Jonathan Blow - How to program independent games - CSUA Speech

I've followed Jonathan Blow for a while. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion. But he has given some amazing talks. [LINK] <-compares games to televison [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]

For anyone interested in just programming, he has a great talk here: [VIDEO] about "how to program independent games". Much of the advice seems to apply to other programming projects too.

Jon Blow's "How to program independent games": [VIDEO] It's about much more than games. To me, it's about identifying and not doing unnecessary work. The second half of this video is a Q&A session, which I would skip.

Every time I get stuck on a project, I watch this video. It's about games, but IMO a lot of it applies to software projects in general, especially MVPs. How to ship something that works before it collapses under its own complexity. I think the bit about remembering to optimize for developer effort is gold. [VIDEO]

This is not uncommon in game development. Jonathan Blow and others have spoken at length about why game development is different than web development or other types of software engineering (not in a condescending way but in a "it's different, here's why" way): - [VIDEO]

Really excited to go through all the other talks listed here I'm not familiar with! Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software: The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought: Bret Victor - [LINK] How to Program Independent Games: Jonathan Blow - [VIDEO]

I don't think most of this applies only to "poor programmers". The advice about KISS is something many "good" programmers would benefit from following. Likewise, I've seen good programmers recommend using arrays as your first attempt at a data structure as well (e.g. Jonathan Blow, [VIDEO] )

I've always encouraged people to check out Jonathan Blow's talk on this topic ( [VIDEO] ). He points out many reasons why this type of code would actually be the optimal version when weighing other factors. Simple code is easy to write, maintain, and optimize later. Despite the code looking messy, I find it easy to understand and navigate. A counter example of truly confusing code, which kind of does similar things, would be something like this: [LINK]

Example masters: John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Bram Cohen. What do they do? I think they're all extremely effective at getting things done. So be smart, hard working, and laser focused on shipping. A long time ago I saw a good talk by Jonathan Blow wherein he made a point that really resonated with me. The point was that to get good at programming you need the experience of shipping a lot of programs and thus you should optimize your career around shipping as many good programs as you can. Contrast this with the common advice of being an expert in databases, or distributed systems, or OOP, or testing, or something like that... Edit: found the talk: [VIDEO]

TFA has some good points. I'd go even further on the situation where you quit your job to work on an indie game -- if you ever find yourself doing this, and you've never built a game by yourself before, you'd better have several years of runway. For many years one of my favorite talks about indie games development was Jonathan Blow's speech at UC Berkeley CSUA (2011) ( [LINK] ) Initially I loved his main message during the talk: "You have to be brutally effective to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time." But there's a part in the Q&A that later grew to be even more poignant to me: [VIDEO] > Q: You said you worked on many projects before Braid which didn't quite get completed. What was special about Braid which made you complete it? > A: What was special was it had been a long time since I'd finished anything on my own, and I sat down and decided that "Dammit I'm going to finish something this time". And, "To that end, so I can finish this, I'm gonna make something that is technically pretty simple"... For some of us, it's REALLY HARD to complete a side-project while working full-time job. For most of my career I had completed a real game only when it was for a job (or for a client) and I worked on it full-time. The single reason I hadn't made a game as a side project was because I'd quit before I finished. I finally figured out something that worked for me, and it was counter to all the advice I'd heard. I'm sure this is different for other people, but for me the k

> Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient I don't think this is accurate. I watched a talk with Jonathan Blow recently and he went on for quite a while railing against premature optimization. [VIDEO]

This reminds me of a portion of a talk Jonathan Blow gave[1], where he justifies this from a productivity angle. He explains how his initial implementation for virtually everything in Braid used arrays of records, and only after finding bottlenecks did he make changes, because if he had approached every technical challenge by trying to find the optimal data structure and algorithm he would never have shipped. "There's a third thing [beyond speed and memory] that you might want to optimize for which is much more important than either of these, which is years of your life required per program implementation." This is of course from the perspective of a solo indie game developer, but it's a good and interesting perspective to consider. [1] [VIDEO]