Top all-time · #1370
Jonathan Blow
Personal blog · the-witness.net · on HN as jblowgamesprogrammingdesign
Jonathan Blow writes The Witness, a personal blog at the-witness.net about games, programming and design. Since 2010, 54 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “How to program independent games (Johnathan Blow of Braid fame)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- How to program independent games (Johnathan Blow of Braid fame)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2011-08-10
- The Witness5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-05-14
- Engine Tech: Concurrent world editing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-12-26
- /news/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-05-08
- A Shader Trick2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-10
- Mapping Walkable Surfaces in "The Witness" Game2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-12
- /news/about/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-28
- Architecture in The Witness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-12-28
- Finding and Fixing a Five Second Stall2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-12-18
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-30
What Hacker News says?
Yep, that's him, given his profile in HN and http://the-witness.net/news/
Comment linking /news/
on “What I'd tell myself about startups if I could go back 5 years”Submitted A Shader Trick as a story · 212 points
HN discussionJonathan Blow, developer of The Witness. [1] http://the-witness.net
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?”Submitted How to program independent games (Johnathan Blow of Braid fame) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThere’s been a lot of coverage about the puzzles and ingenuity of the gameplay, but equal attention should be given to the amazing artistic style of the game. a couple of blog posts about the making of the trees: http://the-witness.net/news/2013/06/2157/ http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/witness-trees/ I’d love to see more videogames step away from uncanny-valley and ill-advised attempts at photorealism and instea…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/witness-trees/
on “Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out”Submitted How to program independent games as a story · 139 points
HN discussionhttp://the-witness.net/news/about/
Comment linking /news/about/
on “Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out”Submitted Finding and Fixing a Five Second Stall as a story · 95 points
HN discussionThey have a timed exclusivity agreement with Sony, hence PS4 first. "It will be released on the PC and the PlayStation 4 on January 26, 2016. The game will come to iOS some months after that, and other platforms a bit later." ( http://the-witness.net/news/about/ ) Fingers crossed for a Linux port at some point! For Blow's last game (Braid) I think the Linux port was done by a third party. Or maybe it's time to get a…
Comment linking /news/about/
on “Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out”Submitted Fun with in-engine color grading as a story · 61 points
HN discussionRather, I think his point aligned with points Jonathan Blow makes in this presentation: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe... One of his points - with which he uses an id game as an example - is that sometimes the naive implementation is the best implementation. His example has to do with loading levels at startup. The written code was, from an algorithmic perspective, inefficient. It was w…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “How to Rock an Algorithms Interview”Submitted Thoughts on Consoles and Certification Processes - Jonathan Blow as a story · 43 points
HN discussionSometimes rigid code is simpler, sure. But what I am arguing is that it is almost never more debuggable / maintainable. What I am saying is not specific to test and branch, though test and branch is great because it gives you these big code blocks into which you can insert more code and it's clear where that code lives and under what circumstances it runs. Which is something you don't get in assembly language, which…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “John Carmack's comment on Doom 3's code style”Submitted Scope exit in C++11 (2012) as a story · 39 points
HN discussion> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. Interesting, and thanks for the sources. I was under the impression that it was the same fund as that announced in 2010 [1] but the date in [2] plus the apparent timeline does align. "I'm not sure…
Comment linking /news/2010/03/announcing-indie-fund/
on “Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles”Submitted Testing the Jai Compiler as a story · 34 points
HN discussionOne of my favourite technical talks is by Jonathan Blow: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “‘Braid’ creator sacrifices his fortune to build his next game”Submitted Fun Sales Fakts – The Witness as a story · 26 points
HN discussionLink to game’s own site: http://the-witness.net/
Comment linking /
on “‘Braid’ creator sacrifices his fortune to build his next game”Submitted What a Difference a Year Makes as a story · 11 points
HN discussionTFA 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) ( http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-prog…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer”Submitted Thoughts on Consoles and Certification Processes as a story · 11 points
HN discussionJonathon Blow had a great talk on the topic of programming indie games, http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe... One part he mentions how when he was a more novice programmer and looking at the Doom1 source code he thought they made some horrible programming choices - but only once he actually started to try to make commercial products himself did he realize none of that mattered. When the goa…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly”Submitted Engine Tech: Concurrent world editing as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSan Francisco, CA Thekla, Inc is hiring good video game programmers to work on unusual and very interesting games. See http://the-witness.net/news/?p=815
Comment linking /news/?p=815
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (May 2011)”Submitted A Shader Trick as a story · 5 points
HN discussionJonathan Blow wrote an excellent article on the text-based entity file format he developed for The Witness, which was designed to be (more) mergeable: http://the-witness.net/news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-w...
Comment linking /news/2011/12/engine-tech-concurrent-world-editing/
on “Unity 5 released with upgrades, full-featured free version”Submitted Mapping Walkable Surfaces in "The Witness" Game as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis talk by Jonathan Blow (author of Braid) has totally changed how I think about writing games, and certainly since I listened to it I've got much closer to finishing any of my personal projects than I have in years, hopefully will release something soon (I believe that games are one of the few areas where 'release quick, release often' is a bad idea, although I seem to be getting proved wrong by minecraft). http:…
Comment linking /news/2011/06/how-to-program-independent-games/
on “"I've got an idea for an app"”Submitted A Shader Trick as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
