Legendary Game Dev Jonathan Blow

Jon Blow shows up to the podcast and tells us all about the journey from Braid to his newest game, Order of the Sinking Star. We talk Jai, Braid and so much more. Hope you enjoy the episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Thank you everyone for joining us to the standup today. We have with us legendary game programmer Jonathan Blow. If you do not know, he is upcoming, releasing a game, Order of the Sinking Star. Josh, play the trailer.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Let us begin. Template, four combiner. North, a world of heroes.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  Can you charm that goblin?

• 0:23Speaker 03

  It's too far.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'll swap him out.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  East, the mirror isles.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  Will the mirrors repair my soul? Will I pass the test?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  West, endless caverns, beams of light.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Nobody else could get this old mine suit working. So all the rewards go to me.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Skipping stones to lonely homes.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  I'm close to the treasure. Just a few more minutes.

• 0:48Speaker 04

  If you don't get back before that storm hits, we're both dead.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Fuse and grow, we will it so.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Who are you? And what are these? Beams.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  They're very useful. Watch this.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Can you push a stone back across the water?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  That's water?

• 1:11Speaker 04

  When the portal appeared and I stepped into this overworld, I had never imagined such a device that could fuse realities. Not just mashing together terrains, it weaves the very laws of nature into a composite home. The result surprises me constantly. But who has done with this? And what do they want with me?

• 1:42Speaker 05

  That was a really good intro. You did kinda nail that.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I made sure that that all happened. Okay, fantastic.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Uh, anyways, I'm sorry. And as always with us is TejDv. Legendary Tej and of course Casey Mira Tori. Uh, the one and the only. Thank you so much, everybody.

• 2:02Speaker 06

  Also legendary game developer.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Also legendary game developer.

• 2:05Speaker 05

  Not really. You guys always say that, but then I'm like, legendary for what? There's nothing. We have an actual legendary game developer with us. You don't need to try to hype up the showcast. We're all good.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Thank you, but uh, it's, it's, it's great to say that because you gotta remember that uh, you're legendary in the web development space because you're that one guy that always knows what he's talking about. Just absolutely ravaging people on the internet and so you're the legendary game developer.

• 2:31Speaker 07

  Maybe infamous.

• 2:32Speaker 06

  I also heard direct from uh, the source that Casey, you're the one who helped come up with the idea for Braid.

• 2:41Speaker 05

  That, that's not really true. That was just, it was a mailing list. We can tell the story, John, if you want to tell that story, but it's, it's, it was, it was sort of just like a mailing list argument.

• 2:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  That was it.

• 2:52Speaker 07

  No, but it is true. So, so back, I don't, I mean, whatever year this was, 2002 or something?

• 2:59Speaker 05

  It was ancient history.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  You were still at AAA Gaming at that point, right?

• 3:03Speaker 06

  I read 2004 in my research, but yeah, something like that.

• 3:07Speaker 07

  Well, the, the actual mailing list argument might've been earlier. But like, I was sort of doing a mixture of like, contracting for AAA Studios and then sort of working on my own little games, right? Which often didn't go anywhere because like many people, I would sort of work on something for a little bit and then my motivation for it would fizzle out or something. So I was in this mood of like, I want to do something really cool. I'm not figuring out what that is, right? So, and then, okay, so there was an argument with uh, I, it's probably okay to name drop some of the other people in the argument. Um, so Casey was in there. Um, Doug Church, who was a guy whose career started at Looking Glass on like the Thief games and stuff like that and who still, still in gaming today, working on some major things.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Uh, I think we actually mentioned him yesterday, right? He's the one who invented Church?

• 3:57Speaker 07

  He made church numerals, actually.

• 4:00Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 4:00Speaker 07

  Um, his, his father invented church.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  And church's thesis also, yes.

• 4:06Speaker 07

  Yes. Um, and then Mark LeBlanc, who's also a guy, if you look up his credits in the game industry, you know, they're substantial. And so they were all just trying to figure out, you know, game design of the future. And, and, uh, the original Prince of Persia Sands of Time had come out, not the original Prince of Persia, but the original Prince of Persia remake that had like rewind in it, which has also since been remade, I think, which is why I have to specify that, right? But so this came out, it did, it did rewind for the first time that I recall seeing that in a game. Maybe somebody else. Anytime you say this thing did it first.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  The Time Sweeper may have had it already.

• 4:46Speaker 07

  I think that was after, but I'm not sure.

• 4:48Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 4:48Speaker 07

  I honestly don't know, but somebody will be like, actually.

• 4:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's somebody, somebody.

• 4:52Speaker 07

  A PC Junior game did this.

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Was that right? That was PlayStation 2, the remake?

• 4:59Speaker 07

  It was on all platforms.

• 5:00Speaker 05

  It was on everything.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it was that era, right? It was like the PS2 era.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Um.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Okay, it doesn't really matter, sorry.

• 5:07Speaker 07

  Whatever was 2002.

• 5:09Speaker 05

  Yes, you are correct. It would have been PS2. Yeah, PS3 was not out yet.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via ssh terminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real experience? You want real coffee? You want awesome subscriptions so you never have to remember again? Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee and exclusive content? Then check out Kron. You don't know what SSH is? Well, maybe the coffee's not for you.

• 5:46Speaker 07

  Okay, so, so it started talking about like, well, this is cool. Uh, obviously they could have done a technically better job. It was kind of shoehorned into the game design and, and stuff, right? And, and so, but then there was also this thing where like you had rewind, but you also had a traditional game where you have lives and like you run out of rewind juice and then you get killed and then your game's over. And it all seemed very cumbersome. And there was just this argument about what is the best way for games forward. And one thing that Casey said was like, look, This is a technical capability, just like you have the technical capability to like rewind a movie. Back in the days, so a VHS tape in a VCR was an appropriate metaphor still at this time. So he was like,

• 6:27Speaker 07

  you know, you should really be able to rewind any, yes. Oh, wow. I don't even have one of those.

• 6:35Speaker 06

  I have props. I have, I have props ready for this. You think I'm not prepared for this conversation?

• 6:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. So just like, just like you could rewind one of those, um, this should be a technical feature in games going forward. And other people in the argument were like, no, you can't do that because it takes away the tension of maybe dying if you can undo anything. And there were points on both sides of the argument, but everybody was also just like busy and doing their own projects. And so nobody actually followed this up with action. And then I was between, I wasn't even really a participant in the argument. I might've dropped some side comments. I was not one of the main people with strong opinions because I didn't know. It wasn't something that I really thought about. And then I was on vacation. I was like, okay, it's time to start a new thing.

