43ish I agree with that. Baldur's gate is an incredible game but at the end of the day is not all that much fun because the idea is cool but not all that fun
50:20 That's so cool you could start a level editor or any creative application putting a human in the loop (maybe a bit too timely for that), or just general program configuration to make personalized programs.
I would love this treatment for The Witness when the time comes. I really enjoyed playing the game again and listening to the commentary. Very insightful and inspiring
Initializing floats to NaN is a really great thing to have for debugging - but it's not a good idea for when you need to ship code most of the time. My thoughts: have a simple way to tell the compiler to use different initialization values for all default variable declarations.
Mr Blow, PLEASE have a look at Zig-Lang, a programming language with similar design goals as JAI & an increasing momentum which is also still in its alpha/development phase for the simple reason so as to avoid reinventing the wheel or missing out interesting new ideas in language design. Andrew Kelly, its main designer, is also a game developer who actually builds programs he's using. One of the main design goals of Zig over other languages is that it doesn't try to prevent you to do low-level things, but instead tries to make it obvious & explicit what you're actually doing & allow arbitrary compile-time execution. It also has a lot of promising ideas around basic integer & bit field types which I haven't seen in any other language. Zig also reuses the LLVM compiler infrastructure so it reuses its mid-end optimization & back end modules so it can currently produce code for any platform which LLVM can run on.
I loved programming and working hard, Until I got my first programming job. Now have been miserable and unproductive ever since. I only enjoy it when I am between jobs.
I've been coding my first 3d-engine, it's made with Powerpoint VBA (don't ask, its a demoscene wild demo flex). and it is visualized by drawing triangle shapes using the shape-system of office programs. So in a way it doesn't draw pixels as such, only triangles, but after implementing all the occlusion culling and simple normal angle lighting systems it dawned on me that creating a proper Z-buffer using triangles will be most likely impossible without a proper per pixel z-buffer. As I've been sorting the triangles in screen by the middle point of the polygon there is considerable z-fighting on some 3d-models. But moving away from the shapes-system defeats the joke, I might need an old-school 3d-modeler to tell me how to model for such engines..
in second though, you are totaly complicating this thing, you dont need to traverse your entities multiple times, if you need speed, then you add "collecg geometry" to your entities, you make a pass, and you collect all the geometry data you need for rendering, this way you still pay only once for cache misses, but you end up with a buffer that is compatible for the gpu, then you render this buffer as many times as you need. and this way you dont need all this low level of control of your memory layout. - so you still have simple inheritence which is useful, and you have your speed.
On my second play through off Braid via the special edition after finding and completing the game around 2014. I spent a year just listening to the soundtrack and watching Johnathan blow interviews. As of this post the only piece remaining is ‘Crossing the Gap’ and the temptation to look up the answer is tremendous…
For me, it's the opposite. Books don't require any kind of an attention span, but video games do. Let me explain: you can quickly pick up the book, read for a few minutes while on a bus or something, then quickly put them down. You're free and start or stop at any time. Meanwhile, to play video games, you have to actually sit down, launch it, wait through loading screen, etc. To exit, you have to find next checkpoint, and only then you can exit. You _have to_ invest a minimum amount of time, or you'll have no progress.
When it comes to the world 2 "pattern break" puzzle, while it's been a long time since I played the game, I do remember at the time really liking it. Not sure if I would call it a "hook", because it's not the point of the game, but it's this cool surprise that just got me more interested and engaged, wondering what else this game might have up it's sleeve. I guess another way to put it is that it adds some intrigue. I feel like a lot of games might put something like this later in the game (if they do it at all), when there has been more of an established pattern and to just keep the player interested, but I can definitely see why world 2 made the most sense in this case.
Quick btw with starting this episode, the playlist on this channel, the episodes are organized in backwards order currently from latest release first to the the first at the end of the playlist. Looking forward to this episode ( ^ v ^ )
"Relate the rules of the universe to the fiction" I would be careful with such statements as they are intellectually blunt, if you want to be taken seriously. "Systemic rules within a fiction" is more appropriate as you cannot really claim "rules of the universe" with certainty. Does the game reveal any insights about physics at all?
