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?
More like, shipped 2 hit games, which were both technological and artistic feats for their time. And developed a blazingly fast compiler. Casey also was a developer in RAD game tools developing animation tools. Their output is probably better than most industry developers. I understand if you don't like their attitudes and the way they attempt to teach/preach to other engineers, but IMO their work speaks for itself. I take their advice and try to apply it to my own work, because it seems to have work for them.
I'm not saying I don't like their attitudes but it's a viewpoint I am struggling with myself.
I'm starting to realize caring about all these minutia of details that don't really matter for my professional goals. I know my software isn't special, caring about pumping out as much performance as possible when I just sling JS professionally feels a tad myopic?
What is the point of it just continues the pattern of procrastination towards the actual goals I want to achieve? Does this also apply to them?
What is the point of espousing all these supposed virtues when the output isn't that special? I mean Braid is still good, but let's not act like greener devs haven't put out good games too without all the jackassery baggage.
Yea I largely agree with you on that point. I think when discussing Jon, Casey (and to add another, Mike Acton), there's actually a series of advice that they give that get lumped into a whole, and people don't really see the parts of what they're saying and instead focus on the part that sounds most critical to their work.
I do agree that if you take from their "teachings" that every dev needs to optimize every thing, and never use any other language than system languages, that advice is myopic for most devs. However, I don't really see them arguing for that, at least not entirely.
From following their teaching for a while, they mostly preech about the following things which I agree with, even when talking about higher-level languages, technologies.
- Get the clowns out of the car: Don't make things needlessly expensive. Write simple procedural code that maps cleanly to what the hardware is doing. This is essentially stating OOP, large message passing, and other paradigms that abstract the problem away from the simple computations that are happening on your computer is actually adding complexity that isn't needed. This isn't about tuning your program to get the highest amount of performance, but rather, just write basic code, that is easy to follow and debug, that acts as a data-pipeline as much as possible. Using simple constructs to do the things you want, e.g. an if-statement versus inheritence for dynamic dispatch.
- Understand your problem domain, including the hardware, so you can reason about it. Don't abstract away the hardware your code is actually running on too much where you lose vital information on how to make it work well. I've seen this many times in my professional career, where devs don't know what hardware the code will be running on, and this inevitably makes their code slower, less responsive to the user and often drives up cost. There are many times in my early career (backend engineering), that just simplifying the code, designing the code so it works well for the hardware we expect, greatly lowered cost. The hardware is the platform and it shouldn't be ignored. Similarly, limitations that are imposed by your solution should be documented and understood. If you don't expect a TPS greater than some value, write that down, check for it, profile and make sure you know what your specturm of hardware can handle, and how much software utilization of that hardware you're getting.
- Focus on writing code, and don't get bogged down my fad methodologies (TDD, OPP, etc). Writing simple code, understanding the problem more deeply as you write, and not placing artifical constraints on yourself.
Now each of these points can be debated, but their harder to argue against IMO then the strawmany idea of them proposing that you must optimize as much as possible. And they argue that you will actually be more productive this way, and produce better software.
FWIW, you may have some datapoints showing that they do propose what I called a strawmany version of their ideas, but I have seen them advocating for the above points more so than anything else.
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I do want to add, for Jon Blow, I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past, and had no problem with their output in terms of gameplay or performance. From his talk about civilization ending relating to game dev, he's more concern that if no one tries to develop without an engine, we as a civilization will lose that ability.
> I don't think he has a problem with people using engines. From what I've seen he's played, and loved games that used engines in the past
He's also said quite openly that if you're only starting, it's fine if you reach for a ready-made engine. It's that you should try and understand how things and systems work as you progress.
Yes, this is well put. I was heavily influenced by Casey back in 2014 and the advice I give juniors now is always that first point about "getting the clowns out of the car". There's a lot of crossover with the "grug brained developer" here too, which is much more aligned with the web/enterprise world.
I find it very hard to convince people though. It runs counter to a lot of other practices in the industry, and the resulting code seems less sophisticated than an abstraction pile.
Aha! I think I know my contention with this advice now. Who can actually disagree with this? Like I'm saying yes to everything, no one I know would say no to this. Never had a coworker say aloud: "I want to write code to make things worse."