• 7:23Speaker 07

  What if I do this rewind thing and then do it? So both at a technical level that's goes to the core of the system. So it's built into the game. It's not like shoehorned on to, to reverse state on, on some other system that, that it's fighting with, right? Um, and then also just design the game design around it. So if people are saying, uh, it removes the tension of dying, or, okay, so we're just not going to have that in the game. Let's see if we can replace that with something else that's a different kind of interesting than, because you know, if you play a bunch of games and all these games are about, I'm worried that I'm going to get killed by a monster. They could have different moods and graphical styles and stuff, but at some point you're playing the same thing over and over and

• 8:08Speaker 07

  the mindset. So I had been doing this thing at the game developers conference called the experimental gameplay workshop where we just try to think every year about, look at examples of things that people had done that were different and new and be like, what can I do that's different and new? And so I was like, okay, let's just do that and just see where it goes. And yeah, that's how it started.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  And

• 8:26Speaker 07

  Long answer. Sorry, I'm, I'm known for long rambling answers, so.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  This is the stand-up, okay?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  If there's anything that's canonical about all stand-ups, it's that there's someone that always has a long answer, and that, this is a good thing.

• 8:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  And I will make it, I will make it worse by saying, the reason that I had made that comment on that mailing list in the first place, was because I was playing through some old games from the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I was playing them on an emulator, and emulators, even in that era, had added the ability to like, fast checkpoint. So you could kinda just like, you basically could rewind. I don't remember if the emulator that I was playing had literal rewind, but it had the ability to just like, whale on a button as often as you wanted to just save your state. So every time you like, walked into a room of something, you could just save. And I was like, you know, for playing through these games, that's actually a lot more satisfying,

• 9:23Speaker 05

  because it's like, I can control how much replay I have to do of this game, and it just made it a more pleasant experience to like, experience the game, honestly. So, uh, that was why I even posted it. That was that, that was it.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Casey, you're clearly outing yourself as not a real gamer right now? Because obviously, real gamers would never-

• 9:43Speaker 05

  Savescomer! Casey outing himself as a savescomer.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  Well, not, not really, because the most, the most nerdy, I mean, I, I'm saying this as a joke, obviously, but like, the most people who sink the most time into games are like, the tool-assisted speedrun guys.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  I was, yup.

• 9:59Speaker 07

  Which like, that is not fun at all. But, they also produce the absolute most hardcore speedrun of a game that you will ever see, right? That's true. So.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  I was just, I was on my way to tool-assisted speedrun, guys.

• 10:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, you invented the tool-assisted speedrun.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  I was just- But then unfortunately got hit by a build system he wrote for C, it just never quite got to tool-assisted.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  I don't see the problem, it's fine.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  So anyway.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  So that, yeah, well, so that's, that's actually good because that kind of leads into one of the first questions I was hoping we could talk about like, because I know, you know, a decent amount about sort of how you got started thinking about Braid and a little bit to The Witness. I'm interested to know sort of like, how did you get into thinking of the idea of your upcoming game? And like, we'll, we'll get there, of course, but like, obviously, we want to talk about your language and like making an engine and a bunch of other stuff there, too. Uh, so I'm interested to hear like, when, when those decision points happened, when you're like, I think it's time to just write a new language for this game.

• 11:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Other way around, I think.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  It's time to write a new game for this awesome language is what you're trying to say?

• 11:12Speaker 06

  A little bit.

• 11:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the, the idea for the language came before I decided what game to use it on for sure. I don't know which, which order should I answer these questions in?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Let's start with what motivated you for order, uh, because the big thing is that we're just going to go to very technical. So it's very good that most people that are listening can have a chance to understand more about you and your decision-making process.

• 11:32Speaker 07

  All right. So we're going to talk about the, the design idea and stuff to grant it, I guess. Okay. So, you know, usually every time I finish a game, it leaves me with interesting ideas to do in a follow-up game, but the, the follow-up game usually is really different from the previous game because that's just how it like, if you start with the actual idea that you want to do, then different forms of game mechanics or structure or whatever might do that idea better. Whereas I think, I think a lot of the game industry likes to do sequels just because it's safe commercially and all that. But I've like literally never done a sequel. So, um, in The Witness, um, it's this game, uh, that came out in 2016. So quite a while ago.

• 12:17Speaker 07

  And the way the game starts is you see these puzzles, they're like little iPad screens mounted in the world really weirdly. And you can trace lines on them and there's little symbols like in these grids and stuff. And you don't know what the symbols mean, like in the game doesn't tell you. And you figure out what they mean just by experimenting. And being an intelligent puzzle player, you slowly build up this idea of what these symbols mean. And then at some point, there's curveballs like, oh, wait, there's a surprise where it does kind of mean what I thought. But there's something deeper about the way this puzzle symbol works. And that's sort of one of the fun things about the game. So I really like that part of that game and that design process. And so after I was done, I was just really interested in this idea.

• 13:01Speaker 07

  So when I'm designing the symbols, right? At first I was just like, what are some interesting rules that I could attach to these symbols? That would make interesting puzzles. But then as I charted out the game ahead of time in my head before building it, I'm like, okay. The interesting part is going to be when we make these combinations puzzles with the symbols coming together. And so we want them to come together and generate surprise. So like one example, not to spoil too much of the witness is like.

• 13:36Speaker 07

  Okay, there's these little, I just thought of them as ghost stones initially, but they're like rounded rectangles. And you have like black and white stones in the beginning and you're just trying to group them with the line. And then eventually there's multi colors and you're like, oh, this could apply to any color. And then when there's other symbols, the color of the other symbol matters. And it's not just, it's not just grouping those things. It's grouping them with anything of that color. So that your idea of the rule like expands over the course of the game, let's say. Okay, so I just became very interested in this.

• 14:08Speaker 07

  In this idea that.

• 14:12Speaker 07

  What game designers do, in some sense, for any kind of game, not even just puzzle games, is they come up with these rules, but the rules aren't just... like, there are fundamental things that the rules have to do. Like, if they result in a broken game that doesn't run, that's not playable, right? If they result in a very boring game that you don't want to play, that's really bad. But then, you know, at some point, like, a good game is when the rules are designed that they create emergent, complex situations out of simple beginnings. And the reason that works is because the simple initial ideas is what can go in your mind and you can understand and can be communicated to you effectively. But then, the surprise and the revealing of new things is what keeps you playing, because

• 14:57Speaker 07

  you haven't seen everything yet. There could be more that you could get out of this experience, right? And the thing that I realized about that, though... So, there's other... This is not just my idea about game design. So, there was a very famous... I think it was like Kim Swift at GDC talking about how they designed Portal or something. And they do this thing where they put a spreadsheet and they say like, "Here's all the object types, and you could put an X in the spreadsheet cell..." I'm bringing it back to stand-up style, right? So, we've got spreadsheets. You put an X in the spreadsheet cell when objects interact with each other's type, and then you want that spreadsheet to be, like, full of X's or whatever, right? Hmm, interesting. That's an oversimplified way of talking about it, but you could imagine that, right?

• 15:40Speaker 07

  So, the thing is, game designers don't actually know why that works, okay? So, it's like, we can come up with rules and design them so that they'll interact, but like, why do they actually interact? Like, what's the engine in the universe that makes things interact and generate complexity, right? And this is something that you see in mathematics. So you know, if you look at like the Mandelbrot set or something, any kind of fractal, you have a very simple equation that when iterated blows out into enormous complexity that you didn't expect there. Or like Stephen Wolfram stuff, he has all these very simple cellular automata, right?

