Jonathan Blow on Launching his New Game

[@MoncefNaji]

I mostly use my wish list to track games that I eventually want to buy IF they go on sale and I don't mind to wait as long as it takes. My backlog is ample enough!

[@mattymattffs]

Personally i use it to mark games i want to play. I don't buy them until I'm ready to play them

[@pedroromano5978]

Wishlists are good when you're marketing a game before launch, so that Steam will e-mail people when it releases. After the launch, wishlists are people who decided to leave your game for the next Steam sale, maybe.

[@marshymarcelo]

have soulja boy play it

[@jomohogames]

Don't forget to cry in a dark room about it too

[@plaidchuck]

Seems positive now, seemed before he was just bitching in every stream.

[@senkrouf]

he is a naysayer. His nickname was naysayer for decades.

[@____uncompetative]

Creating a whole metaprogramming language to just bring out another block pushing game seems like an enormous waste of time.

[@krystianmichalak1316]

As far as I know the reason was to have simple, fast language designed to make games. Tha game is just a proof that the language gets the job done. I belive creating a programming language is time consuming.

[@DooMWhite]

Commenting on a topic you know nothing about is a waste of time-not just for you, but for everyone involved.

[@NoTruce]

The "block pushing game" is just an proof that the language is production ready or at least stable enough, "eating your own dog food" stuff.

[@____uncompetative]

@@krystianmichalak1316 I agree. It is time consuming. I've been working on my own productivity boosting multiparadigm language for 25 years. I needed it to create the tools that I would need to make an asynchronous MMORTSFPSRPG the size of the Universe. I evaluated C++ early on as it was the accepted industry standard and I decided it was error prone due to its operator overloading. A typo in PASCAL would be caught as a mistake in the syntax, but C++ has optional spaces which lead to it compiling code without complaint which isn't your intention. If that code is part of a rarely evaluated conditional branch of execution that unintended behaviour could escape testing and impact the game after it goes into Gold Master for release. This is why we have so many Day One patches and early access where saps pay extra to play _STARFIELD_ only to find it full of bugs, which they dutifully notify Bethesda Games Studios about and perversely deem charming for some masochistic reason I can't understand. These are unpaid beta testers in all but name, and games are more dragged back by C++ than DEI in my opinion, as it might be viable to tackle any themes/identities/politics in a well written story with compelling gameplay, but the poor tools stymie development as they discourage the Exploratory Programming needed to find the fun. Jason Schreier has written about how ABK worked on _Project Titan_ which was a superhero MMO set in a city where players had secret identities where they worked ordinary jobs, but they failed to find the fun, and so this enormous amount of work was stripped back to a simple hero shooter and out of all that investment all they had to show for it was _OVERWATCH._ Now, it is possible with _CONCORD_ costing upwards of $280,000,000 that it also had a Campaign at one point, but it was cut. Why else is there a Galactic Map? _Project Tiger_ was all about Knights going into castles in 3rd person, until Bungie asked ABK for an extension beyond their deadline and redid the game almost from scratch, making it mainly 1st person save for Superabilities in 3rd person, and mixing Medieval stylings and dungeons with a post apocalyptic far future fight to repel the Darkness invading our Solar system. Their Grognok level editor was very slow to make any changes in as it would have to redo all the light maps after moving any object, again discouraging creative experimentation. This is why there are so few maps in _Destiny_ and they get used so many times, then content you paid for is blocked from use, only to return later for nostalgia purposes when the game should have just grown bigger and bigger over the years and there should not have been a _Destiny 2_ but just more seasons of DLC funding the continued running of their Shared World Shooter servers. So, I agree with Blow. C++ is a terrible language and is holding back gaming. I think C++ has the worst syntax of any language not deliberately designed that way as a joke. Also, I think Rust has the worst semantics of any language not deliberately designed that way as a joke. So, although I like the way Rust tells you where you made a mistake in your code, I don't want to fret about its Borrow Checker. As to my game I am not promoting it here and won't tell anyone it has been done with special custom tools or developed in a new language all created by one person. I will let it speak for itself and let people assume it was made by a studio of multiple individuals. If they think one person made it they may not want to pay full price for it. Then assuming it sells and I make some money off it, I will provide the tools so the community can mod it. Eventually, I plan to make the whole thing Open Source so that people can get in and reimplement the renderer, etc. if they so choose, or do a total conversion to make the game into some other game, although it would make more sense to incorporate a genre it doesn't already encompass within its expansive world as it would then turn it into the "everything game" that people have fantasized about for decades. I have no deadlines so I can't say when this will release, almost certainly after _Star Citizen._

[@____uncompetative]

