4 ms·

Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I

Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I'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's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked. But the game is amazing and that'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's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.

bzzzt 11mo ago
The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.
- klausa 11mo ago
  I think for games like Blue Prince, specifically, it’s not a false dichotomy. Those are made in tiny teams. You can either spend more time tinkering with the gameplay mechanics and experimenting with the game parts; or you can put on your software engineer hat and make the code better (or, spend even more time to learn how to make the code better in the first place!). This gets less true with scale of a team, and with 5000 people behemoths you probably should care _a lot_ more about the code; but ROI on improving the code in (relatively! Calling Blue Prince “small” is ridiculous.) small games is very dubious.
  - tialaramex 11mo ago
    A lot of core game logic is presumably Tonda's work. He's a director, not a software engineer. He came into this, many years ago, wondering if the "easy" tools to make a video game meant he could just make the video game he was imagining, and of course the answer is "Yes, but..." Blue Prince is (an extrapolation of) that first game, but it looks and sounds like competent people worked on it, not like something slapped together by a non-engineer in a week. However while you can hire experts to make "You know, like cool jazz for a mysterious underground area" or "Art that looks thematically like it was sketched, but also feels solid enough that you could lean on it" it's very difficult for software engineers to "just" fix the software to get rid of bugs because what's a bug? Only the puzzle designer knows for sure what they intended. [[Spoilers! Do not read if you are still playing or might play]] Is it a bug that "Swimming Trunks" don't let you swim? No! That's a Dad Joke. They're Trunks. Large locked wooden boxes. They're in the swimming pool, and if your pool has water in it, that means they're swimming. When I picked a time from my near future in Shelter, it didn't work, that's a bug right? Nope. The Shelter cares about game time, not real world time. Make sure you know the date in game. OK but is it a bug that being in Clock Tower at the Sacred Hour doesn't have any effect? Um, maybe? It seems as though the software doesn't believe clocks repeat, so only the first time will actually work. Or, maybe the second does too? It's hard to say. Try again? I need food but somehow I keep digging up keys and money. That's a bug right? Nope, probably means you have made a Contraption which changed your dig probabilities. OK, so that's also why my Door facings are weird even though I put my Compass-based Contraption in a Cloak Room? That one's probably a bug. Still, "If you draft it quite late" ought to mean my Music Room has the key right? Well, maybe, what did you think "Quite late" meant? "I thought after a few hours would do it". Huh. Well, maybe. "OK, what about Rank 7?". Rank Nine would be better, but it might be enough, depends. "I still get no key, are you sure this isn't a bug?". The most likely problem is that you've done Music Room. If so the most likely key to wrongly believe you did instead is Vault, although Station is also possible. Check the other locations.
  - bzzzt 11mo ago
    Of course programs will be worse when non-programmers are in charge of programming. That doesn't mean they shouldn't but lots of indie game attempts fail because the programmer (educated or not) doesn't have a clue about when to refactor and make sure the design of the system matches the intention of the game. You can only tinker until a certain point, after that you're just creating new bugs by fixing other bugs. ID software once was a small team and they built complex games by writing tight code which was modular and very clear. Lots of their '3d era' contemporaries failed because their engines were sloppy, complicated, buggy and slow.
- socalgal2 11mo ago
  It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.
somenameforme 11mo ago
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history. I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
lylejantzi3rd 11mo ago
That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable. The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
- MrJohz 11mo ago
  I think the question is whether Cyberpunk 2077 would ever have been made under the constraints that Blow and Muratori talk about. Like, Order of the Sinking Star looks pretty impressive, but from what I can tell it's basically just a bunch of Sokoban-style games operating on a fixed grid. You don't need anywhere near as complex an engine for that as you do for a game like Cyberpunk 2077. My impression is that the Blow/Muratori style works well if you're the only person working on a game, or part of a very limited team, which is fair enough, but it naturally limits the scope of what you can achieve.
  - lylejantzi3rd 11mo ago
    The Witness is a 3d engine made from scratch. Not all AAA companies use Unreal or Unity.
    - estebank 11mo ago
      Having a 3D engine does not a AAA make. The Witness is a beautiful looking game, but the amount of state and interactions it has to deal with is orders of magnitude less than GTA: San Andreas. It is closer to the complexity a Myst remake would have.
- _bent 11mo ago
  It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.
tstrimple 11mo ago
I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

bzzzt 11mo ago

The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.