• 16:23Speaker 07

  So there's something about the universe that does that. And we, game designers don't actually make that happen, right? It's like we're exploiting an underlying phenomenon about reality that we don't stop to think about anymore because we're too busy actually making games. So I wanted to make a game that was about looking at that very closely. And part of that was like, okay, instead of starting with these simple puzzle symbols, what if the ingredients in the soup that we're going to mix together are themselves games that are already fun and complete by themselves? And then we'll mix those together and they'll blow up into like a big like hyper reality with way more dimensions than you would usually get. So here's the other thing. If you're designing a game, you know,

• 17:05Speaker 07

  at first you just have some idea and it's usually not as good as you thought. It's like not as fun as you thought or whatever. And so you implement the idea and then you start adding sophistication to it or like, oh, this thing happens that I don't like. Let's change the rules to disincentivize that or whatever. And at some point you iterate on that enough to where it's fun or you lose out on the game of game development. But assuming you succeed, you get to the point where it's fun and then you ship the game because it was so hard to get there that that's basically all you could do, right? And so what happens is games sort of have converged at a certain level of complexity of game design, right? Because the process of making them is always iterating up till

• 17:46Speaker 07

  you reach that and then, and then shipping it. And so this was also a way of trying to force ourselves above that ceiling that everybody hits about how complex is the game in terms of the amount of interactivity, because we're starting with things that were already in that zone and then mashing them together and having, you know,

• 18:09Speaker 07

  I don't know. It's like if you, if you have a vector and you do the outer product with another vector, you get a square matrix, right? For the math people. And then you could outer product another vector and you get a cube. And then you get like a four dimensional thing. And so we have kind of this four dimensional space of games. Interacting with each other. So that was, that was the idea.

• 18:28Speaker 06

  And that's like the, you don't have to give any spoilers, but that's like the four different kind of like lands that we see in the trailer and everything. And each one, so like the idea is, if I'm understanding correctly, each of the like four islands, I think you called them or something like that, right? Is like its own, it could be its own game effectively.

• 18:47Speaker 07

  It is its own game in fact. When you start playing them, they're completely separate from each other and they have separate characters, separate stories and separate game mechanics, right? And then later on, um, we show this in the trailer, so it's not that big of a spoiler, but um, later on, you know, some dimensional combination things happen and the games then come together and you start playing with the magic mirror from this game, you know, with like the monsters from this game or whatever. And, and you see how those rules play out and, and yeah, that's the fun part. Or really the whole game is the fun part, but yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 05

  So, uh, I wanted to throw one thing in here just because, uh, to the extent that I have anything to contribute to this podcast. It's like digging into the back catalog that some people might not know about.

• 19:40Speaker 05

  Would you say it's worth talking a little bit about Raspberry here? Cause I kind of see that as sort of like an early experiment with a different sort of like a continuous version of this, that you didn't decide to make it to a full game, but it kind of feels a little similar.

• 19:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. Okay.

• 19:55Speaker 06

  Can you give a little background on what Raspberry is?

• 19:57Speaker 05

  That's what I was prompting, sorry.

• 19:58Speaker 07

  This is something you could actually download the old version of. There is a, I actually worked and never re-uploaded. I have a much more sophisticated version of this game, but you can download the one. I made Raspberry and a couple other prototypes while I was working on Braid. I was feeling burned out like two years into development and I spent like two months just working on other side projects. If you search for my homepage, I still have some like hand-coded HTML thing that I barely, don't really maintain. Like every seven years I'll go and like.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Put under construction on it.

• 20:32Speaker 07

  I never did. I never had the guy with the little pickaxe or whatever.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Marquee tab.

• 20:38Speaker 07

  Um, but, but there's a game prototype on there called Raspberry. It only runs on Windows. Sorry. And so the idea behind this was a little bit different, but it was about combining game mechanics. And I didn't, I didn't think about it this way, but it was like, okay, what if you made a game where you tried to use game mechanics like music? Where you have, you'll have one interaction that's like, you're trying to click on things or something, right? And you have another interaction that's like, you're trying to dodge things. And what you could imagine some number of very simple things like that. And then like in a song, you might have like drums come up really loud for a little bit and do stuff. And then you'll have, you know, guitar come in or whatever. And, and sometimes you have everything and sometimes you have one thing.

• 21:20Speaker 07

  It was about just composing these gameplay interactions in that way over time. And it was a good experiment. What the conclusion that I came to was you can't exactly do that

• 21:35Speaker 07

  in the same way that music works, because game design is like fundamentally a little bit lower frequency. In the sense that the rate at which your brain can track the changes in what you need to do has some maximum rate before it just is not that fun.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  But it did work in the sense that like, oh, this is kind of cool and interesting. And maybe I should ship. I mean, I would have to dig it out of source control and compile it again, which, oh my God, compiling a C++ program from, from 15 years ago is difficult, but uh, you know, um, yeah, that, that was, that was related. So it, I think it goes to show that I've been thinking about this kind of thing generally for a long time.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  Would compiling a JI program or a J program or the language program in 15 years, will that be a challenge or will that?

• 22:25Speaker 07

  Well, it depends. So part of the reason we're keeping it in closed beta right now is, is to give ourselves the permission to change things in a somewhat incompatible way. But because there are like a thousand people in the beta now, we still try to smooth it out. So like what, what I'll do is I'll say, okay, this feature's going to get deprecated and replaced by this other feature. So first we implement them both alongside each other, right? Then a month later, this one gives you a warning when you use it, right? And then a month later it gets deleted, but. If you take a year off and come back, you might have missed that and now your program just doesn't compile, right? And there's information in the change log about why, and sometimes we can even leave error messages that say, "Oh, this isn't how it works anymore."

• 23:09Speaker 07

  But yeah, so, um, now, there's different levels of changes that are different levels of severity and stuff, right? But what I would say is, okay, so the reason we're doing that is because of my experience with languages like C++ where they had a lot of ideas early on about like what would be really cool ideas and make programming better, and a lot of those ideas are very inaccurate. There were other things that they really should have done early on, like that C didn't really do, and not to blame C, but like in the days of C, it didn't make sense to think in a very clear way about integer types, let's say, because there were just all sorts of

• 23:54Speaker 07

  computers with all sorts of different word sizes. You didn't know what was going on and like all these things. But like now, it's like, it's pretty obvious that like if you have an unsigned 8-bit number, that'll fit into a signed 16-bit number, right? If you, and that should implicitly cast, but if you have an unsigned 16-bit number and you put it into a signed 16-bit number, you maybe should say that that's what you meant to do, right? And it eliminates, and like, they weren't thinking about that kind of, I'm not even saying that that's exactly the right decision that you should make, but it's like a clear, it's a clear idea that should have come up, right? And they just weren't thinking about that stuff and they had all these other things that they added to the language. And, um, and the problem with C++ now, or one of the many problems with C++,

• 24:39Speaker 07

  I would say there are two core ones that drove me to make a new programming language. One is the C++ is completely saddled with almost all of the baggage of almost every idea that was ever introduced and there's no, there's no way to deprecate things, right? So that's a problem.

