Jonathan Blow Puns

Hello devout Witness players,

It's been over 5 years since the Witness came out and I still often think about it. I was wondering if anyone had any solid information on the release date for Jonathan's new "sokoban" style game.

I know there are lots of clips of him programming on YouTube, I just wondered if we had anything more concrete.

(Sorry to post on this page, but I wasn't sure where else to ask)

The topic is creativity, consciousness, free will, and gaming. We can also talk about any aspect of Braid or The Witness that you may have.

I had heard of Jonathan Blow before, I heard that he was a game developer and was writing his own language. I am not a gamer so I knew nothing else about him.

This interview made me dislike Jonathan and frankly lowered my opinion of Curt too.

In a nutshell.

Jonathan is incredibly poor at communicating what he is thinking. Every answer meandered all over the place, consisted of statements followed by retractions followed by attempted clarification ended up with no answer or some vague thing.

There was a lot of "othering" of people and groups. They were basically talking to each other about how others are not as good as them for whatever reason. How others fail to see the universe as good as they are.

There was a ton of "boomers complaining about millennials" vibe about just every major topic. I especially enjoyed both of them bashing modern art and modern artists (basically they don't have skills, they don't have talent and they don't produce anything worth experiencing) immediately followed by them complaining about critics of video games. It's astonishing that the irony didn't occur to either of them.

There was entirely too much "woo" sprinkled through along with disdain for anybody who doesn't buy into the woo.

This one ended up being a messy pile most likely due to Curt's fanboi attitude towards the subject and the subject being kind of loopy.

Jonathan Blow will be joining us for Q&A on Sunday September 19 at 10:30 Pacific Daylight Time, 20:30 Israel Daylight Time, 17:30 UTC.

Designer of acclaimed games including Braid and The Witness, Jonathan Blow is currently working on the programming language Jai (currently in closed beta) designed to compete with C++ in games programming, as well as designing and implementing an upcoming game (written in Jai) with his colleagues at his games studio, Thekla Inc.

Please signup here and we’ll send you an invitation.

I know that Joe sometimes talked and him on streams but I never seen what's the beef is actually all about. Is there an archive anywhere I can read or anyone who remembers what happened?

Been waiting on this one, keep checking every day!

1. Do you like the games he's primarily worked on

2. He's often tried to have a more artistically warped side to his puzzle games, e.g. saying in an interview he wants to make games for Thomas Pynchon fans. Given that Dean has also been involved in post-modern art, do you think Jonathan succeeds enough at implanting an artistic side in his games to warrant a post on this subreddit?

I remember Jonathan Blow giving a bit of a rant about how all software "these days" is bad. He asked people to write down every time a computer has an error, or does something weird or unexpected, or something that you didn't want it to do. Unfortunately I can't remember the exact wording. IIRC Linux was involved too. It was definitely in a YouTube video, most likely one he uploaded himself (link to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888/videos ) and it's likely an older video. I want to find that video so I can cite it. Apparently, nowadays YouTube allows searching through subtitles, but it seems those older videos don't have subtitles.

Hello kind sir, not sure if you read this sub but if you do....

I've been looking for a non-GC language to dive into that is simple like C but has a better build system and adds some modern features without going overboard. Tried a bunch and Zig is my favorite so far, but I'm really frothing for some Jai action, I like the idea of someone who comes from a video game design space creating their own language and I just want to give it a try. I'm wondering what the disadvantage might be to having an open alpha / beta other than having to ignore some annoying people. I see the main advantage as scoping out potential candidates, as I've seen you put up job openings on Twitter and I'm sure low level engineers are very hard to find these days.

Anyways can't wait for a compiler to be released, I know it will happen one day so I'll just be patient.

Looking ahead, and thinking how much I would like to see what Jonathan Blow’s next game(s) will be about...

I realized that The Witness was released in January 2016, which means it’s about to be 5 years since its release.

Wasn’t The Witness’s “long” development only about 6 years?

And actually, hadn’t Jonathan Blow been showing people the nearly developed game for quite a while before January 2016?

I thought for sure he said that the next game wouldn’t take as long as The Witness! :-o

I assume the answer is that he was busy with ports and updates to The Witness, and that right now he’s actually working on two games, as well as a programming language, and all these things take time.

