I will use this opportunity to sing the praises of HiFi Rush, because that original game deserved so much better than it got. Probably would have gotten it as an indie game too.
Big companies avoid risk too much, they want to make revenue, not games. I haven’t been interested in any AAA game in some 10 years. They’re all just the same open-world, microtransaction-DLC, soon-to-be advertisement platform with uninspired gameplay features.
Independent developers on the other hand are innovating and making cool and fun games.
First off I didnt know Braid was remastered until now and secondly Jonathan is an anti vaxxer which means I’m not gonna give you any money.
And I thought Braid wasn’t very engaging when I first played it ages ago so I’m not really interested now. Apparently Jonathan has been spending his free time working on a programming language that isn’t public yet (for a while now) and just talking a lot of shit on X/Twitter.
Braid is like Myst. Everyone and their grandma either bought it, got it as a gift, got it in a bundle, or just pirated it way back in the day. I mean I friggin have it in my steam library and I don’t know how I got it.
So it doesn’t surprise me that no one bought this remaster or whatever.
add to the fact that remasters really work if it’s of a game that is on an older console or is an older game that has a hard time running on modern PCs. Braid isn’t either of those. Why pay for a remaster if chances are you already have it and is still runs.
Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.
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 didn’t know that about the creator. I’m fairly anti piracy when it comes to indie games, even if I don’t agree with the devs views. I still hope he gets it and has a bad time with COVID if that is the case though.
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.
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.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a Unity game, last I checked, and it’s not getting done any faster. As per The Witness, it’s probably far more about how he’s retooling puzzles rather than his language, if I had to guess. Plus, it’s not just iterating within the editor; this thing exported a build in well under a second. I worked on a Unity game a few years ago, and it definitely took me far longer than that. It even had a bug for a bit there where we couldn’t see the game when run via the editor on Linux, so the only way we could test it was by exporting a build until we got an update to Unity.
A pretty terrible one. Remasters are for games that are high on replay value and deeply nostalgic. Braid was cool and innovative and I enjoyed it when I played through it the first (and only) time, but I have no desire to play it again.
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.
I appreciate letting me know about the anti-vaxxer conspiracy stuff. Makes me feel better about never finishing The Witness (not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because whatever filters were on there, it made me cripplingly motion sick for hours every time I played it).
I never finished The Witness either, but I kinda wished I would have, as the philosophical nature and puzzles were both very engrossing, such a unique take on the “walking simulator” style of game. Granted, it was much more than that, and I’d actually compare it closer to Myst and Obduction than such. The puzzles were repetitive but just incentive enough to be engaging and twisted in just the right way, though they got devilishly difficult later on. Sucks about the motion sickness though. Wonder if there was an .ini swing which could’ve turned the filter off?
Though, all in all, this was definitely a difficult “separate the art from the artist” scenario.
Yeah, I had the same reaction - The puzzles were definitely “learn how to think a new way,” my favorite kind. I ended my play on one perspective-shifting pattern puzzle that I was so close to beating, so I kept pushing myself through the motion sickness, and just ended up disabled on the bed feeling ill and unable to move for two hours (without completing the puzzle).
I tried a bunch of things - permanent reticle in center of screen, disabling walk shake, etc. I still play high-motion FPS shooters with no issue. It’s just some games (The Forest was another). I am guessing it’s a middleware-introduced visual filter that adds 15-25ms delay to screen latency, just enough to mess with inner ear visual/motion sync in sensitive people.
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