking tool that I can never listen for long. I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.

He's the Stephen Wolfram of game dev.

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

#566

Post by thrance »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #226
harperlee wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Issue is when MAGA people (Like Blow) say "women are biologically inclined towards X", it doesn't come from a place of geniune scientific curiosity, but rather a way to advance their misogynistic agenda. There is nothing you could ever say that would change their "opinion" on the matter.

Truth is, programming was women-dominated in its inception, but was taken over by men when programming the computer became more prestigious. Whatever biological factors at play here, they're completely overridden by sociological factors.

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

#567

Post by tialaramex »

mariusor wrote: post #82
jstimpfle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other pe…

I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever. I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.

There's also just a lot of "No, no, no, I kill the bus driver". A sort of "Greater Fool theory" but for genocide, everybody else is a useful idiot who, having supported your rise, is then next in line to be sacrificed, never for a moment remembering that even if you are the only person to have thought of this - which is unlikely - everybody who understands how this actually works will have been together against you from the outset.

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

#568

Post by jstimpfle »

immibis wrote: post #555
jstimpfle wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one have said that sentence you're discussing a lot, and you'll just have to take my word that I'm far from being a fascist. I even draw conclusions from that sentence, but I'm trying hard to not draw any conclusions about specific members of any given sex. I of course get where you're coming from, but don't you think it is intellectually dishonest to try and police certain "obviously true statements"? Isn't it…

Just ask yourself what you'd do if you were living in the early days of Hitler and someone said Germany needed to be cleaned up. This analogy seems to answer several of your questions. Or if someone says "make America great again", today. I mean who doesn't want America to be great?

I deny this rhetoric; you can use it to justify all kinds of wrongs. I can't tell you what I'd done if I was living in the early days of Hitler, because I don't have that context, while I do have the hindsight. Comparing Hitler with the current US administration seems a bit of a stretch to me, even though I have strong disagreements with some of the things that Trump/MAGA are doing (or _seem_ to be doing. At this point it's hard to trust anything anymore). On the other hand, there's a serious question to be asked, had we not been on a descent to madness for more than a decade before the current administration?

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

#569

Post by tialaramex »

zozzle wrote: post #539
NeutralCrane wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing their point. They are saying they start with relatively benign views, and the intense overreaction to those views drives them to support much more extreme views, like what you are describing, that they otherwise might not have. I can't speak for Blow, but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years.

> but that definitely seems to accurately describe the arc Rowling has taken over the last 7-8 years. What a bizarre time we are living in when "men aren't women" and "women should have single-sex spaces and rape crisis centres" are considered extreme views.

Women who insist that they specifically get to decide who is or isn't a woman and what women believe aren't new. Phyllis Schlafly managed to ensure the Equal Rights Amendment didn't pass on this same basis. Phyllis would fly from city to city, addressing crowds of women to tell them that women should be at home looking after their kids, not um, flying from city to city making political addresses like she did...

Beware anyone who claims to represent "all" of some large diverse group, such as "Women" or "Floridians".

"Women should have single sex spaces" turns out to be used to justify, "It's OK to be hateful and even violent against women in these spaces so long as your excuse is that you believe they're not actually women" which is bullshit.

Years ago, when I wasn't too tired to spend all day and half the night dancing, I went to Bang Face Weekender - basically imagine a huge multi-room club night except for days and days. I keep the socials for it available because hey, it's a nice memory. This sort of "Single sex spaces" bullshit caused a problem for the last-but-one Bang Face because a new-to-this Security outfit somehow decided it's their job to go remove people who in their view weren't women from a toilet for women. These women weren't causing any problems for anybody else, but because they presumably had the wrong genitals or for some other reason were "suspect" to that Security team, Security dragged them out of a toilet cubicle and threw them out of the site. Other clubbers were of course horrified, and the event runners had to apologise to everybody - because regardless of how many X chromosomes you have, or whether you do or don't have a womb, dragging people out of the toilets because you've got weird ideas about what is or isn't a woman is batshit.

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

#570

Post by dsego »

progbits wrote: post #37
phtrivier wrote: post #7

I wonder how much of the 10 years spent making "a programming language, an engine, and a game" were actually spent on each slice. Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...

It's hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era. I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.

If I remember correctly, the game was just a showcase to test the new language. Afaik that's exactly why it's a sokoban clone, because he didn't want to spend time inventing new mechanics.
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