• 24:58Speaker 07

  And so that makes the new features worse. So if you actually have a better feature that actually will help people, it actually doesn't work as well as it should. And it's harder to implement and slower because it has to interoperate with like all this cruft that's like built up over time, right? And so there's a lot of things they just can't really do. Like, I haven't tried to use the modules feature. I don't, I sort of froze my C++ usage at C++ 11, and even only some of C++ 11. Like I do, you know, probably less severe than, like Casey, you actually use C++. You just don't use most of the features, right?

• 25:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I kind of gave up on C++ features a while back.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. But like Sean Barrett didn't even use the C++ compiler forever, right? Like, he was using the C compiler, which was not maintained anymore. But he was like so much faster than the C++ compiler.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  Same, same with Jeff, Jeff Roberts, still to the, I believe to this day, when he has his own stuff, if he doesn't have to interoperate, it's the C compiler only.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  And like, you can't, so in that dialect of C, the last one that Microsoft made this compiler for, you can't even like declare a variable in the middle of a block.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  What?

• 26:04Speaker 06

  Only at the top?

• 26:05Speaker 07

  It's bad. Like, original C was really different from modern C.

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Modern C has like added a bunch of those conveniences in now. So it doesn't feel that clunky. You can, you can program in straight C.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Modern C, are we talking like 89? Are we talking 99?

• 26:19Speaker 07

  Well, I haven't followed anything since Ancc, right? I know there's like C99 and stuff. I don't know what those features are. I don't care.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Really, we just mean, if you go download a C compiler today, whether it's Microsoft's or, or Clang, or, you know, GNU C, they now all have things that you would have been very happy to have way back when. Like, including like how like a for loop might get scoped for variable declaration.

• 26:46Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  Or how you would, whether you could use declare anywhere, those sorts of things. They didn't have any of that, right? You had to put all of your variables at the very top of the function and all that sort of thing, right? That was still the, that was still the norm in like, you know, the year 2000.

• 27:02Speaker 07

  So K and RC, when I was in college, I was learning C. And there was this shiny new book that said Ancc with a big stamp on the front. But in the used bookstore, they had a book that looked almost the same. It was the same like C programming language book without the Ancc stamp. And I was like, that's pretty cheap. I'll learn from that book. And that was the K and R version of C. And so I was using compilers at school that could do the newer C stuff, but I didn't know that. And so in K and R C, for example, if you're going to call a function that's in another file, because you're organizing your program, you don't declare the arguments to the function. Just whatever you pass to that function, the compiler says, sure, that seems fine.

• 27:42Speaker 07

  Right? And so then you spend all this time debugging because like you passed a double instead of a float, or you forgot an argument or whatever, and you you just crashed at runtime, right? There was no static type checking on external functions. So that was a good time.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  That feels like my experience with the Lixer. I did this very regularly, tried to pass things in and getting the wrong types constantly.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's exactly what you need when you're just trying to learn, you know?

• 28:08Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, we say this, but like, welcome to JavaScript, right? Like, like, fast forward to today and like a very standard programming language is still in the state where it's like, yeah, I don't know, you just pass something. And whatever you want, man. Whatever you pass is what gets passed and good luck.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, to be fair, most modern JavaScript, they use, you know, TypeScript, which alleviates a good portion of those problems. There's still the problem of outside objects coming in. You have to literally hand validate them with some sort of runtime checking to prove that they are what they are.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  Are you sure most is true here, though?

• 28:43Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like all, like 75% of new projects. It's like some decently good number these days, but nonetheless.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  That's, that's nice. That's nice for the youth today.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  That's nice that the web finally figured out about types.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  My favorite part still is that we do take, we take a language that cannot be interpreted and turn it into a language that can be interpreted. And we call it compiling. It is like, we're in a very weird world in that side of the universe, but it's very fun. All right. So I want to actually steer away from the, I love the C++s and, well, actually I don't, I actually genuinely hate it. But, uh, this is great discussion all, but I actually want to focus on kind of a question with Jai. Sure. And or Jay, do you, by the way, do you call it the language, Jay or Jai?

• 29:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't pronounce it. So.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Artificial intelligence.

• 29:23Speaker 07

  So I have an allergic reaction to one of the, so I'm very frustrated with the quality of software broadly speaking, right? And part of that is the culture of what are people thinking when they sit down and make software, right? And there's a pattern that I noticed that bothers me that doesn't seem to bother a lot of other people, but both in academia and industry. If you read an academic paper that's about somebody's algorithm, right?

• 29:51Speaker 07

  There's a very classic form, which is they put the cool name of the algorithm that they made up, like the marketing name, colon, and then they tell you what it means. And Hacker News posts are the same, like Django poop, colon,

• 30:06Speaker 07

  a thing that converts all your comments in JavaScript to uppercase, right? And like, they come up with like the seemingly, this is my cool project name for like something totally stupid. And it's like all the effort goes into thinking about the name. Or like thinking that if you make a really neat name, then, then you've passed some hurdle of being a contributor or whatever. And, you know, meanwhile, I'm trying to implement this algorithm from a paper, for example, in a video game and like realizing that it doesn't actually work. And then sometimes under very strict deadlines where I suffer greatly due to this. And just, it's really frustrated me.

• 30:49Speaker 07

  So, so this was just like a code name that I made for this language. I don't ever use it. We don't market the language. I don't have a logo for it, which is another thing that people make like first before, you know. And even when it comes to language syntax, like if you start talking about what languages should a feature have, people will talk about the syntax because it's, it is the most concrete and easy to observe thing. But it also kinda doesn't matter that mu... I mean, it does matter at some point, like in the end, once you finally have a tool that you're like, this is the thing I'm going to use day to day for years, then small amounts of friction do add up and they really matter, right? But the problem is that if those are the main things you're concerned about,

• 31:32Speaker 07

  when you're designing a new language, those are relatively shallow problems that you're preoccupying yourself with. And, and what I found, okay, so let me get back to this other thing that you sort of asked at the beginning, which was like, why did I make the language?

• 31:46Speaker 07

  Part of it was I was sitting there using C++ every day. So Casey visited in these days and worked on The Witness. And we had both an annoying like asset processing pipeline for the game, which I won't explain that right now, but it's like,

• 32:02Speaker 07

  you know, crunching the data that's going to go in the game sometimes would take too long. And that slows down your work process, but also just compiling the game was really annoying. It would take like a couple of minutes, which doesn't sound that long, but it like really breaks your flow when you're trying to think about stuff. And it was only a couple of minutes because we spent a lot of effort trying to minimize the C++ suffering about how long things take. And so, so I was like, I have all these problems. Like I was kind of sad and depressed working on this game, even though it was the best thing I had ever made. And it was clear that it was going to succeed at some level. I mean, who knows about commercially, but like artistically, we had at that point succeeded in making a good game. We just had to finish it, right? And I was still bummed out going into the office every day, just working on this thing.

