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Comment by colund | Hacker News Reader

I find that Jonathan Blow ranting about Rust game development here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk. He adds interesting perspectives to the discussio, how the language makes the Rust game developer resort to arrays and their so called Rust point of views.

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The blog post reminded me of a quote from Jonathan Blow as well. I forgot the exact wording, but basically he said that Rust makes you treat every state of the project to be production ready (e.g. free of memory safety bugs), but in game development, most of the time the project needs not to be production ready, and for a good reason (rapid prototyping). You just have to fix the really bad things (crushing bugs) before shipping.

There is a better, more recent clip of him where he explain 'would we haven chosen rust, the witness would never been finished'.

Well the problem with Jonathan's argument here is that he's spent the past decade mostly ranting about Rust and working to make a perfect game programming language, instead of making games.

So it turn out that even if he's opinion on Rust is correct, he would still have been much more productive using it than trying to build his own language for a decade…

(But he already shipped his masterpiece and he's a millionaire so he gets to chose his full time hobby as he wishes)

He is actively developing his new game in parallel to creating the language.

Not to mention smaller projects like 'Braid- anniversary edition'.

Isn't the traditional advice that if you try to write both a game engine and a game that you'll get neither?

I mean, it's not like there are no games in existence that shipped with a custom engine.

Even in hindsight it's hard to judge whether building your own engine was good or bad decision, and we are nowhere near "the hindsight" level of knowledge.

Then it's a good thing not everyone listens to traditional advice.

Braid and The Witness, his last two games, both used custom engines written in C++.

Yeah, and it's taking him YEARS to implement a simple grid-walking Sokoban clone, and Braid anniversary edition had to be delayed.

Last I heard, the Sokoban game has a ridiculous number of puzzles on it. Can't find a source but I seem to recall hearing that it would take 400+ hours to finish it all. So.. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable it's been taking this long.

I mean, he does like a good rant lol. But this seems like a bad take. The witness came out ~8 years ago, and Braid came out ~8 years before that. Braid Anniversary is launching next week, he's actively developing his language and next game (occasionally streams). "he's just resting on his laurels now" I think is clearly wrong

Writing games in C++ feels horrible which is a large part of he wrote the language.

Why should he be making more games, instead of building his vision of a perfect language?

A machinist who retires from running lathes and goes into the lathe-making business has reached the pinnacle of that profession.

>spent the past decade mostly ranting about Rust and working to make a perfect game programming language, instead of making games.

I wish. As far as I can tell he made a single hour long video shitting on rust and now he's the enemy of the cult. That's hardly spending the last decade sitting being mad over rust.

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