klausa 11mo ago
I think for games like Blue Prince, specifically, it’s not a false dichotomy. Those are made in tiny teams. You can either spend more time tinkering with the gameplay mechanics and experimenting with the game parts; or you can put on your software engineer hat and make the code better (or, spend even more time to learn how to make the code better in the first place!). This gets less true with scale of a team, and with 5000 people behemoths you probably should care _a lot_ more about the code; but ROI on improving the code in (relatively! Calling Blue Prince “small” is ridiculous.) small games is very dubious.
- tialaramex 11mo ago
  A lot of core game logic is presumably Tonda's work. He's a director, not a software engineer. He came into this, many years ago, wondering if the "easy" tools to make a video game meant he could just make the video game he was imagining, and of course the answer is "Yes, but..." Blue Prince is (an extrapolation of) that first game, but it looks and sounds like competent people worked on it, not like something slapped together by a non-engineer in a week. However while you can hire experts to make "You know, like cool jazz for a mysterious underground area" or "Art that looks thematically like it was sketched, but also feels solid enough that you could lean on it" it's very difficult for software engineers to "just" fix the software to get rid of bugs because what's a bug? Only the puzzle designer knows for sure what they intended. [[Spoilers! Do not read if you are still playing or might play]] Is it a bug that "Swimming Trunks" don't let you swim? No! That's a Dad Joke. They're Trunks. Large locked wooden boxes. They're in the swimming pool, and if your pool has water in it, that means they're swimming. When I picked a time from my near future in Shelter, it didn't work, that's a bug right? Nope. The Shelter cares about game time, not real world time. Make sure you know the date in game. OK but is it a bug that being in Clock Tower at the Sacred Hour doesn't have any effect? Um, maybe? It seems as though the software doesn't believe clocks repeat, so only the first time will actually work. Or, maybe the second does too? It's hard to say. Try again? I need food but somehow I keep digging up keys and money. That's a bug right? Nope, probably means you have made a Contraption which changed your dig probabilities. OK, so that's also why my Door facings are weird even though I put my Compass-based Contraption in a Cloak Room? That one's probably a bug. Still, "If you draft it quite late" ought to mean my Music Room has the key right? Well, maybe, what did you think "Quite late" meant? "I thought after a few hours would do it". Huh. Well, maybe. "OK, what about Rank 7?". Rank Nine would be better, but it might be enough, depends. "I still get no key, are you sure this isn't a bug?". The most likely problem is that you've done Music Room. If so the most likely key to wrongly believe you did instead is Vault, although Station is also possible. Check the other locations.
- bzzzt 11mo ago
  Of course programs will be worse when non-programmers are in charge of programming. That doesn't mean they shouldn't but lots of indie game attempts fail because the programmer (educated or not) doesn't have a clue about when to refactor and make sure the design of the system matches the intention of the game. You can only tinker until a certain point, after that you're just creating new bugs by fixing other bugs. ID software once was a small team and they built complex games by writing tight code which was modular and very clear. Lots of their '3d era' contemporaries failed because their engines were sloppy, complicated, buggy and slow.
socalgal2 11mo ago
It’s not a false dichotomy imo. If the creator of Blue Prince had concentrated on code quality it’s likely they’d never have shipped. The same would be true for the creator of Undertale.

somenameforme 11mo ago

I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history. I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.

lylejantzi3rd 11mo ago

That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable. The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.

MrJohz 11mo ago
I think the question is whether Cyberpunk 2077 would ever have been made under the constraints that Blow and Muratori talk about. Like, Order of the Sinking Star looks pretty impressive, but from what I can tell it's basically just a bunch of Sokoban-style games operating on a fixed grid. You don't need anywhere near as complex an engine for that as you do for a game like Cyberpunk 2077. My impression is that the Blow/Muratori style works well if you're the only person working on a game, or part of a very limited team, which is fair enough, but it naturally limits the scope of what you can achieve.
- lylejantzi3rd 11mo ago
  The Witness is a 3d engine made from scratch. Not all AAA companies use Unreal or Unity.
  - estebank 11mo ago
    Having a 3D engine does not a AAA make. The Witness is a beautiful looking game, but the amount of state and interactions it has to deal with is orders of magnitude less than GTA: San Andreas. It is closer to the complexity a Myst remake would have.
_bent 11mo ago
It's not a lack of engineering, but a lack of time, no? 5 years later and Cyberpunk runs on the Switch 2, MacBook Air and Linux Gaming Handhelds. While also scaling beautifully to 64 core CPUs or $3000 Nvidia raytracing GPUs.

tstrimple 11mo ago

I'd add Dispatch as a more recent example of this. It's a buggy mess for such a simple game (I encountered multiple game breaking bugs in one play-through) but its reviews are overwhelmingly positive.