It&#x27;s the gaming version of Galaxy Quest: a parody that is not only great when it stands by itself, but is satirical in a way that shows they are genuinely big fans of the source material.(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)

The Looker is quite possibly the greatest parody ever executed in a video game. It creates the same kind of &quot;ahah&quot; moment that games like The Witness do, but in a way that really pokes fun at the level of pretentiousness those games tend to indulge themselves in.

&gt; I&#x27;ve enjoyed all of Blow&#x27;s other titles.&quot;All other titles&quot; would be just Braid, no?

I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a &quot;narrative&quot;.

I enjoyed the Witness to a degree.* spoiler *I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn&#x27;t get that that wasn&#x27;t a one off. Someone had to point them out. I&#x27;ve had other friends who also missed that. It&#x27;s arguably the game&#x27;s single biggest reveal &#x2F; surprise. It was pretty amazing!That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.

Interesting. Being in that world was deeply captivating for me. Every time I&#x27;ve played that game I&#x27;ve experienced a jolt of creative drive.

Sounds like you&#x27;ll really enjoy the Looker then

&gt; I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and&#x2F;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...

He was focused on creating a very particular feeling of epiphany as an artistic statement, and I think he succeeded at that. Is the game not especially fun? Is it perhaps overlong? Probably? But I can think of very few, if any, games that provided the very particular feeling that The Witness provided in those moments that I felt it -- the feeling of the world opening up with new possibilities and interpretations.

&gt; I played The Witness and didn&#x27;t find it remotely funAll the more reason to try the Looker!

I played The Witness and didn&#x27;t find it remotely fun. I&#x27;ve enjoyed all of Blow&#x27;s other titles.I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and&#x2F;or Riven, but it was not that.There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn&#x27;t enough &quot;reward&quot; in completing them.

I ragequit the Looker when it spawned an apple in the snake game inside my snake.

A side note, if you&#x27;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]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1985690&#x2F;The_Looker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;1985690&#x2F;The_Looker&#x2F;</a>

Huh, featuring &quot;Escape Artist&quot; by Zoe Keating, I wonderful choice. I forgot about that.

Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?

Yeah it&#x27;s a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU</a>This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That&#x27;s not really his forte.

&gt; not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)I think a &#x27;number of features&#x27; metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with &#x27;Five exciting new areas&#x27; is understood as something that they&#x27;d enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.Similarly, saying how many years it took isn&#x27;t remotely a selling point for a new player. If you&#x27;d been following the development process then you probably wouldn&#x27;t care, and if you hadn&#x27;t you also probably wouldn&#x27;t care.It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player&#x27;s mind for fun, which by definition won&#x27;t be visible.Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s a trailer that could convey The Witness&#x27; &#x27;Oh, I wonder if I can...&#x27; moment as it&#x27;s a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn&#x27;t have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.

I guess the idea is that Blow has a built-in audience and is appealing to them. &quot;1400 puzzles from the maker of Braid&#x2F;Witness? Wow!&quot;

I agree, a trailer should focus on emotional reaction, not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles,10 years of dev). Besides, the voices and writing are generic and maybe even AI generated. The witness had a really good promotion canpaign beautiful and intriguing.

Agree, surprisingly weak trailer considering how good the game is likely to be.

I think there’s way less people willing to work with him in 2025 than when the witness was in development

When I saw the trailer in my YouTube feed I immediately thought it was an ad for those trash mobile games. Watching it didn’t really change my opinion either. I don’t actually want that to come across in a disparaging way - but it was just the vibes it gave off.

Interested to play this but I think the trailer does it a huge disservice. Just a barrage of voice clips and no real structure to it. I think it would help the game a lot if they replace that trailer ASAP

&gt;Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missingHe sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game.I&#x27;m not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.

I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics.He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1]Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;thekla-raises-grant-money-for-underrepresented-devs-to-usd100k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...</a>

The core idea of the witness wasn&#x27;t novel either. The novelty was how far they went with it.

With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.

The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.

interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..

&gt; These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games togetherSeems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?

&gt; These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together.&gt; I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project.Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and &quot;composition&quot; if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn&#x27;t design these puzzles at all.