But it would be nice to know if something cool is coming soon. :-)

Podcast link: https://oxide.computer/blog/on-the-metal-9-jonathan-blow/

Submission statement: Bryan Cantrill (of the "Is It Time to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?" presentation) interviewed Jonathan Blow, developer of Braid and the Jai compiler on a podcast called On The Metal. The whole thing is engrossing, but there's a quote in there regarding Rust I wanted to get opinions on from the /r/rust crowd at around 1:40:50:

> Blow: And so Rust has a good set of ingredients there. The problem that I have with it is when I'm working on really hard stuff, I don't exactly know what I'm doing for a long time. And so if the cost of experimentation is driven too high, it actually impairs my ability to get work done. > > Blow: And so my approach that we're doing in the language that we're working on is different. It's like, you have very very very extensive metaprogramming facilities and you can use those to build your own correctness checking for your program that you traditionally would have needed to make a compiler extension to do, which is pretty far away from what people do day to day and they don't end up doing it even if they could have. So what happens is your metaprogram gets information that normally would only be internal to the compiler.

He goes on to describe a use of that at 1:45:34:

> Blow: So in games the way that's traditionally handled is there's a very natural barrier which is the end of the frame, right? So we do a bunch of stuff over and over 60 times per second or 200 times per second, whatever. And at the end of the frame, we pretty much know it's all... > > Cantrill: -garbage now. > > Blow: Well, we're not really hanging on to anything. So it's very clean cut you could say. So, well, it's a very reasonable thing to say it's fine to do that stuff as long as you don't hold an entity pointer across a frame boundary, okay? Now that's not a very generalizable rule. Because what's an entity pointer versus a pointer to something else? Your compiler doesn't know that right? But you know that. And so when the new guy shows up or the summer intern shows up and writes some code where he puts that entity pointer into a data structure that... > > Cantrill: -is surviving- > > Blow: ...some hash table that's sitting around, that's going to be a problem, right? And that's a very practical, real kind o

Been following Jonathan Blow's development of his new language JAI for more than a few years now and I'm curious what the community at large thinks about it, especially game devs since that's the target audience for the language. I'm really interested in how C++ replacement type languages (rust, go, nim, D, etc.) are impacting the state of gamedev since C++ is so ubiquitous in the industry and it seems like it has been since the dawn of time.

Some key features just for a quick summary

• C++-like syntax
• Designed for easy refactoring
• Arbitrary compile time code execution (like, really arbitrary. This feature has been shown off by running an entire complex game at compile time without a single hitch)
• Manual memory management with some key quality-of-life features like pointer ownership within structs, builtin support for custom allocators, a defer keyword, etc.
• Focus on data-oriented programming, notably with ability to align arrays of structs as structs of arrays without any massive syntax overhead

I'm aware it's not actually available yet but I think it's in beta now so it could be available sometime in the near future (so not *quite* vaporware). I wish there was more written content to show off but most stuff about the language, especially recent developments, is tied up in Blow's own compiler hacking and engine programming streams.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I forgot to mention the compiler is super fast. Like <1s cold compile times on 40k+ LoC projects. This is also a major selling point.

For ones who know that crazy game, the witness (Jonathan blow),

when I meet Envoy, we have a long speach that I dont understand (sorry english is not my native language),

I have the exact same feeling when I found these little records on the witness game : you continue to play with that long speak I can't understand, the tone is the same, it speaks about phylosophy.

Durring these moments I dont play a brute in a ARPG anymore but I play a puzzle game.

I am a multiclassed game designer/programmer and I run a small game studio in San Francisco. A couple of weeks ago we released a game called The Witness; for Witness-related questions, we'll have some other members of the team on here answering questions as well.

Questions are not limited to Witness-related stuff, obviously!

If you do ask about Witness stuff, please spoiler-tag anything spoilery; don't presume that most people here have played or finished the game.

Proof: http://the-witness.net/news/2016/02/ill-be-having-a-reddit-ama-on-friday-the-12th-of-february/

Edit: The following other members of the team will be answering Witness questions:

Andrew Smith, programming: anchsm

Luis Antonio, modeling and texturing (they hate it when I say that and they want me to say "Artist"): castorpt

Orsi Spanyol, also "Artist" and designed some of the puzzles: Orsi_Spanyol

So, this is a pretty good variety of people who can answer questions about all portions of the game. So you can feel free to ask detailed stuff about the engine, the modeling, et cetera!

So, he mentioned in his latest programming stream that they planned to announce a new game at E3/GDC and are now looking for new ways to announce it. It‘s not that Sokoban puzzle game they‘re working on but another one. Who‘s excited?