• 32:45Speaker 07

  And I was like, okay, part of this is the programming language and part of it is the asset stuff. And the asset stuff we can look at next time we make an engine. The processing, the programming language though, I would go online and look at what are the conversations people are having because like there's a C++ committee, right? And then there's, there's other people making other languages and like, why? What are they saying is their motivation? And I would look at the problems that they say that they are solving. And they had very little to do with the problems that I had from day to day that was making it hard, right? And, and the thing is like, when you're working on a smaller program or you're working on, or you're a new programmer, right? You feel like there's certain things that are serious problems, but actually when you get more experience, you're like, yeah, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 07

  Like you don't really make that many syntax errors when you type later. But if you're a new programmer, you're like syntax errors are really, I'm drowning in syntax errors. This is obviously a problem.

• 33:39Speaker 05

  What, yeah.

• 33:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. Now it is true that better syntax error messages can help people learn really fast, but that's not like a deep. So, so what I found was that once, and I think this is obvious once you say it, but like once programs get past a certain size of code. And/or, because it's like some kind of product function, and/or a certain complexity of like the internal data and how it has to be arranged and like, you know, what the structures look like and what the constraints are. Once it gets past a certain point in complexity, it's just hard to work on the code because it's hard to understand everything and see everything and, and just know what's going on. And that's kind of the bottleneck is that it just gets complicated. And so that's what I wanted help with was like, code that just gets really complicated.

• 34:26Speaker 07

  And I was looking at what people were talking about and they just didn't, didn't have any of that as a concern. And then the other thing was compile times.

• 34:36Speaker 05

  Can I, can I inject one thing there too? Like, uh, when you look at, like, the biggest thing that frustrates me when I've looked at things like C++ uh, committee discussions or how they go about like deciding what and how to put in the language, is the, the mindset, in my opinion, when you're designing a language, has to be that we are trying to make the best possible system for the working programmer. Like, the person who's going to sit down and is trying to get their job done that day, that is what you need to, unless you are making, like, if you're making some abstract, like, you know, like ML or something like this, or Lisp,

• 35:20Speaker 05

  and you're making, you're intentionally going down that road to make a theoretical language, then that, you do whatever you're trying to explore. That's, that's your thing and that's fine. But if you're like the C++ committee, your job should be to focus on what is going to allow the working programmer to have the tools they need to succeed every day, right? But if you actually look at the way that they make decisions, it's almost all about weird, esoteric, theoretical things. Like, they are never, they will never go like, okay, well, we have to make this thing work because this is what would actually be effective in day-to-day work. So we'll, we'll go and we'll deal with ugliness in the theoretical realm or something as a result. They will never make those decisions. And it always ends up feeling a lot like,

• 36:05Speaker 05

  you know, you're, you're, you're in some like rundown, like dilapidated shack.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  And and someone is like, OK, we've got this beautiful mansion that we're gonna move to. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't move to that mansion. I planted this tulip bulb back at the shack. And I don't know how we're gonna move that, right? And like, literally, like, you're really like, I'm like, what? Like, you guys, like, you guys decided you can't do any of these things in the good way that you would have done them because of this one little thing. And like, like, no, like, this is why the language keeps getting worse. And so I do think like, there's this, there's, in some languages, they've, they've calcified this very academic process for like, moving the language forward. And it always results in substandard features over and over and over again. Um, so anyway.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  And can I also say, it would, it does feel a little bit different, too, if it felt like, I mean, we already made the joke about it being impossible to build an old C++ project. It'd be one thing if I could pull any C++ project out from any time and they're like, you have a random one from 1997, you can compile. But I feel like I never, so it's not even like you're getting this feeling of like, oh, I have this rock solid thing I can always build. It's like, we're gonna keep all the features around, but you still can't build it? Like, what?

• 37:25Speaker 05

  You get, you get nothing from it, yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's like the history of all of computers, really, is like, there's these stated reasons why things are the way they are. We need to do it this way to get this benefit. And then you actually ask if you get the benefit. And it's like, well, we get 5% of the benefit.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're like, no, not really.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  So a question would be, is, is that a design by committee problem? Because John, you're like, you're effectively the decider of the language. You're the benevolent dictator of it. And so do you avoid a lot of those problems? Because you look at the tulip and go, ah, just plant a new one. Like, you can just make that decision. You don't have five people of the 10 being like, that tulip is life. I cannot let go of the tulip. Like, you don't have to make those fights. You can just say, no, this is the way, it's the best way.

• 38:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, what, I would say that the problem still occurs, even if you have a benevolent dictator, because you do wanna listen to your audience a little bit, at least, as part of a grounding, like. So even if you think you have the best ideas and nobody else can have better ideas, which is not usually exactly true. You still need to listen to people to know like, okay, I have an idea that doing this feature this way will help a certain class of program. There's people out there writing that class of program. They can tell you if that feature actually did what you meant it to do or not. You can't quite do all of those yourself because you're, like I said, the real problems happen when you're like deep in a very complex program and you can write like little demo

• 38:50Speaker 07

  programs to test your features out and stuff, but you just don't have enough human life years to like write all these super deep programs. So you need to talk to the people who are using your thing and they're going to have all different opinions about what you should do and you need to just like not listen to some of them. Like that's, that's simply how it is because if you listen to everybody with an equal weighting, it is equivalent to designed by committee. And so you just have to say, I'm sorry, it's, you know, for some people, it's not that you necessarily have a worse idea or anything like that, but this language has to pick a direction to go and it's just not that direction and maybe a different language could go that direction, right? And maybe that's better. Like we're just, you know, you're doing some hill climbing process, right? Where hill climbing is this

• 39:34Speaker 07

  thing in computer science where you start out on some landscape and you just, you only can look nearby probably and you just go the way that seems the best, but you don't exactly know. And this is an entire class of algorithm in computers, right? And so you're kind of doing that. But, but you have to, if you listen to everybody, you'll add up all these vectors that point in all these different directions and they will sum to zero and you will not go anywhere, right? And, and so that's, so you just need to be willing to be a little bit, like not even exactly disagreeable because you don't have to argue with people or anything, but it's just like, look, that's just, I appreciate that you want this thing. It's just not what we're doing here.

• 40:12Speaker 06

  You have to have conviction.

• 40:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, something like that.

