And why exactly is this on Hacker News?
Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
81–90 of 273 posts
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 100% sure Jonathan Blow can install Ubuntu. He is writing his own programming language. For a game like that, it just isn't economically feasible to develop for Linux. Especially since the engine was written from scratch. He spent more or less all of the profits on his previous release on this new game. From the videos I've watched about the dev, he is somewhat of a perfectionist. It would likely rankle him to re…
I had a quick look at the trailer and it looked to me like it could have been built with Unity or Unreal Engine... wondering why own engine, given the effort to then port the game to other platforms?
This level of polish would be somewhat herculean to pull off in unity, and was not even close to possible when the game's development was started 8 or so years ago.
Unreal maybe, but it also wasn't as viable a choice 8 years ago.
Source: I use unity professionally at my day job.
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
And for all those wondering, YES you should go buy & play Braid if you haven't already. It's an astounding game. A 2D platformer-style game that deals with in-game undo, time travel, time distortion, and multiple realities. It's mind bending, fun, and beautiful. Watch the trailer for it here if you haven't seen it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM
Braid is a masterpiece, just go get it now and play it WITHOUT WALKTHROUGHS (they'll just spoil the game for you). I'm not sure the Witness can live up to Braid, but we'll see.
I think a lot of times people tend to over-exaggerate when using terms like 'masterpiece', but in this case it's warranted. The puzzles and gameplay are brilliant, and then when you discover what the story is actually about it really blows you away.
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#84For those wondering, Jonathan Blow is the author of the critically acclaimed time travel platform game 'Braid'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow
It's hard not to admire Blow. Not only does he make amazing games, but he actually powers through and finishes them. That's a talent on its own. I mean put aside his engineering and design skill-sets, actually finishing should be part of what one would have to 'learn'. At least for me.
After Braid, Blow (rightly or wrongly) took an immense amount of criticism for his views and opinions. Even more admirable is that he shrug all that off to come thru' with another game (unlike Phil Fish who took all his criticism rather badly).
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#85And why exactly is this on Hacker News?
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
An open world puzzle game seems exactly like the kind of thing that might gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Plus it does make a nice change from reading the latest thing about React ;)
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard not to admire Blow. Not only does he make amazing games, but he actually powers through and finishes them. That's a talent on its own. I mean put aside his engineering and design skill-sets, actually finishing should be part of what one would have to 'learn'. At least for me.
After Braid, Blow (rightly or wrongly) took an immense amount of criticism for his views and opinions. Even more admirable is that he shrug all that off to come thru' with another game (unlike Phil Fish who took all his criticism rather badly).
Fish also stole much of his stuff, so you can't expect him to steal twice as he has eyes on him this time. http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/evidence-that-phil-fish-st...
I actually paid for Fez, apart from its little gimmick and art work, it wasn't really much. Never finished it even, and I finished Assassins Creed 1 ;-)
Blow just seems genuinely good at writing games/software and creating puzzles, but even better at finishing.
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#87It is interesting that the game's rating is very positive but no one recommends it if I read the reviews. It seems that this game is not like Myst but a sterile puzzle collection without a story. Did I miss something?
I think the default sorting for Steam reviews is by how helpful a review was. Looking through some of the positive and negative reviews, it seems like the positive reviews are fairly short and don't say much about the game, while the negative reviews are longer and the reviewers do mention what they thought did and didn't work about the game, so the longer reviews that have a negative opinion end up being the most he…
The proportion of votes for negative vs positive reviews seem way off. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some vote brigading going on for whatever reason. Either that or people mindlessly vote for the longest review.
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#88Excellent. Now hopefully he has more time to work on his programming language :-)
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#89And why exactly is this on Hacker News?
Honestly, I'd like to see more about gaming on Hacker News. (I've been submitting what I can, although it's hard to find good sources)
Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
After Braid, Blow (rightly or wrongly) took an immense amount of criticism for his views and opinions. Even more admirable is that he shrug all that off to come thru' with another game (unlike Phil Fish who took all his criticism rather badly).
Fish also stole much of his stuff, so you can't expect him to steal twice as he has eyes on him this time. http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/evidence-that-phil-fish-st... I actually paid for Fez, apart from its little gimmick and art work, it wasn't really much. Never finished it even, and I finished Assassins Creed 1 ;-) Blow just seems genuinely good at writing games/software and creating puzzles, but even better a…
I feel like I could pop into that forum, ask "what is code, exactly?" and get 25 different, incorrect answers.