​@@krystianmichalak1316 I agree. It is time consuming. I've been working on my own productivity boosting multiparadigm language for 25 years. I needed it to create the tools that I would need to make an asynchronous MMORTSFPSRPG the size of the Universe. I evaluated C++ early on as it was the accepted industry standard and I decided it was error prone due to its operator overloading. A typo in PASCAL would be caught as a mistake in the syntax, but C++ has optional spaces which lead to it compiling code without complaint which isn't your intention. If that code is part of a rarely evaluated conditional branch of execution that unintended behaviour could escape testing and impact the game after it goes into Gold Master for release. This is why we have so many Day One patches and early access where saps pay extra to play _STARFIELD_ only to find it full of bugs, which they dutifully notify Bethesda Games Studios about and perversely deem charming for some masochistic reason I can't understand. These are unpaid beta testers in all but name, and games are more dragged back by C++ than DEI in my opinion, as it might be viable to tackle any themes/identities/politics in a well written story with compelling gameplay, but the poor tools stymie development as they discourage the Exploratory Programming needed to find the fun. Jason Schreier has written about how ABK worked on _Project Titan_ which was a superhero MMO set in a city where players had secret identities where they worked ordinary jobs, but they failed to find the fun, and so this enormous amount of work was stripped back to a simple hero shooter and out of all that investment all they had to show for it was _OVERWATCH._ Now, it is possible with _CONCORD_ costing upwards of $280,000,000 that it also had a Campaign at one point, but it was cut. Why else is there a Galactic Map? _Project Tiger_ was all about Knights going into castles in 3rd person, until Bungie asked ABK for an extension beyond their deadline and redid the game almost from scratch, making it mainly 1st person save for Superabilities in 3rd person, and mixing Medieval stylings and dungeons with a post apocalyptic far future fight to repel the Darkness invading our Solar system. Their Grognok level editor was very slow to make any changes in as it would have to redo all the light maps after moving any object, again discouraging creative experimentation. This is why there are so few maps in _Destiny_ and they get used so many times, then content you paid for is blocked from use, only to return later for nostalgia purposes when the game should have just grown bigger and bigger over the years and there should not have been a _Destiny 2_ but just more seasons of DLC funding the continued running of their Shared World Shooter servers. So, I agree with Blow. C++ is a terrible language and is holding back gaming. I think C++ has the worst syntax of any language not deliberately designed that way as a joke. Also, I think Rust has the worst semantics of any language not deliberately designed that way as a joke. So, although I like the way Rust tells you where you made a mistake in your code, I don't want to fret about its Borrow Checker. As to my game I am not promoting it here and won't tell anyone it has been done with special custom tools or developed in a new language all created by one person. I will let it speak for itself and let people assume it was made by a studio of multiple individuals. If they think one person made it they may not want to pay full price for it. Then assuming it sells and I make some money off it, I will provide the tools so the community can mod it. Eventually, I plan to make the whole thing Open Source so that people can get in and reimplement the renderer, etc. if they so choose, or do a total conversion to make the game into some other game, although it would make more sense to incorporate a genre it doesn't already encompass within its expansive world as it would then turn it into the "everything game" that people have fantasized about for decades. I have no deadlines so I can't say when this will release, almost certainly after _Star Citizen._ This is because I learned from watching the reaction to Sean Murray discuss _No Man's Sky_ that was in development that people didn't understand that anything he was talking about was subject to change for business, technical or creative reasons. He wanted it to have multiplayer at launch, but the servers wouldn't have met the demand, so rather than have an epic failure he cut that feature so close to release that vendors had to put stickers on boxed editions to cover up that it said it did online multiplayer. This lead to some complaints to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority, but he was exonerated after their investigation as he was when Valve cleaned up Steam to stop some vendors showing concept art and misleading potential purchasers into thinking it would be in game graphics. Funnily enough their own _DOTA_ came afoul of their policy, but _No Man's Sky_ did not. The main point of contention was that it had promised online multiplayer and this simply wasn't the case as you can use the Internet Wayback machine on its Steam page to see the earliest entry for when prepurchases first became available and it was sold as a single-player experience so no one preordered it with a promise of online multiplayer only to not get that. Later as everyone knows this feature was restored. Then it got VR support, etc. Now the improvements are evidence of the tech they want in their next game _Light No Fire._ So, I say all this as people have the wrong history of _No Man's Sky_ and to say that I realised that if I talked about my game or did a Kickstarter for it like Chris Roberts did with _Star Citizen_ then I would create a community who would be pressuring me for its release, and it was better they have no idea I was working on it until it was done, and even then I saw no point in identifying myself as its creator, such as the guy behind _Balatro._