• 40:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 07

  You have to not be a super people pleaser.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Like here is what we're trying to accomplish that, that includes some things that you will take seriously and some things that you will just decide we're not going to do. Like, right? You, if you tried to do, I mean, C++ also has a little bit of that problem where they don't have a strong idea of exactly what we are trying to accomplish. At the end of the day, so great. Everything and nothing. All the things. Right? Like they they all it's everything and nothing somehow, right? And and so, you know, it also pays to have we're separate from design by committee or not. If you're going to have a committee design things, it helps to have an overriding idea of like, we are trying to get the language to this place and accomplish this thing. So that we have like a guiding principle, like I said, like make the working programmers life easier every day or something like there's something like that that you could point to.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  So that somebody on the committee can argue, look, we're just gonna have to trash the tulip because we really need like this mansion is going to be so much more helpful for everybody. Yeah, and we need it to be good or whatever. Anyway, I interrupted John when he was about to talk about compile time, so maybe we can.

• 41:17Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Well, that that so.

• 41:18Speaker 05

  That was number two.

• 41:19Speaker 07

  There are friction things. And so when people talk about like, oh, the syntax needs to be good or whatever. They're talking about the minute to minute pleasure of using a language. And for some reason, people focus on that. And then, you know, it takes two minutes to compile hello world now. And it's like, what what happened? How am I supposed to have a thought process? How am I supposed to develop when it's like so painful that I just sit there and wait to see what happens? And so that was an emphasis from the beginning, also because I come from the world of video games like even a video game 10 years ago. Did an insane amount of computation in one frame. Especially on the GPU, which is a highly specialized, very parallel thing.

• 41:57Speaker 07

  But even if you factor that out, the amount of stuff that a video game does just to figure out what to put on a screen is very high at a very high rate. And it's because that was just like the fitness function under which the industry evolved. People wanted games that rendered smoothly and looked good, right? And like, for some reason, no such fiction fitness function exists in programming languages. There is one, but it's like, it's something about how cool of an anecdote can you post on Hacker News or something, right? It's like not, it's not really to do with usability. It's, I mean, at some level, there is, I don't know, it's complicated, but um. You know, so looking at these compilers, I was just like, look, I've written compilers before,

• 42:41Speaker 07

  never as serious as this one, but like in college, I wrote like 12, instead of doing my homework and doing classwork, I wrote like 12 compilers for different languages. And so I knew how it worked and I knew what they were doing under the hood. And I was like, it's way less computation than a game does actually. And so it should be really fast. And so, you know, part of the goal was to just try and fix that. And because, you know, we're decently, we've done a pretty good job at that. So our 300,000 line game does a full build. We don't have incremental builds because that's in my experience, another source of bugs and confusion. Like even the more you have to think from minute to minute about what are all the different ways that a thing might be building and which one is selected, right? It's just another roadblock. And so it's just like,

• 43:26Speaker 07

  look, it's a full build all the time. Right now that takes about two seconds for a debug build, which is longer than I wish it was. I wish, I feel like it should be like a quarter of a second. But, you know, we've reached the point where with the team size that we have, it's, it's hard to push that number down without concerted effort. And we're still trying to ship the game and all that, right? But that's still, you know, a lot of these other languages that have been made in the past 10 years. How long does it take them to compile a 300,000 line program? Like way, way, way longer. And it's just like decisions that are made about how the language works.

• 44:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, two seconds is a lot less of a temptation to pull out my phone and forget everything that I was doing than two minutes or 20 minutes.

• 44:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like just short enough because if you turn around to do anything, the prompt will come back up, right?

• 44:15Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 44:18Speaker 07

  It's actually like 1.7.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Personally, I think it's really impressive. 300,000 lines for two seconds in modern development that is genuinely unheard of. Because, you know, even in my personal, what's it called? Interpreted languages as of recent, it often takes more than two seconds for significantly less lines. So this, you know, it's a, that is actually, in modern sense, a very impressive feat.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  Yeah. So that's something that our beta users enjoy, you know, significantly, is that sped up iteration.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  I know we've got a hard stop. I got a few last quick questions for you if that's alright.

• 44:51Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 44:52Speaker 06

  They might not be, they might not be quick, so then you don't have to answer them too.

• 44:56Speaker 07

  I could, one word answers.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Alright, okay.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Cause I got some too.

• 45:01Speaker 06

  Alright, here you go. Do you think that AI is going to save the games industry by forcing RAM and GPU prices up so high that people actually have to care about performance?

• 45:16Speaker 05

  Interesting take.

• 45:17Speaker 07

  I'm not sure. Okay, we'll not try to one word answer that. Here's the thing.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  You can also include web development as well.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, I don't do web development much, ever.

• 45:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 07

  But, like, so this is a problem. Like, games for a while was known as the place where there were still a lot of really good programmers, because we were forged in this fire of really difficult stuff. And that's become increasingly untrue. I think game programmers are reverting to the mean. And so, it wouldn't be too bad. I don't think that, like, I think things are gonna adjust and RAM prices are gonna come back down pretty soon. This is just a short frequency trend like all of these.

• 45:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 07

  But, yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 06

  Prime, you wanna ask one? We can alternate.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Common wisdom says, or at least, common wisdom on Twitter, so may not be actually wisdom or common. It suggests that you should be making a game and getting it out fairly fast and, you know, making sure your concepts are good and getting it in front of people and all this kinda stuff. You shouldn't go and hide yourself away for many years to build one game. You obviously having the time to build a language, build an engine, then build a game, 10 years total. Why, like, when do you make that decision to say, no, actually, taking your time, taking the 10 years, taking the 5 years, this is actually the more superior choice? Like, when do you know to make that decision?

• 46:35Speaker 07

  For me, it usually happens gradually. So, all of these projects I would have envisioned being shorter. Like, this game was supposed to be the proof of concept game with like a simple engine, just to prove out the programming language. And it turned, I just always wanna do a good version of everything and then, I don't know. There was like a lot of weird stuff that happened over development that I won't go into, about like what different people on the team want and things. And, so, we ended up making an engine that's actually more sophisticated than the one for the last game, when I was hoping for simple. But it means the game looks really beautiful and...

• 47:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, but but here's the thing. So so I think that that advice that you said is the right advice for someone new to games or just projects generally like if you have never shipped anything before, you should not spend five years in a back room doing something because you're just you're going to be miscalibrated. You're going to be slow at what you're doing. You're not going to have the right amount of experience. And so being quick early is a good way to just iterate and learn, right? However,

• 47:43Speaker 07

  somebody's got to be working on really whatever you want to call like moving things forward and not just trying to release something and make some money like there there have to be adults in the room somewhere who are worried about actually improving life in some way. And sometimes that's just really hard. If you could find a way to do that. In fact, there there almost always is a way to do that. That's actually small and incremental. It's just that's not the way that I think apparently. But but for me, it's a lot more about motivation. Like if you can.

• 48:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, however, long it takes to do something that's genuinely meaningful is how long you should take.

• 48:23Speaker 07

  If if that's your lot in life and that's different from the guy who's like, I just I'm supporting my family by having a job. That's cool, too. That's totally fine. But we need we need some percentage of people who actually are trying to like lift up the quality of things. Otherwise, it it'll just be an eternal slide into into a pit that we never get out of.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Recently, also, oddly enough, there's been some examples of these kind of long gestating games that I think might have also been first times like I want to say both.