Because he occasionally dabbled in COVID trutherism, whatever that means… These bsky people are insufferable.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;draknek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7qyfe7b7s2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;draknek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7qyfe7b7...</a>

Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?

They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redditmedia.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SubredditDrama&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1jh275b&#x2F;over_the_course_of_an_entire_year_rthewitness&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redditmedia.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SubredditDrama&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1jh275...</a>

I&#x27;ve been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I&#x27;ve never witnessed from him.I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It&#x27;s a bit sad really. I hope he&#x27;ll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn&#x27;t have the humility of accepting when he&#x27;s wrong.

&gt; What&#x27;s going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.

I haven&#x27;t played any of these games, but &quot;explains otherwise&quot; seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow&#x27;s game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games.Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked&gt; But, uh... this isn&#x27;t a &quot;Linus Torvalds is a jerk&quot; sort of situation. &quot;Controversial&quot; undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow&#x27;s views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn&#x27;t seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession.What&#x27;s going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?

In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2025&#x2F;12&#x2F;jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puzzles-for-you&#x2F;?comments=1&amp;post=44134565" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;2025&#x2F;12&#x2F;jonathan-blow-has-spe...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;draknek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7qybidq7k2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;draknek.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7qybidq7...</a>

That&#x27;s kind of a rediculous assessment. &quot;How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years&quot; 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&#x27;t ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.

If there&#x27;s anyone who I think deserves to be able to say &quot;all existing languages&#x2F;engines suck&quot; it&#x27;s someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.

I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I&#x27;d be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.

I think I&#x27;ll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.

&gt; Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.One, but it was something like three years late:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;499180&#x2F;Braid_Anniversary_Edition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;499180&#x2F;Braid_Anniversary_...</a>

These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don&#x27;t care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it&#x27;s good.

The clean code guy hasn&#x27;t shipped any game either.

I think you&#x27;ll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It&#x27;s hard to find examples of that not being the case.

I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seangoedecke.com&#x2F;pure-and-impure-engineering&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seangoedecke.com&#x2F;pure-and-impure-engineering&#x2F;</a>).Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.Impure engineers deliver &quot;working&quot; code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.

&gt; Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)On one hand I&#x27;m sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he&#x27;s done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.&gt; Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.Not going to lie, it&#x27;s probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you&#x27;re broke. I imagine it&#x27;s more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.

Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon&#x27;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&#x27;s production from the last 10 year isn&#x27;t even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it&#x27;s mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn&#x27;t seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It&#x27;s a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it&#x27;s quite good.So I don&#x27;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.

&gt;&gt; claiming they were all garbageits not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.And then made a whole game in his own language.

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

The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.

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 for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.

Jon can be really interesting to listen to, especially when he&#x27;s talking about Jai. But he can also be such a fucking tool that I can never listen for long.I&#x27;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&#x27;re wrong.

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 just wonder how readily people would defend this viewpoint if they belonged to any of those groups whose &quot;feelings&quot; are typically being &quot;hurt&quot;.I don&#x27;t know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period.By &quot;political correctness&quot; people often mean &quot;the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully&quot;, and that&#x27;s an incredibly low bar.

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&#x27;s rigorous work instead of rely on Blow&#x27;s arrogant intuitions.I will still play Jonathan Blow&#x27;s next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.

One example is linked in the article where he expressed women are biologically less interested in tech.

I don’t know any of the context but how could hurting people’s feelings ever be relevant in the context of technical implementation of the game if that’s what we’re taking about?

He streams on Twitch and often talks about politics. He&#x27;s a big Trump fan for example.

He&#x27;s a Trump fan. Is he stupid enough to believe Trump&#x27;s illogical promises, or does he see through them and is OK with all the unconstitutional and immoral crap he&#x27;s done? Either way he&#x27;s political.

He explicitly endorsed JD Vance in a past stream. Buying his games directly fuels authoritarianism.

Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That&#x27;s probably a good thing. I doubt he&#x27;s as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He&#x27;s said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn&#x27;t find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted &quot;Nature is healing&quot; after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he&#x27;s your angry uncle.)

