Braid creator next game

But in terms of scale and ambition, it's really not in the same category anymore as almost anything you would see under the 'indie game' category on like Steam or PSN or something. It's not quite AAA, either. It's in the middle somewhere.

The independent-gaming industry didn't evolve exactly as Blow once predicted it would. After the release of Braid , he thought the indie boom would fizzle out within a few years.

But as the months rolled on, indie kept kicking. I don't think the indie bubble bursting means that people can't make indie games that are successful anymore. Obviously, that's not true. But it's much harder. You can't just make a game that's good and put it out and expect people to buy it.

Independent games are still finding their footing, but today they're an ingrained, generally beloved, presence in the video game universe. Indie projects balance out the mainstream world of online shooters and cinematic cutscenes; they're the plucky yin to Call of Duty 's yang.

Modern tools and online resources make it easier than ever for amateur developers to create their own games, and for years now one of the indie scene's most pressing problems has been oversaturation , a consequence of its own sudden success. As painful as it is for creators, this market factor could be a sign of maturity for the video game business.

Other established industries face issues of oversaturation, too, including film and literature. Blow doesn't have that problem with The Witness. And that matters a lot. He's now taken that money, and re-invested it all in The Witness , his next independent title. The game has spent six years in the development cycle, but the developer has faith that his huge gamble will pay off.

His first hit , Braid , was a smash on Xbox Live, and would later be ported to PC after massive consumer demand. It made Blow millions, but even that income wasn't enough to fund the ambitious efforts of The Witness - and the developer has resorted to borrowing investment money in order to complete his next title. The Witness is a first-person puzzle adventure game that eliminates the features Blow doesn't like about other adventure games.

He's kept most of the game a mystery to avoid spoilers, but this year is the tentative year of release for the long-awaited title - though he hasn't ruled out delaying the release to ensure the title is up to his standard upon release. The Witness currently has a development team of nine people actively working on the game, and they recently completed all of the puzzles for the game - totaling in all. Or Elite?

All pretty indy and commercially successful. Back then Indie was called Alternative, don't you remember 90's kid? Doom was pretty commercially successful It is or was a specific scene, centered to an extent around TIGSource and its forums.

The games that came from this scene are what put the genre in its current spotlight. EDIT: You may find it interesting to read Jordan Mechner's journals about the making of Prince of Persia as a solo dev published by Broderbund, so not quite fitting the indie self distribution model today, but otherwise fairly similar.

Still, that's how the word is used today. Many, if not most, "indie" games are either made by those original TIGSource people, or were strongly influenced by contact with that community.

PhasmaFelis on Feb 7, root parent prev next [—]. Doom was not indie. It had a publisher, for one thing. GT Interactive. Masters of Doom is a fantastic read, if you haven't read it. Retra on Feb 6, root parent prev next [—]. All those remind me of Steam. Which was new at the time, yeah? Actually, this was around or so, so Steam was already out for a few years. And remember we're on the 17th annual Independent Games Festival.

That statement shouldn't be read as Braid being the first indie game it wasn't by a long shot. But as Braid making indie games popular. Before Braid, the average console gamer did not know what an indie game was.

Or if they did, generally considered indie games to be terrible. Probably should specify indie on consoles. Braid was huge on the xbox Well, it is also not hard to think of other successful independent games that predate Or It seems to come down to what you mean by it? Without access to the author's mental definition of the term we can't really quibble successfully.

ForHackernews on Feb 6, parent prev next [—]. I mean, if you go back far enough, there wasn't such a thing as a games industry, so everything was an "indie" game. I say Spacewar! Actually this article shows many interesting examples going back to the late '40s, most of which would be considered indie. It is just an easy narrative trope to throw if you are a lazy journalist having to write an article.

Braid was a very successful indie game. Even if you don't consider the early games such as Doom as indies, there has been cult games like Uplink way before Braid. It just arrived at the right time in order to be published on consoles as well and with the right portable gameplay.

It's a bit of a silly statement because it completely ignores the fact that in the recent past video games were almost universally "indie" efforts. Actually it kind of died out for a bit. During the PS1 and PS2 era, with the introduction of optical media and a push for mainstream quality, low-budget and hence only moderately profitable games slowly died out, while high-risk, high-return 'AAA' games dominated.

That's not to say that people didn't make independent games at this time but they were rather niche. The Indie movement was in part a rebellion against that.

The first indie game was obviously golf. I played indie games in Making indie games by Selling my own indie games by late 90's.

Jare on Feb 7, root parent next [—]. We were making commercial games from our bedroom in the 80's and 90's but we were not calling ourselves "indies". I'm pretty sure industry comparisons with indie filmmakers and indie music bands started before Braid IndieCade was founded in , but as a widely used and popular term, I think it's fair to choose as a turning point [1], and Braid as the poster child. That segment of the market has gone through many names. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom as "shareware" which defined a fairly large chunk of the indie market back in the early 90's.

Before that there were people putting games out on BBS systems that you could buy the full versions of by mailing in checks of money with your return address. You don't get much more "indie" than that but you can. I am really excited for The Witness. If you ever watch one of Mr Blows interviews on Youtube you will see why.

His philosophy about video games is interesting and refreshing. Particularly, his thoughts on establishing a dialogue between the player and developer through small events and patterns in the game is very insightful and inspiring. I'm sure that The Witness will be a very thoughtfully crafted game and I am definitely going to buy it. Mr Blow, if you are reading these comments, I wish you the best of luck with this game.

