7 ms·

The Witness: the creator of Braid talks about his fiendishly difficult new game

147 points by binarycrusader 11y ago

teddyh 11y ago
Buried lede: “While it's been a long and winding road, The Witness is nearing its end. Blow has a little over four months until the just-announced release date of January 26, 2016.”
- nulltype 11y ago
  Sounds like Windows and PS4 will be released on that date.
- devindotcom 11y ago
  It's not really the lede, though.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
I strongly encourage anyone interested in programming languages to watch his series about Jai, the language he is creating for his next game. Starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1kgKJXD3PkyxO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxai... It's not released yet, but watching the videos has massively changed the way I think about programming. The notion of "data-driven programming," which I would describe as "only move around the data you have to", has been a real revelation to me. I sort of came out of the Ruby world (and Java before that) where the attitude is more "Abstract all the things!" I have been trying to apply many of Blow's principles in my JavaScript programming and it has been awesome. I find myself staying closer to the "metal" (which in JavaScript world is pure Node and low-level browser APIs) and it has been incredibly rewarding. I've also really enjoyed his policy of pragmatism over idealism. I think the React world for example has taken a good idea (immutability can clarify data flows) and turned it into a religion (Everything Must Be Immutable!) Watching Blow work has given me the confidence to steer away from that. Much in the same way that learning Rails made me a better programmer (even though I don't use it anymore, and I've rejected a lot of its premises) I have found learning Jai has really leveled me up as a programmer and a computer science thinker.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  You might really enjoy Clojure, which is a data driven language, even the code itself is data. It also challenges how you think about programming, as any lisp would.
  - jp_sc 11y ago
    Or Elixir, which is nicer if you prefer Ruby syntax over -Java- (updated:) Lisp
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      That's an odd comparison to Clojure, because while Elixir has vaguely Ruby-esque syntax, Clojure, despite excellent Java interop, has Lisp syntax, not Java syntax, even down to having method calls on Java objects look like Lisp function calls -- (.methodName object) rather than object.methodName
- cableshaft 11y ago
  Which premises of Rails have you rejected? I'm just now starting to learn it. It seems very inflexible so far, and a lot of things seem too magical (I'm used to being able to follow where things are being set on a step by step process), but it does seem like if it finally clicks I should be able to crank out my website concepts a lot faster.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    The big one is "Convention Over Configuration", which means there are magical things you can do that have lots of wonderful side effects. If you put a file in the right directory, the Rails engine will react by doing lots of things in lots of different parts of the request lifecycle. You don't have to connect your routes, views, and controllers, you just have to structure them correctly on the filesystem and you let Rails glue everything up. This tradition has been carried on by Ember. It is great when it works... after spending a year or so in Rails, you are able to make lots of things happen with just a few lines of code. But it makes debugging a nightmare. Even after several years of Rails programming I would often find myself in a situation where I needed to debug down into Rails internals just to understand what was happening so that I could figure out where my code was wrong. A good contrast would be raw (no framework) PHP. If you want to know why your PHP script isn't working, it's easy to figure out what's going on: Just look at the URL, get the name of the file, start from the top of that file and trace through your code until you find the problem. Ember (although I love it) is very similar to Rails in this regard. It took me about a year to get to the point with Ember where I knew what magical buttons to push to make things happen. But I also found myself continually needing to debug into the framework to understand why my code didn't work. To their credit the Ember folks are doing well to mitigate this problem by having good error messages and documentation. You also see the same complaint come up a lot in regards to the ActiveRecord pattern. It has you set up a bunch of declarative facts about your data model, and then then your giant ActiveRecord library does a lot of super smart things in response to a simple command like "update". It's cool when it works, but when it's not doing what you expect it's miserable to debug into the query builder. These days I'd much prefer just to have a good, imperative (do this, then that) interface on top of SQL.
stringham 11y ago
I have been following the progress of this game on the-witness.net for a few years. Really exciting that they've got a release date now.
teddyh 11y ago
The web site of the game itself (http://the-witness.net/ http://the-witness.net/) seems down at the moment, but their Twitter account has links to more articles: https://twitter.com/witnessgame https://twitter.com/witnessgame
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  Wordpress. Nuff said.
  - PopeOfNope 11y ago
    To all you twits downvoting me, proof: @Jonathan_Blow: "Sadly I did not manage to get us off WP in time, and surprise surprise, our blog gets crushed immediately every time I reboot the machine." https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/644564200275054592 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/644564200275054592
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      You're not being downvoted because you mis-characterized the software stack.
      - PopeOfNope 11y ago
        Care to enlighten me, then? It's as on topic and relevant to the posted story as the rest of the comments here. The best I can figure is people just don't like my tone, which is childish.
        steveklabnik 11y ago
        > which is childish. uh huh
        loco5niner 11y ago
        https://xkcd.com/1124/ https://xkcd.com/1124/
maxander 11y ago
My goodness, but that's pretty for a small-studio game. Its worth noting that, assuming this actually comes through, Blow will have overcome one of the most pernicious traps that wait for successful game designers- that next, wondrous game you make once you have all the resources you could possibly dream of and no excuse not to follow every possible design ambition. Compare Duke Nukem 3D, or 0x10c.
- xerophyte12932 11y ago
  Yes its refreshing to see them take a complete departure from Braid instead of just seeing Braid as "formula for success" and re-iterating it. (I am looking at you Angry Birds). I like how he used his financial freedom to follow through with something he really wanted to build in a way that he feels justifies his dream
tempodox 11y ago
I wish the temporal delta between buzz generation and game release were smaller. By the time the game will be released, I will have forgotten all about it.
- rtpg 11y ago
  I've been looking forward to this for an extremely long time. But it looks so promising that I go to the game blog once a month or so to see what's happening