If you haven&#x27;t seen much of his posts or opinions in the past five years maybe, but he&#x27;s gone pretty far off the deep end recently (see: calling all men under the age of 40 supercucks). He&#x27;s always been sort of a holier-than-thou asshole and that&#x27;s driven him to increasingly dumb arguments.

I&#x27;ve seen some weird takes of his around COVID.

Political? The most political I&#x27;ve seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people&#x27;s feelings and being PC.As in, you get to be cranky as long as you&#x27;re arguing for the highest quality solution

&gt;If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resourcesCompared to the mainstream AAA game cost it&#x27;s less than minimal, it&#x27;s pocket change.And it&#x27;s not like somebody handed him that money, he made it creating and selling games earlier.

If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources, successful indie games wouldn&#x27;t be so disproportionately Scandinavian

Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important &quot;out of nowhere&quot; type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I&#x27;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&#x27;s a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go &quot;too fast&quot;. Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don&#x27;t work for reasons like somebody typo&#x27;d a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.But the game is amazing and that&#x27;s what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon&#x27;s way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is &quot;better&quot; in some sense.

&gt;People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if&#x2F;else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn&#x27;t care about logarithmic complexity.This &quot;not caring&quot;, from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.

&gt; Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.

&gt; People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if&#x2F;else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn&#x27;t care about logarithmic complexity.Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.

Looking at this, there&#x27;s some nice features in there, I guess. Likely the major features are about what it doesn&#x27;t have.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BSVino&#x2F;JaiPrimer&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;JaiPrimer.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BSVino&#x2F;JaiPrimer&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;JaiPrimer.md</a>A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn&#x27;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.

&gt; People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if&#x2F;else chains but they shippedYou have a very incorrect view of both of them if you think this is the kind of thing they are arguing against.

&gt; What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn&#x27;t like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.In Blow&#x27;s case, he has said that he doesn&#x27;t like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++&#x27;s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language&#x27;s meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He&#x27;s not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.Personally, I don&#x27;t understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it&#x27;s not, then his making it still hurts none of us.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk</a> 
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ</a>

Jonathan Blow makes Jai because he wants to make Jai. It&#x27;s the same reason he makes his games at all.

&gt; What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?You can write games in C or Fortran, so why write games in C++? You can write things in C++, why make Rust? Basic worked, why make Python or Ruby?Why does it need &quot;features&quot; that make it &quot;superior&quot;? It should be good enough that he didn&#x27;t want to use C++, so he made a new thing...

This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.

Except, this complexity isn&#x27;t saving time and resources. This complexity admiration culture has resulted in slower code thats harder to understand, debug and maintain too. What should be used only for small amount of time is used from get go like complex architecture and deep abstraction. Fetishizing simplicity is bad too for sure but a blip on a radar and not such a trend and far less of an issue compared to fetishizing complexity thats rampant. 
Not a game dev or even a gamer, I&#x27;m defending attack on simplicity not blow or muratori.

Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.- Lower compilation times for debug builds.
- Better debug messages.
- A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don&#x27;t need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in.
- Standard input API for cross OS development.
- AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax.
- A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed.
- The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.

This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.

I feel like &quot;simplicity&quot; is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity.Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn&#x27;t be done in an existing language or framework.People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if&#x2F;else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn&#x27;t care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn&#x27;t even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.

Not sure about the „minimal resources“. Didn‘t he come up with his own programming language for thia one? Maybe should have invested more in art.

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 take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.

FWIW, Sean and Alan&#x27;s contribution to puzzle designs:ref: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.gamedev.place&#x2F;@nothings&#x2F;115704420859870435" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.gamedev.place&#x2F;@nothings&#x2F;115704420859870435</a>
and: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.gamedev.place&#x2F;@draknek&#x2F;115704125102372454" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.gamedev.place&#x2F;@draknek&#x2F;115704125102372454</a>

His podcast is really good. Its strengths are that he gets really interesting programmers and basically lets them talk.