These are the platitudes of our industry that no one disagrees with. Like you said, this is what Blow + Muratori teachings can be distilled into. But there is something worse it also assumes, coming from such people.
Both Blow + Muratori have extremely privilege dev careers that a good ~80% us will never achieve: they have autonomy. The rest of us are merely serfs in someone's fiefdom. Blow has his fief, Muratori his. They can control their fiefs but not the majority of us devs. We don't have autonomy in the direction of the company, we don't control the budgets, we don't even control who we interview or hire.
Assuming that this onus of organizational standards has to be placed on someone with no authority to dictate it isn't just. Also as someone who has consumed content from these two for about a good 8ish years as their videos pop into my feed: I've never see them advocate for workers to be empowered to make their environments better. They mostly just trash on devs that have no authority.
With that mindset I need to seriously decouple myself from these people. Plenty of other devs advocate for the same things in our craft while also advocating for better rights as workers.
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".
> Some people don't have the luxury of preaching for whatever ideals they have without a need to release anything in 10 years
Wait, how did they gain this "luxury"? Are they trust fund babies or something?
Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
This line of "criticism" doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
After all both in question live off money they've made and/or are making from their (arguably) uncompromised quality work.
That is to say their uncompromised quality work has directly resulted in them being able to not release anything for close to 10 years, and practice their ideals in software they ship even if the "shipping" takes 10 years to do.
It would be more fair to say, that most people don't have the craftmanship and skill (and not the luxury) to be able to produce high quality work and software that enables them the so called "luxury".
>Or did they earn their big stash of money by producing "garbage" and now retroactively are preaching ideals that they themselves didn't follow or what?
In the JBlow case - yes, he made his money using C++. So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.
> So far, he hasn't shown that using Jai is particularly productive for software engineering.
And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?
Many people have criticized C++ in past (which is very easy to do), yet he's practicing what he's preaching in the most direct way humanly possible, he's both (1) designed and implemented a new programming language (that has directly addressed most of the issues), whilst (2) also making a complete non-trivial game in the newly designed language at the same time.
His games have always taken long time to make, and now he's making game + engine + programming language. At the same frigging time!
The only "luxury" JBlow has is that he's an exceptional individual and you're not. He has rare combination of ability, perseverance and work ethic, and by all accounts most people are neither of those things at once.
Most criticisms 99% of time are either misrepresentitive, misinformed jealousy or something to do with politics.
I have no issue with personally acknowledging that some rare individuals are simply way better than me.
And to prevent sounding like a gushing-fanboy, I suspect that his newest game won't sell very well, because his first two games have atleast something to appeal to general public (either visuals of Witness or time travel mechanics (somewhat novel at the time) of Braid) while this game doesn't appear to have the same draw.
This game has too much of a generic-sokoban puzzler vibe to it to appeal to the general public who aren't already ardent puzzler fans (and are there enough of those and can he reach enough of them? etc). And the trailer doesn't help to change this perception.
>And how would he do that exactly to whatever ungodly standards you are setting for the man?
By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo. Maybe there will be results, but right now there are none.
I have no idea why you are so invested. I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has. I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.
Of course, you could say that changing the course of the industry not possible in one man's lifetime, so you'll need to gather round more people to get the action going, but this tone actually prevents you from starting a Jai revolution.
>I don't care about the man's personality or whatever qualities he has.
The only thing I'm addressing is the so called "luxuries" you alluded to, and the alleged "luxuries" he has is directly a result of his personality and his qualities.
The only reason you don't have those so called "luxuries" is because you're not even in the same ballpark as good. It really is as simple as that.
> By providing a result in a way that will be superior to the current status quo.
But he's done exactly that.
> I look at what he does, and so far, he spent 10 years making a game that you yourself admit won't be even that good.
I'm not saying that the game won't be good necessarily, I'm saying the game probably might not sell very well (atleast not to justify the amount of money spent from purely business perspective, etc)
Just to be clear, your comments are implying everyone who doesn't write everything from scratch is shipping garbage.
Ignoring how misinformed that opinion is, I would say The Witness is a very compromised game. Maybe if less focus went into the technical aspect, it could've been better.
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).
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?