[EvilTrout]

Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage.

They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago.

Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)

Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.

[NathanaelRea]

That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is.

John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.

I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.

[bena]

To be fair, I had not heard of the Witness until well after it came out.

Braid came out the same time XBox Indie Games.

I will say, I do not find a lot of their rhetoric convincing. Especially for people who have never attempted to write the software they are criticizing.

Blow only writes single player games that do not persist significant data to the machine. Nothing bad happens if your save file is corrupted. Nothing of value is lost if scene transitions have a bug.

But they're going to tell me that hyper-scaled multi-user real-time software is written poorly?

Also, I've been watching Muratori's Handmade Hero series. The deeper it gets into the game, the worse it gets. At one point, he's like "Ah, I dunno, we'll implement bubble sort because we don't have time to do any other sort." Followed by a diatribe about why bubble sort is a bad name. It's a fine name. Things bubble up.

Second, merge sort is just as quick to write and faster.

But in general, they alternate between speaking in platitudes and disparaging other software.

[cwyers]

The point is that Blow has two blockbuster hits under his belt and can afford to take a decade to ship a single game. Most people would go broke never having shipped a game if they tried to do things Blow's way.

[20k]

Braid didn't start the indie boom, Garry's mod did

[bananaboy]

Casey hasn’t worked on game engine or engine tech in almost a decade. That’s not to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but imho it’s important to be aware that he hasn’t worked on a real shipping product in a long time.

[doctorpangloss]

another POV is, business IT projects fail at a higher rate than video games do! the people who post about "shipping" are projecting: "at least my garbage is delivered frequently, which is key to being employed, not key to creating meaning."

[arduinomancer]

Did Casey ever finish the video series?

[WhyOhWhyQ]

I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.

[ferguess_k]

I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.

[stocksinsmocks]

Thus, by their fruit, you will recognize them.

Heckling is a lot easier than creating. Personally, I think we have an over supply of “ideas guys“

[dismalaf]

> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)

On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.

> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.

[jackling]

Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.

Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.

So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.

[Ygg2]

I think Blow and Muratori are pure engineers (as defined here: https://www.seangoedecke.com/pure-and-impure-engineering/).

Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.

Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.

[moosedev]

I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making.

That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

The clean code guy hasn't shipped any game either.

[pwdisswordfishy]

And his advice is also crap.

https://qntm.org/clean

[_bent]

Untrue, there is a game (however it's not very good): http://cleancoder.com/space-war

[metaltyphoon]

I truly despise the damage those books did to the SWE as a whole.

[z-dev]

I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.

[hbn]

If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.

[mvkel]

I think you'll find that most development -teams- ship about one game every decade. It's hard to find examples of that not being the case.

[jayd16]

What? Its about 3-5 years for a AAA game and you ideally pipeline things such that a studio is shipping somewhat frequently. Almost no one can front a decade worth of development without shipping anything.

Where are you getting a decade from? Consoles ship more often then that.

[dsissitka]

> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.

One, but it was something like three years late:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...

[hiccuphippo]

Was it rebuilt in Jai?

[thenoblesunfish]

These guys are more like artists than engineers, right? I don't care if my favorite band only releases one album a decade, if it's good.

[deadbabe]

The problem with people like you is you’re all about the money, all about the end product, never about the craft.

[Capricorn2481]

Someone can't honestly write this unless they aren't a fan of games to begin with. Are you saying the Clair Obscur devs don't care about their craft because they used Unreal Engine?

There is a massive gap between Handmade Hero and a bloated, unoptimized game. It's one thing to be a purist that wants to do everything Handmade Hero style. It's another thing entirely to claim people who don't do that are hacks who don't care about their craft. There is A LOT to game development other than writing things from scratch.

Casey has made great resources, but I understand OPs frustration. He's created a culture of devs that think people shipping games over 100mb are soulless profit chasers. Animal Well is awesome, but not everyone wants to spend 7 years making a platformer.

[cloudhead]

And your point is? Shipping garbage is better than not shipping anything?

[azemetre]

Probably a nuanced point in what's the purpose for espousing the virtues of performance if you don't have the output to show it is worth it?

If you want advice about making games would you rather learn from the person that routinely ships games or a person that shipped a game once 10 years ago?

Is that a trade off worth chasing? "Potential perfection" with nothing to show for it?

[AndriyKunitsyn]

Some people actually have mouths to feed. Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years; that doesn't make their products "garbage".

[rcxdude]

Fact of the matter is that code quality is a pretty small part of whether a game is good or not. It can be notable when it's good and it can sink a game when it's really bad, but there's a huge gap in the middle where it doesn't really matter that much (especially to the player).

[cwyers]

If you have bills to pay, it really is.

[risyachka]

>> claiming they were all garbage

its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.

Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.

And then made a whole game in his own language.

[lawn]

Blow did not in fact prove that all alternatives were garbage.