147 points by binarycrusader 11y ago

Buried lede: “While it's been a long and winding road, The Witness is nearing its end. Blow has a little over four months until the just-announced release date of January 26, 2016.”

nulltype 11y ago
Sounds like Windows and PS4 will be released on that date.
devindotcom 11y ago
It's not really the lede, though.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

I strongly encourage anyone interested in programming languages to watch his series about Jai, the language he is creating for his next game. Starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxaiCKfxMBrNsU1kgKJXD3PkyxO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ&list=PLmV5I2fxai... It's not released yet, but watching the videos has massively changed the way I think about programming. The notion of "data-driven programming," which I would describe as "only move around the data you have to", has been a real revelation to me. I sort of came out of the Ruby world (and Java before that) where the attitude is more "Abstract all the things!" I have been trying to apply many of Blow's principles in my JavaScript programming and it has been awesome. I find myself staying closer to the "metal" (which in JavaScript world is pure Node and low-level browser APIs) and it has been incredibly rewarding. I've also really enjoyed his policy of pragmatism over idealism. I think the React world for example has taken a good idea (immutability can clarify data flows) and turned it into a religion (Everything Must Be Immutable!) Watching Blow work has given me the confidence to steer away from that. Much in the same way that learning Rails made me a better programmer (even though I don't use it anymore, and I've rejected a lot of its premises) I have found learning Jai has really leveled me up as a programmer and a computer science thinker.

hellofunk 11y ago
You might really enjoy Clojure, which is a data driven language, even the code itself is data. It also challenges how you think about programming, as any lisp would.
- jp_sc 11y ago
  Or Elixir, which is nicer if you prefer Ruby syntax over -Java- (updated:) Lisp
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    That's an odd comparison to Clojure, because while Elixir has vaguely Ruby-esque syntax, Clojure, despite excellent Java interop, has Lisp syntax, not Java syntax, even down to having method calls on Java objects look like Lisp function calls -- (.methodName object) rather than object.methodName
cableshaft 11y ago
Which premises of Rails have you rejected? I'm just now starting to learn it. It seems very inflexible so far, and a lot of things seem too magical (I'm used to being able to follow where things are being set on a step by step process), but it does seem like if it finally clicks I should be able to crank out my website concepts a lot faster.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  The big one is "Convention Over Configuration", which means there are magical things you can do that have lots of wonderful side effects. If you put a file in the right directory, the Rails engine will react by doing lots of things in lots of different parts of the request lifecycle. You don't have to connect your routes, views, and controllers, you just have to structure them correctly on the filesystem and you let Rails glue everything up. This tradition has been carried on by Ember. It is great when it works... after spending a year or so in Rails, you are able to make lots of things happen with just a few lines of code. But it makes debugging a nightmare. Even after several years of Rails programming I would often find myself in a situation where I needed to debug down into Rails internals just to understand what was happening so that I could figure out where my code was wrong. A good contrast would be raw (no framework) PHP. If you want to know why your PHP script isn't working, it's easy to figure out what's going on: Just look at the URL, get the name of the file, start from the top of that file and trace through your code until you find the problem. Ember (although I love it) is very similar to Rails in this regard. It took me about a year to get to the point with Ember where I knew what magical buttons to push to make things happen. But I also found myself continually needing to debug into the framework to understand why my code didn't work. To their credit the Ember folks are doing well to mitigate this problem by having good error messages and documentation. You also see the same complaint come up a lot in regards to the ActiveRecord pattern. It has you set up a bunch of declarative facts about your data model, and then then your giant ActiveRecord library does a lot of super smart things in response to a simple command like "update". It's cool when it works, but when it's not doing what you expect it's miserable to debug into the query builder. These days I'd much prefer just to have a good, imperative (do this, then that) interface on top of SQL.

stringham 11y ago

I have been following the progress of this game on the-witness.net for a few years. Really exciting that they've got a release date now.

teddyh 11y ago

The web site of the game itself (http://the-witness.net/ http://the-witness.net/) seems down at the moment, but their Twitter account has links to more articles: https://twitter.com/witnessgame https://twitter.com/witnessgame

PopeOfNope 11y ago
Wordpress. Nuff said.
- PopeOfNope 11y ago
  To all you twits downvoting me, proof: @Jonathan_Blow: "Sadly I did not manage to get us off WP in time, and surprise surprise, our blog gets crushed immediately every time I reboot the machine." https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/644564200275054592 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/644564200275054592
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    You're not being downvoted because you mis-characterized the software stack.
    - PopeOfNope 11y ago
      Care to enlighten me, then? It's as on topic and relevant to the posted story as the rest of the comments here. The best I can figure is people just don't like my tone, which is childish.
      - steveklabnik 11y ago
        > which is childish. uh huh
        loco5niner 11y ago
        https://xkcd.com/1124/ https://xkcd.com/1124/

maxander 11y ago

My goodness, but that's pretty for a small-studio game. Its worth noting that, assuming this actually comes through, Blow will have overcome one of the most pernicious traps that wait for successful game designers- that next, wondrous game you make once you have all the resources you could possibly dream of and no excuse not to follow every possible design ambition. Compare Duke Nukem 3D, or 0x10c.

xerophyte12932 11y ago
Yes its refreshing to see them take a complete departure from Braid instead of just seeing Braid as "formula for success" and re-iterating it. (I am looking at you Angry Birds). I like how he used his financial freedom to follow through with something he really wanted to build in a way that he feels justifies his dream

tempodox 11y ago

I wish the temporal delta between buzz generation and game release were smaller. By the time the game will be released, I will have forgotten all about it.

rtpg 11y ago
I've been looking forward to this for an extremely long time. But it looks so promising that I go to the game blog once a month or so to see what's happening