Finally, on 27th July, Blow noted the “whole industry is having a hard time” and then, when asked how many of his development team are working on the compiler for programming language Jai, Blow replied: “None, because we can’t afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad.”
Oof. I don’t like Jon Blow, but I do like Braid. Sad to see nobody really cares about it anymore.
Or the people who care about it already have it. It doesn’t have archaic controls or graphics or whatnot, so the need to buy a new version is way lower than the likes of a Resident Evil remake.
Yep! I would be much more interested in a Braid 2 rather than a remake of a game I already own and enjoy. I actually didn’t realize until writing this comment that Braid Anniversary Edition even had more puzzles than the original.
He should have called it “Braid+” or “Braid 1.5” or something. “Anniversary Edition” makes it sound like I’m just going to pay to replay the same puzzles I already figured out a decade ago but with minor cosmetic changes. Forty new levels is fairly substantial.
Edit: Never mind: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/13251037
Braid was a solid game all its own, and a remaster certainly wasn’t needed (yet or at all). The Witness was freaking phenomenal, and I hope there will be other iterations of games like it to come. Blow can go blow away though. He’s an anti-vaxxer and Covid conspiracy theorist, and that is something I can write off as anyone worth acknowledging. Plenty of other amazing games in the sea.
What was the business case for doing a remaster of Braid? Either terrible market research or this was super cheap to make.
I believe it was a desperate attempt to get a new source of revenue. His upcoming Sokoban game is taking forever to make, so it’s not going to bring them any new revenue anytime soon. In large part because he made the arcane decision to create a new programming language for it (as a replacement for C++), because apparently Sokoban is the type of game where you really need that high performance.
Sometimes writing the game engine is just more fun than making the game itself, ok…
Yes, but read that again, he’s making a new language, not a new engine… To put it in terms of food, using things like Unity is equivalent to eating industrialized food, you have absolutely no control and you get what you get; Using other engines like Unreal or Godot that have open source is like cooking at home, some work but you can get it just the way you like; Building an engine yourself is like having a little farm in your backyard and doing everything from start to finish, it’s slow, you’ll face problems that have nothing to do with cooking that were handled by the farmers before and at the end you’ll get something only slightly better than what you could using store bought products; Building a language from scratch is the personification of the saying “to make an apple pie from scratch first you have to invent the universe”.
And you know the worst part? It won’t be any faster or better in any mensurable way, large groups of developers spend decades to develop the languages we have today.
I think his use case is that the new language allows for more rapid iteration in development. Years ago now, I saw his demo of the language, and it compiled so quickly that it may as well have been done by the time he pressed Enter. For all the gains he got from that, it still hasn’t helped him release a game by now, but I do see the problem he’s trying to solve, and I do think it’s worth solving.
Faster compilation is probably nice, but making a new language with all its tooling from scratch is a huge endeavor. Props to him for actually doing it.
The problem is that all this work takes away time from the actual game development. I’m not sure about the scope of his next game, but from what I’ve seen I don’t really understand why his Sokoban adventure game can’t be made in Unity. I don’t think he’s pushing any hardware limits with it.
Unity also got hot reloading nowadays, which is about as fast iteration you can get.
I’m just armchair guessing, but I believe he would’ve been done with his game by now if he just used Unity.
I was going to buy braid, but the original was delisted and the anniversary edition is 10x the price on sale. Will have to wait a few years for it to fall into 80% territory again.
I already own the OG on steam. If I want to play it, I will. But I don’t. Because it’s fuckin boring. Always has been.
