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.
replyHe 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."
replyI 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.
replyHe’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.
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.
replyIs 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.
replyIn fairness, AAA games are practically over. They have grown too bloated, take too long to develop, and, with the culture wars raging in the background, almost every AAA game steps on at least one landmine and loses a large fraction of its audience before it is even released. Sad, really.
replyThere 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.
replyHis 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
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.
Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.
replyThat 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.
replyI’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.
replyI 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.
replyI 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".
replyWhereas JB actively thinks you're an idiot, and the things you do are idiotic because of your stupidity, period.
IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in.
replyI think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
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".
replyHuge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
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.
replyI 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.
replyYeah, 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.
replyNow 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.
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%"
replyOriginated (or maybe just popularized) by Joel Spolsky, I think?
replyCasey was right, though. The windows terminal was (is, it's still there even if you use the new Terminal) atrocious. The performance is so bad, due to going through all the layers it does, which Casey exposed. And it's not even packed with features, pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that. The support for colors was also bad, the very limited options for font configuration, and it renders fonts as if it was Win2k... Thankfully, the Windows Terminal solves most of those, and includes tabs and other useful features. Too late for me as I already jumped ship to Linux.
reply> pressing up on a new console doesn't bring you a command from history, which Linux terminals and 3rd party Windows ones have been doing for decades, even Powershell does that.
replyI'm wondering if you're confusing Windows terminal with cmd.exe?
Windows terminal is not the shell. It's a terminal emulator. You run a shell inside of the terminal, for example you can run... Powershell.
Command history is a feature of the shell.
Imagine if he had approached it like, e.g. Bruce Dawson though, instead of coming off like an edgelord off his meds.
replyIsn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
replyHe'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.)
replydeleted
replyThat's fine for database-like meta-data (e.g. game entity properties), but not for images, videos or audio files. Just writing those as hex dumps into text files doesn't make them any easier to merge.
replyHe uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.
replyYou really can't merge binary data, such as textures, meshes, audio, etc. It doesn't matter if you base64 encode the data and stuff it in a text file: it's a jumble of data (assuming this is the implication of what Blow did).
replyHow do you merge changes to a texture, mesh, audio file, etc?
reply