• 48:53Speaker 07

  Blueprints was like seven.

• 48:54Speaker 05

  Blueprints and Animal Well. I don't know if Animal Well was his first, though. We're both very long gestating, single person or close to it games.

• 49:02Speaker 07

  Yeah. And and so if you think you can hit the target.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  You know?

• 49:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  And they they sold out. They were very, very popular, right? So it's it's kind of hard to guess what's going to happen. I think you just it's nasty.

• 49:13Speaker 07

  I mean, the thing that we don't see is how many of those did the same strategy and they just weren't they just didn't have the best idea or whatever. I I don't know.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:23Speaker 06

  Any advice for people balancing CEO of game studio and someone who wants to be programmer slash designer?

• 49:32Speaker 07

  So the way that I do that is by not CEOing very much.

• 49:38Speaker 07

  Cause as you know, programming takes a lot of time and game design also takes a lot of time. So one thing that I'm doing this time that helps somewhat is I did sign this game with a publisher. This is the first time that we ever did that. Part of that was to get additional funding to help finish the game, but part of it was

• 49:57Speaker 07

  just like they have a whole infrastructure for like doing stuff that left to my own devices. I would do, but not as well. So like marketing the game, like they're running ads for the game right now. I wouldn't be running ads for the game right now and like all these things, just like. So we're kind of delegating some of that to this other company who now also has a financial interest in the game succeeding and all that. And so I think that's good. I never, I don't like want to run a business. That's never been my motivation, but I have to in order to

• 50:29Speaker 07

  be able to do what I want to do. Cause like, nobody's going to pay you to do some weird thing that they don't understand. Now, in, in the earlier days, the game business was easier and so I could kind of be a little bit more

• 50:44Speaker 07

  just lackadaisical, especially like when there was no teams, it's just me working on braid and like with occasional contractors. It's a lot cheaper and it's like, you can just make whatever decision you want and it doesn't matter that much. Now there's like a pretty serious burn rate and there's people and like, so I have to balance this. Like we have to stay in business and not be like constantly losing money year after year. But at the same time, if you turn into generic business, making generic product, that's also bad because it's not what I signed up to do and it all, people are not motivated by that because there's just a bunch of the same slop out there. Right? And so it's actually kind of hard. And, and the past couple of years, we have survived the massive slaughter of 2023 to 2024 that afflicted a great amount of game industry.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  So we'll see.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Cool. All right. So I don't know if you've answered this one anywhere. I could not find it. You don't have to give us an answer if it's still kind of, if it's a secret, but why did you call it braid?

• 51:44Speaker 07

  Some of these things are just creative decisions that happen at a relatively deep level that I don't like to explain them.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  That's fine.

• 51:52Speaker 07

  Because sometimes the magic is in the non-explained things. And so I'll just say it's part, there's some kind of, the idea for the game involves like a mood and a feeling and like a texture and that was just part of it. And that's all.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  All right, I got, I got one that I feel like is really good for Twitter.

• 52:13Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  If you could give a two-minute, one-minute piece of advice to all people coming into modern web dev.

• 52:22Speaker 07

  I don't know anything about modern web dev. What, don't do it. What do you mean?

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Well, because that's where a lot of people enter into, right? Like that's, that will always be the entrance and because it's just the easiest to get something on the screen and theoretically make one million dollars by making another chat wrapper. So, so if you were to give somebody an advice other than don't do it, what would you say to them that could potentially put them on the right track so in 10 years they look back and say, that guy was right?

• 52:48Speaker 07

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna say what I think the right answer is. And this may not-

• 52:58Speaker 00

  You can say, don't do it. I, you can say whatever you'd like.

• 53:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, don't, still don't do it, but here's the thing. Okay, the web started, I, I saw the very, very beginnings of the web and chose not to participate. So just to spend like 30 seconds giving a little background, I was at UC Berkeley. I was in this place called the Experimental Computing Facility, which is just like students enthusiastic about programming. The GIMP guys were there a couple of years after me. That's why the file extension for GIMP is .xcf because they came out of like the same computing lab. A little bit of trivia for you.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  I did not know that.

• 53:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  I was wondering about that. So the X in xcf stands for experimental?

• 53:35Speaker 07

  Yes. So this was like when, if you had a computer at home, it was like a Commodore 64 or like a, not that good of a PC. You didn't have an equivalent of a Unix operating system at home. That was not a thing. And so if you wanted to program real programs on real computers, there were these workstation class computers that were in relatively short supply. There was a whole controversy that like the xcf snagged allocations from the university that were meant for another group called the Open Computing Facility. And there was like a war between the students about this. All that happened a little bit before I showed up. Okay. So- Um, there was a guy next to me named Pei Wei, who wrote one of the first web browsers before I even knew what that was. It was called the Viola browser. It doesn't exist anymore, but you can look it up.

• 54:19Speaker 07

  And I was at an early conference and Marc Andreessen was there. And everybody was angry at Marc Andreessen. Some things never change. Yes. He was making, um, the, the Mosaic browser at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And web browsers didn't have images at that time. They just couldn't display bitmaps on the screen. And there was a discussion underway that was one of these laborious committee discussions that Casey's talking about. Because every, it was like, we're the web community. We want to make sure we think about these and do everything. And he was like, you know, angle bracket, IMG, angle bracket, file name, or whatever, you know, URL.

• 55:04Speaker 07

  Boom, it puts it on the screen. And they were all mad at him for implementing that and having images in his browser before everybody else. So that's, that was my experience of the web. And like, I didn't, I didn't really love it. Um, I didn't, I didn't stay in web from that time. But it was very, so even Viola, right? Was very visionary in the following way. It was not just a web browser that put the text in on the screen, but it had an embedded programming language that was interpreted. It was a lot like JavaScript, but it was a different language. So it was not really semantically equivalent. And then JavaScript came, again, you know, a couple of years later, or whatever. You know, 96 or whatever year it was, 95. Um, when Brendan Icke famously did it in 10 days, right?

• 55:49Speaker 07

  The reason it made sense to do something like this in 10 days was that like, look, it's just to change a couple state variables in the browser about whether they push the button or it's not for real programs. So it doesn't need to be very serious. And so we don't need to use all the, and it, we want it to be cross-platform. So it's just going to be a very lightweight language, right? Okay. Fast forward, and now it's like the language that most software is written in, right? Nobody thought that that was-

• 56:17Speaker 00

  What can be written in JavaScript, will be written in JavaScript, is the considered truth of JavaScript.

• 56:22Speaker 07

  And so the problem with all that is that- Somehow, we forgot all this thing that we knew about programming. Like, it kinda, like, it doesn't matter what programming language you use, because the computer knows how to run some backend representation, which in the old days was machine language, right? So then you move to the browser, you're like, "We want it to be portable, so it can't be machine language," right? But like, it wouldn't have even taken that long. If I had a time machine, it's like, do you, do you try to find baby Hitler and re-educate him to be a kind and loving young boy? Or, do you try to find Brendan Icke and say, "Look, spend two more days to make a little bytecode engine, so that you're language-agnostic on the, on the front end," right?