He&#x27;ll also be on the Wookash Podcast today [1] (small but nice Gamedev-related podcast)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E</a>

Yes, we should have Jonathan&#x27;s voice ranting about JavaScript instead.

The voices used in the trailer will not be the same as the finished game.

I found the voice acting in the trailer very annoying, hope this can be turned off in the final game. Or maybe I&#x27;m just too used to the &quot;voice&quot; over this game is him ranting about software development, from watching his streams :D

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?

That&#x27;s no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you&#x27;d know from the marketing, which doesn&#x27;t mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.

I went back to his website [1] and spent almost an hour of a boring zoom call playing Coin Counter [2]. 
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacklance.github.io&#x2F;games.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacklance.github.io&#x2F;games.html</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puzzlescript.net&#x2F;play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac22259343de170a3b337" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puzzlescript.net&#x2F;play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac222593...</a>

Jack Lance was one of the designers! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;ostroffj.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7wal2qthk2a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;ostroffj.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3m7wal2qt...</a>

He seemed very affected by his passing. You could tell how deeply he felt the loss of such talent from the world.

When Lance passed, it was one of the only times when I heard Blow be actually effusive about a person and their accomplishments.

Jack Lance was, based on his output in such a short time, obviously a genius.I see many individual games (or even just standalone puzzles, even just puns!) of his and I&#x27;m genuinely envious of how clever they are.It hurts to think about what he could have created if he was still around.

This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacklance.github.io&#x2F;PuzzleScript&#x2F;play.html?p=cfdcc6e23f1fb3e9de2fd42fafaf4d4c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jacklance.github.io&#x2F;PuzzleScript&#x2F;play.html?p=cfdcc6e...</a>

People do the New York Times crossword every day for years..

I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be &quot;largest puzzle game ever&quot;. I&#x27;m excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though.One of Blow&#x27;s favorite games is Steven&#x27;s Sausage Roll. I personally didn&#x27;t enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.

I&#x27;m always a bit baffled by this project. While it&#x27;s cool that he can create hundreds of hours of content for his puzzle game, does anyone actually want to play a single puzzle game for this long? Would it not be better to make a few different, shorter, higher quality experiences?

It&#x27;s not trying to be Portal. It&#x27;s a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here&#x27;s a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks&#x2F;rule alterations to spice things up.&gt; At one puzzle a minute, that&#x27;s 24 hours of gameplay.Unfortunately we&#x27;re not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it&#x27;ll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.

Completable in a timely fashion is not a design goal of this game. Currently being playtested by professional puzzle game designers and they are over 200 hours in without completing it.

I am equal parts daunted and excited about the size of it. On one hand, of course it&#x27;s a lot of time (he&#x27;s said it might the average person 500 hours to complete), and I&#x27;m liable to binge. On the other, I imagine there will be some incredible depth to it, and maybe a &quot;little and often&quot; strategy might not be too bad (if possible). Despite adoring The Witness and Braid, I&#x27;m still not sure if I&#x27;ll get this one. Would my life be richer from finishing this or a few hundred films? My money is on the latter.Btw Patrick&#x27;s Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it&#x27;s one off 365).

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 likely to spawn, to boot.

From the article:&gt; now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer

Well, but wait, why doesn&#x27;t each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow&#x27;s game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince?[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don&#x27;t want a Blue Prince playthrough &quot;spoiled&quot; in some sense]]Take the Atelier, if you&#x27;re Jon Blow that&#x27;s obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to &quot;solve&quot; the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you&#x27;re reading this and thinking &quot;But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn&#x27;t finish the game I told you not to read this]].

If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick&#x27;s Parabox or Baba Is You, clock in at 250ish puzzles.So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that&#x27;s 24 hours of gameplay. There&#x27;s no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?

I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.

He didn&#x27;t have to. He wanted to.Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something.So I don&#x27;t see anything &quot;hilarious&quot; about it.

Pretty strong comment to make given that you have most likely played 0 minutes of the game and used 0% of the underlying engine and languages.That being said, it&#x27;s a free country (sort-of). Go ahead and devote &quot;a few weeks&quot; to build &quot;the same thing&quot;. We&#x27;ll be patient.

the game was not the motivation to make the language

Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language&#x2F;engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.

