Alexandre Franco
9 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2015–2026
1:15:51 · 190K views · Sep 12, 2013
Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.
HN recommends it as a talk whose advice on simplicity and avoiding unnecessary work applies well beyond games.
12 comments from Hacker News
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: this 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
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 - this video
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. this video
Jon Blow's "How to program independent games": this 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.
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] this video