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Really, big, big, big decisions there with the time machine.

• 57:08Speaker 06

  One of software's biggest questions.

• 57:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, I don't know, that, I'm not serious. Obviously, the answer is baby Hitler. I'm not, that's not really a joke. But, uh, so, um, because baby Hitler was so much earlier in time, that maybe everything would have gone better after that. And, and you don't, you know, yeah. So, um, but the point being, like, it used to be, before the web, that like, if you wanted a language with strong type checking, you had your pick of a whole bunch, and they all worked the same. And, and they all targeted the same backend at the same level of quality. So it's not like you were using some janky transpiler to like, build some massive 10x too-large amount of bloat code that you can't debug or anything. It's just like, they would target, I mean,

• 57:57Speaker 07

  those things did exist too, but you didn't have to use them, because you had choices, right? And like, we threw all that away, and, and we made this thing where like, now there's an interpreter engine, and it just runs this one thing, and then you can have wrappers around that one thing, right? Okay, so now we also ostensibly have WebAssembly, but it just, because it came in later and people are not... Like, all these companies also benefit from the fact that they're the only few people who can make browsers, right, as well, that there's no competition there. And so, like, Google loves that, dude. That's why they put so many resources into the browser. And so they're disincentivized from making it easy to re-target, like, to, to control

• 58:41Speaker 07

  your own computing environment, let's say, right? Because if there's a very simple substrate and you don't need Google's permission to have new features or whatever, they can't, they can't leverage that against you in the future, uh, as part of their more, like, it would enable incumbent browsers to come in and displace their market share and all that, right?

• 58:58Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. It's actually worse than that, because also you have companies like Apple, who are actively invested in not having the web be very good, because if it was, then you don't have to use the App Store.

• 59:08Speaker 07

  Yes. Yo, there's, like, every-

• 59:10Speaker 05

  Like, and that's not hypothetical. They literally, like, you can literally go watch them do that in the minutes of W3C meetings, which I have done, and it's frankly, pretty disgusting.

• 59:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, um, every big company has a different angle on this, but they're all kind of in common. Every angle is about kind of capturing more market share and preventing their current market share from being eroded in the future by competition, right? So, so that's, this is all a long-winded, long-winded way of saying, okay, there's good things about a browser, you can just open a webpage and just, there's a program running, and that's something that we didn't used to have. It didn't used to be that easy. But like, we didn't have to throw away all the good things about system software to get that. And there's this fundamental confusion about this.

• 1:00:00Speaker 07

  Like, if you just targeted an equivalent to a machine language, but that's cross-platform, well-defined, it has some instruction set, and then the browser was interpreting that-

• 1:00:13Speaker 07

  Which is again ostensibly what WebAssembly is, but it like doesn't quite get there for, I don't know, various reasons. And it's certainly not the default, right? But if we had that, you could run real debuggers on your web program, right? You could do all these things. And so getting that back, like, those tools are actually incredibly valuable if you want your software to be high quality, because they bring in a level of analyzability and and understandability that we just didn't have, once we made the jump to interpreted languages by default. So getting back there would be great. And so this has been a 28-minute-long answer,

• 1:00:54Speaker 07

  by which I'm saying, you could like, work on getting back some of the things that we lost, and getting them back into web infrastructure, so that we could have the best of both worlds. You could have the convenience, right? But also the quality and robustness of older systems. And that would be great.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Alright, I think you're probably out of time. I don't want to keep, I don't want, I definitely don't want Wucash to get pushed back, so.

• 1:01:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, sorry, long answer. It was not a one-word answer.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  It was a great answer.

• 1:01:27Speaker 06

  That's okay, great answer, though. We like it.

• 1:01:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 06

  That's part of the stand-up. You're supposed to schedule the stand-up for a certain amount of time, and it's supposed to go long. That's the point.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  We did perfectly do what a stand-up is supposed to do.

• 1:01:37Speaker 06

  We gotta get the people what they want.

• 1:01:39Speaker 07

  We're not standing up, though. I'm disappointed.

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  You can't stand up, or I'm standing up, it's too long.

• 1:01:43Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it would be painful, it'd be bad for your knees.

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  Technically, aren't you supposed to end by asking John what he's going to get done tomorrow?

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, so what are you blocking? Any blockers right now, John?

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  Any blockers?

• 1:01:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, there's some stuff about the end, so we have play testers, and they got to the end game of the final end game, because there are multiple end games. And one of them got there a couple days ago, and it was totally broken, because like, we changed some stuff in the code, and it didn't work. And we have automated tests, and the automated tests claimed they worked, but like, the objects were invisible, and then also some other things that are not covered by the tests. Didn't so so I've been fixing that and in the process of fixing that it's like oh there's some feature that I won't spoil but a good end game is like it follows on naturally from the game that came before but also brings in some new stuff some surprises and stuff

• 1:02:38Speaker 07

  right it feels like the culmination of the game and some of that stuff uh you know there's a programming part that you gotta do and then there's the the user level part of like let me mark up the level to have the right script triggers and like whatever and like a few of those levels that I had designed were not marked up and so people went to play them and they're like I don't know what's going on in this level so last night I feverishly fixed a bunch of these things and shipped a new build because with steam you just push a button and deploy it really fast um and then an email from one of the people who's helping out with design he was like oh but you know the geometry

• 1:03:19Speaker 07

  of this level has this bug exploit that I emailed you about months ago that we never got around to so I'm like oh I thought I was done with it so I've got to go and like redesign the geometry of the level a little bit to like dodge this exploit and this level's in two places in the game so there's that like the copies have to match up and all so that's what I'm doing and then after that so I'm trying to make time during Christmas break when I'm relaxed and can work on story stuff is the other thing um so that's that's my roadmap but Also the most immediate thing that I'm doing right after this is I am going on the WooCash podcast which

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  Go check him out

• 1:03:58Speaker 07

  You can like and subscribe

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  I've started the raid so that way you have to get going okay it is now a requirement that you go

• 1:04:04Speaker 07

  Alright thanks guys

• 1:04:06Speaker 06

  Casey any blockers for you?

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Uh nope no blockers for for me I'm just I'm uh I'm uh gonna go listen to this WooCash podcast

• 1:04:13Speaker 07

  Nice there you go yeah nice we're all gonna get distracted for the rest of the day

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Awesome well thank you very much for joining the startup if you want to listen or the stand up not the startup if you want to listen to the full podcast check us out on Spotify thank you again Jonathan for joining us please check out and wish list order of the sinking star and as always Casey thank you for joining us TJ thank you for joining us

• 1:04:35Speaker 07

  Of course thanks John Thanks everyone See you John Yes

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Errors on my screen. Terminal coffee. In hand. Living the dream.