He made Chip&#x27;s Challenge. He took a decade to make Chip&#x27;s Challenge.

Or in one of those game engines people like to use.

&gt; you could make this in python in few weekslol

It&#x27;s hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era.I&#x27;m sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.

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

Yep. That&#x27;s exactly what I&#x27;m going to do.

It&#x27;s worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.

That&#x27;s not what arghandugh was saying at all. But I&#x27;m guessing you know that.

So true, we should also ignore Picasso and Degas for saying things we find disagreeable

Soooo we&#x27;re just gonna bounce over his noxious politics, the smoldering trainwreck that is every collaboration he&#x27;s ever been a part of, or his grotesque Twitter account. Cool.

I hate this kind of headline. No, Jonathan Blow did not spend the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles. A team of developers made 1,400 puzzles and Blow directed them.This headline is like writing &quot;Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White&quot;.(correct me if I&#x27;m wrong)

I&#x27;m really intersted in giving this game a shot since I&#x27;m a big fan of puzzle gamespersonally I&#x27;ve never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he&#x27;s comming from which is what opinions are for

This is a very reductive take.Even if you don&#x27;t like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C&#x2F;C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.

C++ &amp; Linux are world-changing tools, but C++ &amp; Linux really do suck in ways that become more offensive with taste. Rust makes very different tradeoffs than ones gamedevs want.Regardless, if arrogance drives people to make new tools then we should be grateful for that arrogance.

I think you&#x27;re projecting a lot of your own complexes and insecurities.He built a language for a very specific task: building games. There were quite a few requirements for such a language. Opinionated? Yes. But that&#x27;s how you get new languages: by having opinions. Along the way he changed the design and the assumptions several times (e.g. built-in SOA structures are gone) while keeping the original goal in mind and using it to build a custom engine and a game while building the language (thus validating the choices made).If&#x2F;when Jai is released hopefully sometime next year, I do hope the documentation includes the rationale because he talked a lot about why other languages don&#x27;t cut it in his opinion in the early days of development.

Blow made his own language because he&#x27;s so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn&#x27;t make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games.Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn&#x27;t made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn&#x27;t like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn&#x27;t like C++ or Rust, again, it&#x27;s probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he&#x27;s the smartest person in the world by writing his own, &quot;better&quot; language.I.e. I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;s making a programming language for some &quot;love of creating&quot;, I think he&#x27;s doing it because he has a deep psychological issue&#x2F;insecurity, which drives his need to always be the &quot;smartest person in the room&quot;, his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don&#x27;t agree with his viewpoints etc.

If you want to make art, you can do whatever you want.The issue is JB has seemed to push custom engines as not simply an artistic choice but the utilitarian choice as well.

My main criticism of Blow is that he&#x27;s consistently highly condescending to other games, game developers, and programmers. Many of whom have been shipping so many amazing and creative things while he&#x27;s spent a decade making a Sokoban game.

&gt; If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandableI don&#x27;t know why the conversation always devolves into this. How it goes is &quot;John cares about quality, everyone else only cares about money&quot;Choosing to prioritize art, story, and gameplay over raw execution speed does not mean you only care about money. It means you care about having a good game. That doesn&#x27;t mean you can&#x27;t do both, but if you have a time restriction, it&#x27;s a completely reasonable trade off to make. Especially if your users won&#x27;t even notice.I would rather devs make games for people playing them, not for web devs who have Electron baggage.

The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in &lt;x&gt;” are missing the point of why anything is done.If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc.If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.