@@SufferDYT has he ever said why, game mechanics feels like a pretty unassuming basic term to me. Could also use the word systems I guess? Rules of the Universe just feels too fundamental to me for it to be immediately intuitive what it's supposed to mean exactly
@@acblook As far as I recall, he said that he thinks "mechanics" have been watered down to also mean "features" or "variables". Personally, I think his alternative phrasing doesn't really solve concerns of clarity very well.
@@Muskar2 well like features is a commercial term and variables are a technical term, mechanics is supposed to be a design term so something can be all three
@@Muskar2ditching a word due to a bunch of people using it incorrectly makes zero sense to me. Does he also not use the word "literally" anymore? He used the word "epic" in another episode. He might wanna ditch that one too, considering what internet culture has done to the word.
I’m stuck on Braid anniversary editon already. I mean, I completed the original game, I sware this updated game is way harder. It was taxing on the Brain to say the least. 😂
In response to what we do with world one if we can't rewind time for death. You could have death the instigator of the time powers, then it immediately boots you to world 2 and removes world 1 as an option and also make death the final event of the story and the catalyst of rewinding time that you only realize after you finish the last level. That gives thematic meaning and gameplay significance. But maybe too metaphysical or on the nose or not the meaning you wanted to convey with time powers. Thanks again for these, I have been enjoying the remaster on my switch in between making my own game.
While every puzzle of a game should work together to make a cohesive whole, I'm glad topics on a discussion can be a string of random tangents tangled together like a clump of overboiled spaghetti. (To be clear it was tasty overboiled spaghetti).
1:04:00 It’s so weird to me hearing him talk about how that puzzle can’t easily be fixed when in my mind it could be fixed in literally five minutes by just swapping the puzzle piece you need to complete it from the Hunt! level with one of the pieces from Three Easy Pieces. That way the puzzle would be solvable for 99.9999% of people when they first encounter it. Instead of completely impossible for everyone. Am I missing something? Why didn’t he do that? All he had to do was swap the positions of 2 assets and his problems go away.
Thank you Jonathan and Marc. Always interesting to listen to these. Game design has remained one the most fascinating and stimulating topics for me and I think that's in large part thanks to Jonathan. There's so much to think about here, it feels like a very dense and high-bandwidth conversation, if that even makes sense. There's might be a part of me that feels a bit skeptical sometimes, which might come from my relativist/nihilist inclinations, that all of this is really just a lot of big words and eloquent rhetorics to talk about things that don't really have any objective meaning or whatever. But I recognise this as a very cynical view that doesn't really get you anywhere. Anyway I'll stop rambling.
A recurring theme that resurfaces at multiple points in this podcast is the delineating threshold between the conception of an idea vs. the refinement of the idea. And after that how it fits or alters the directional core of the game. It would be great if this could be explored more deliberately in future segments. Great to hear more discussion between Jon & Marc again, especially on topics related to the aesthetics of game design. The IndieCade talk from years ago was an eyeopener, and here we get to see how it was applied to various details in Braid. Thanks for another great episode. 🙏
Woah, pretty cool that at 40:34. If he had done most of the new art in procreate there are some chances that he has the Timelapse’s that procreate records of each document brush history. That would be a sight to see. Else, really cool already, we are also exploring procreate to expand on an art of our next game as one of the artists basically swims like dolphin in water with that app.
“Why am I an ice cream shop owner-ok, why is one an ice cream shop owner, broadly speaking? And some people will have an answer like ‘Cus I want to make things that let people have fun’ or whatever, and OK. That’s not really why I’m an ice cream shop owner, cus, like, you could design a video game; people would really like the video game. But I’m doing something different. I’m really interested in something about the universe and how it works (through ice cream).” -A pretentious Ice Cream Shop owner named Jonathan Blow somewhere in the multiverse
adding extra levels to Braid is what Metroid Fusion did to Super Metroid; you are breaking the rule you freely self-imposed, and won with it big time, for the sake of money.
Johnathan's thinking is so interesting, and Game Dev is such an interesting perspective for building software, even if I don't write games. Like, "how would this change impact our life mechanic?" ;)
The most funny thing would be to put both required puzzle pieces with platforms in exact places to which you can't get without them. This would be an ultimate troll.
