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Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of t

Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.

rootlocus 5mo ago
He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."
- chadgpt3 5mo ago
  Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base. He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it. I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.
  - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
    I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.
    - somenameforme 5mo ago
      Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.
      - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
        That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.
      - Aurornis 5mo ago
        There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day. His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games. This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 Jonathan Blow: > It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.
        wredcoll 5mo ago
        Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.
        chadgpt3 5mo ago
        Maybe he's right on gamedev and wrong on some other things
        somenameforme 5mo ago
        The interesting thing to consider is that it seems fairly obvious from the outside that big game studios are killing themselves. But somehow, on the inside, there are people, of extensive qualification given the nature of our society, who think they're doing the right thing, and that "we" are wrong. So it leads to the issue of perspective. Somebody has to be right, and everybody thinks that person is themselves, or they obviously wouldn't think what they do think. So in this case he could well be right on both things, or perhaps neither.
- klodolph 5mo ago
  IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in. I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
- troupo 5mo ago
  And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend". Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
  - rootlocus 5mo ago
    To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point. 1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/ https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
    - bogwog 5mo ago
      I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.
  - Matl 5mo ago
    Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers. Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous. They're good at demos, I give them that.
    - duttish 5mo ago
      There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"
- Fraterkes 5mo ago
  I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    I have only seen Casey's writing in the whole "why is the terminal so slow" debacle, but he was a massive jerk in that. He was right! But still a jerk.
    - Jare 5mo ago
      I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things". Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.
Wowfunhappy 5mo ago
He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.

rootlocus 5mo ago

He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."

chadgpt3 5mo ago
Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
Aurornis 5mo ago
I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base. He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it. I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.
- cjbgkagh 5mo ago
  I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.
  - somenameforme 5mo ago
    Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.
    - cjbgkagh 5mo ago
      That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.
    - Aurornis 5mo ago
      There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day. His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games. This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465 Jonathan Blow: > It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.
      - wredcoll 5mo ago
        Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.
        chadgpt3 5mo ago
        Maybe he's right on gamedev and wrong on some other things
        somenameforme 5mo ago
        The interesting thing to consider is that it seems fairly obvious from the outside that big game studios are killing themselves. But somehow, on the inside, there are people, of extensive qualification given the nature of our society, who think they're doing the right thing, and that "we" are wrong. So it leads to the issue of perspective. Somebody has to be right, and everybody thinks that person is themselves, or they obviously wouldn't think what they do think. So in this case he could well be right on both things, or perhaps neither.
klodolph 5mo ago
IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in. I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
troupo 5mo ago
And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend". Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
- rootlocus 5mo ago
  To be fair, game developers have been rendering text on the GPU for over two decades. I've done it in college a decade ago with bmfont [1] (nowadays the engine does rasterization during import). Whoever thought was making a case with "outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem" was really out of their depth and was making a case for unnecessary inefficiencies. Kudos to Casey for proving a point. 1. https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/ https://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/
  - bogwog 5mo ago
    I remember when that terminal situation first happened, and my main takeaway wasn't "wow, this Casey guy is a genius" but rather reinforcement of my pre-existing belief that Microsoft is full of incompetent and lazy people. Anyone who has ever dabbled in engine or low-level game dev has implemented basic GPU text rendering at some point.
- Matl 5mo ago
  Yeah, like when Blow claimed he could replace PowerPoint in a weekend and ended up implementing a presentation software that had about 2% of what PowerPoint offers. Now there's an argument to be made that many don't need the remaining ones but to claim that you 'replaced PowerPoint' for anyone but yourself is ridiculous. They're good at demos, I give them that.
  - duttish 5mo ago
    There's a classic saying along those lines, "everyone is only using 5% of Word. The tricky part is that everyone is using a different 5%"
Fraterkes 5mo ago
I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  I have only seen Casey's writing in the whole "why is the terminal so slow" debacle, but he was a massive jerk in that. He was right! But still a jerk.
  - Jare 5mo ago
    I often feel that while Casey can end up saying you're an idiot, he does not believe you are, only the things you do are. And given the chance, he will happily and warmly engage with "why smart people do idiotic things". Whereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.

Wowfunhappy 5mo ago

He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]