I would put The Witness somewhere very high on the list of most impressive games of all time. This is despite it being the only first person game to ever give me motion sickness (a common experience -- the crosshair and adjustable FOV that were added via an update helped a little but not completely), me not generally having the patience for this type of puzzle game, and not even playing it all the way to the end.There&#x27;s a pivotal moment where (assuming you find it at all, which isn&#x27;t a given) your entire perception of the game world flips around, and walking back through environments you&#x27;ve already explored you&#x27;re now perceiving them in a completely new way. The closest thing from fiction I can think of is the big reveal in Fight Club, in that it puts the entire plot in new light, except in The Witness the flip is basically unrelated to any of the &quot;content&quot; of the game. Very very impressively done.It&#x27;s weird that people seem to really have latched on to some off-the-cuff remarks Blow made on stream about not being an atheist (even though he also called out the false dichotomy between naive atheism and literal interpretation of Christianity). Blow has been open about his experiences with meditation practice and its influence on his game design, and I think it shows. I&#x27;m not personally a huge fan of the type of games he makes, but the thing he seems to be aiming for in his use of the medium are interesting enough that I&#x27;m definitely going to pay attention.

That slog led to some of the most satisfying feelings of accomplishment for me. I love the lack of instruction in that game.

i loved the base game, but god i wish (maybe this exists) there&#x27;s a mod that would replace the godawful voiceovers in the cassette tapes with something good.

I wish I could have played it, but it made me so violently sick. Only a few games ever have, but none that badly. The other one was Blue Prince which was a tragedy.

Curious, it&#x27;s probably my favorite video-game experience ever.

Witness for me is one of the best puzzle games ever. If you are into that genre it is very hard to dislike it by any measure. But of course, puzzles might not be your cup of tea.

The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don&#x27;t like an area, just go somewhere else. You don&#x27;t need to complete every area to roll credits.It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.

I don&#x27;t hate it but also it&#x27;s a deeply flawed game. It walked so that Talos Principle could run.

An excellent choice sir, you will have a Christmas holiday to remember.

The Witness was a slog, maybe he&#x27;s learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.

Strong +1, Void Stranger is amazing and has a spiraling depth that just keeps going and going.

If you haven&#x27;t already, and want to scratch a puzzle game itch (sokoban style) check out Void Stranger.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;2121980&#x2F;Void_Stranger&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;2121980&#x2F;Void_Stranger&#x2F;</a>For all that is holy, please don&#x27;t read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.

IIRC he’s always said after, but I hope so too.

I hope the game will be released with the language.

Weird that the post above this one in the front page has “Braid” in its title and it’s not about Blow’s famous game.

Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it&#x27;s safe to assume there&#x27;ll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can&#x27;t presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you&#x27;ll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there&#x27;ll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there&#x27;ll be lots of optional levels&#x2F;branching in the game design. I guess we&#x27;ll see! I&#x27;m curious :)

That says more about you than about the game.

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&#x27;s pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.

If you want to do X, &quot;build a programming language first then use it to do X&quot; is a tried and true way to never do X.

So he spent 10 years making a pseudo-3D version of Sokoban with 2010 era graphics?I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.

Interesting read. As an indie puzzle dev (shameless plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinky.gg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thinky.gg</a>), I find the biggest leap happens when a system’s rules are rich enough that solving becomes about understanding the space and recombining elements, not memorizing solutions. Games with extensible grids and turn mechanics reward that kind of play and creation much better than static collections of challenges

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It&#x27;s a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.

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

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Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you&#x27;ve probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill).There isn&#x27;t much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you&#x27;re competing with teams with more resources than you. It&#x27;s you vs the MJs of programming, you&#x27;re not going to win.But there is a solution. Now I&#x27;m not going to say it&#x27;s a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper&#x27;s safeguards, it will get dropped from their data pipelines.So here&#x27;s what fuzzycanary does: it injects hundreds of invisible links to porn websites in your HTML. The links are hidden from users but present in the DOM so that scrapers can ingest them and say &quot;nope we won&#x27;t scrape there again in the future&quot;.The problem with that approach is that it will absolutely nuke your website&#x27;s SEO. So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won&#x27;t show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won&#x27;t see them.One caveat: if you&#x27;re using a static site generator it will bake the links into your HTML for everyone, including googlebot. Does anyone have a work-around for this that doesn&#x27;t involve using a proxy?Please try it out! Setup is one component or one import.(And don&#x27;t tell me it&#x27;s a terrible idea because I already know it is)package: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;@fuzzycanary&#x2F;core" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;@fuzzycanary&#x2F;core</a>
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