I'm not sure where to insert this in the comment threads It is beautiful. I've probably listened to it over times. Highly recommended. I really like his attitude on the turing-complete compile time metaprogramming feature: 'Yes you can shoot yourself in the foot, hang the compiler, and launch missiles at the same time. You're a good programmer or you wouldn't be using this language. So don't do that. If you do, don't do it again. Are there any common languages that allow you to do compile time metaprogramming in the language itself?

I'd like to write little miniprograms which output source code and get evaluated at compile time. Learn a Lisp say, Scheme or Common Lisp.

For Lisp family, this is bread and butter. Since the source code itself is at the same time a data structure, you can and often end up doing it easily generate code at read time, compile time or run time. The border between those three kind of starts to blur. Note that a macro can call ordinary functions at compile time, which themselves can use other macros, etc.

So a lot of code can be used both at compile and run time. Nim can execute code at compile time and store them in constants. Have a look at D, its metaprogramming facilities are really something.

In particular string mixins will do what you want; they will also do much more, like for instance include external files written in domain specific languages and compile them in native D code; all this is done by the compiler, using language facilities, without external tools.

These is not some theoretically cool feature; it's used in real world code, like dproto, which compiles protobuf definitions into native code, or HTML templating engines which compile templates to the equivalent of Java servlets.

RodgerTheGreat on Feb 7, root parent prev next [—]. Forth has always been able to do this sort of metaprogramming- in fact this approach is how most of the language is built.

Constructs and syntax like conditionals, loops and comments are all just normal word definitions and it is easy and commonplace to extend the syntax of the language for a particular program. Forth is often described as "compiled AND interpreted" because "compiling" a program constantly swaps between interpreting pre-existing definitions and building up new definitions and allocations in memory.

Common Lisp is one of the languages with the best control over what gets executed at compile-time versus run-time. It also has a syntax which is extremely amenable to this kind of compile-time generation of code. Blow's language has, from what I've seen, the cleanest CTFE syntax and most straightforward usage approach. To add to the at this point rather large list , Haxe[0] allows this, although it prefers that you don't use the string-based method which IIRC the docs, outside of the API reference, don't really mention, but does exist , but instead manipulate an AST-like object defined in its standard library.

It's macro facilities are actually fairly amazing, and allow for a lot of boilerplate code to be generated at compile time think: the kind of things reflection is used for in other languages. Sadly, it's a GCed language, so while it's very popular for game development, it's use is mainly in the indie scene, and so it's probably never something I'll use for anything other than a toy.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'in the language itself', since isn't all compile-time metaprogramming in the language itself? The second part of the question is about how to turn that into a table which can be referenced at runtime, which would seem to be the same as your question.

MaulingMonkey on Feb 7, root parent prev next [—]. Plenty of them. I occasionally write C which writes C using. If you want it to be more string-oriented then perhaps TCL not that there's always a compile time per se.

Skoofoo on Feb 7, root parent prev next [—]. You can achieve this effect in any common language with a Makefile. GuiA on Feb 6, parent prev next [—]. Just to be clear, this is a side project he's pursuing to explore ideas he's been having in language design.

As of today, the intent is not to have a final product anytime. There's a good chance it will be his next full time project, after The Witness is done. Svenstaro on Feb 6, root parent next [—]. Very few have tried to compete in that exact field actually. This is what makes Rust so attractive.

From my experience, its usually mix of different languages. Just an example. Then there is Unity, and plethora of frameworks where you write in some language and then it gets translated into another and there are just too many variations.

There are still games shipped done in Borland Pascal for that matter :. GigabyteCoin on Feb 6, root parent prev next [—]. That is entirely irrelevant. Tangentially, I hate this phrase. It ignores the fact that there's an opportunity cost to missed shots. If you're imagining the metaphor of a ball game, it's possession and thus time and position.

If you imagine the metaphor of a gun, it's your limited supply of bullets. This exhortation has an implicit assumption of endless resources, which are typically not available in the real world. Of course there are times you should risk things on an uncertain outcome, and be willing to move on to the next opportunity - trying to hold on to a declining situation is often motivated by a sunk-costs fallacy.

But I've heard the 'miss shots you don't take' thing proffered too many times as an excuse for ego-driven, risk-indifferent, and resource-wasting decisions and I'm pretty tired of it.

An excess reliance on sports metaphors has become a huge red flag for me in picking the people I work with. For the record, Blow has said that he's making the language primarily for his own use.

I expect that most of the games he makes in the future will be written in this language. I dont' disagree with the poster I replied to either - I was just venting my irritation at this increasingly popular but frequently empty truism. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some kids that I need to eject from my lawn So it is always kind of interesting to see what the current generation says.

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. I've followed him for a while and I think it might be a little more complicated although this is definitely how it might come across to the average person.

He is blunt, and seemingly socially detached at times, almost in a Carmack-ish way. I don't see this as a bad thing really, just a different type of personality. Most of the best programmers I have known have this kind of personality. Also, as mentioned his new language is definitely worth checking out. Since money is becoming an issue, I hope he tries to fund this language somehow.

I've found his Twitter very frustrating to follow sometimes, but I also learn a ton from the things he links to and talks about. For example, I'm certainly not in the anti-OO camp, but his perspective keeps me on my toes and has been informing my programming decisions to a degree. He also seems like a good person in general — just one who happens to be an old school programmer with a very specific view on how things should be done.

As are many other game developers, I've been discovering! People are complex and multifaceted, and you don't have to like every part of them.