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Thekla - Jonathan Blow Interview

Gamelab was very busy in Barcelona this year, but we still made time for Thekla's president and game designer Jonathan Blow to talk about his very own game programming language JAI and the many mysteries The Witness hides.

Audio transcription

"All right, we are at Gamelab 2018, last day, but this interview to me, personally, is so special.
I enjoyed The Witness so much at home, that it's really nice to have you. Thank you for joining us, Jonathan.
Yeah, thanks for being here, and I look forward to our conversation."

"Yeah, so, first off, before getting into The Witness, you had this masterclass yesterday, which was about JAI, the programming language you're building.
What did you share with the audience? How are you making this type of programming language to have less friction for developers?
I mean, there's really a lot that I could say about that."

"The speech itself was like an hour.
To boil it down to a couple sentences is hard.
But really, the languages that we use to make games today, they didn't come from nowhere, right?
They're a product of a history of evolution of programming languages that goes back to the 1970s or the 1960s."

"And a lot of that historical stuff is actually causing problems now, because a computer today is a very different thing from a computer in the 1960s.
We have so much more memory. The computers are so much faster.
And so the very way that you build a program that was conceived back then maybe doesn't make so much sense anymore."

"And so it's really involved from the ground up saying, look, ignoring everything from the past, just starting in 2015, which is about when we started, for computers of today, what is the best way to build a program?
And then exploring what that meant."

"And that led us to all kinds of design decisions about how to do things differently.
And then, of course, it takes a long time to implement all those design decisions.
But we're at a place now where we have a really good thing, actually.
It's really fun to program in. It's much faster to program in it than the way games are usually made."

"And, yeah, I don't know.
What's the status of the language right now?
Which, I don't know, type kind of version, if you feel you're close to being final, or what can you share on the status of the language?
Like final is a hard thing because a language like this, there's a lot of details, thousands, right?
And so we might be tweaking things for a long time."

"But I would say that recently, sometime around the end of 2017, we figured out what the basic thing really is because we were experimenting a lot with the basic ideas.
So we've got the basic idea.
This year, we're reengineering it, making it better, stronger on the inside."

"And then also working on the libraries that people will be using that helps them make programs, right?
By the end of this year, we hope to go into a closed beta where we're just adding a small number of people who get to use it.
Right now, nobody has access to this."

"You're not sharing it with other students for now?
No, no, not at all. It's fully in-house.
And the reason for that is we want to make sure it's really good before we say, okay, spend time with this."

"Because personally, when I try to use software and it doesn't work very well, or it obviously isn't done, I feel like it's wasting my time and it's frustrating.
And part of what we want to do here is break some of these traditions, how these things are done.
And so we're polishing it like you would polish a commercial product, even though we're giving it out for free, right?
But we want it to be high quality, right?
The same way that if I worked on a game for years and released it, I would want that game to look nice and feel nice and not have any weird problems, right?
Same thing."

"All right, regarding The Witness, I would ask many, many questions about many, many things and mysteries surrounding this island.
I don't know if you can tell me who created that island.
I don't really talk about that kind of thing."

"The limit of what I want to say about that is in the game itself.
So I prefer that people just get to play it and think what they want to think.
All right, how did you come up with this combination between nature, technology and art?
What is the main message you wanted to send with the feelings players get with this combination by exploring the island?
Well, the original idea of the game, you know, it's a very complicated game with lots of stuff."

"To get to that complicated game, we had to start with some initial design idea and explore that to figure out what the locations could be and what the puzzles could be and all that, right?
And the original idea was something about we wanted to make a game where you genuinely feel surprised by things that you see, right?
The way I described it was it's simulating experiences of epiphany, right?
Where you suddenly understand something and it's not something dumb or trivial."

"It's actually something kind of important, right?
And there's a moment where, you know, you don't understand something.
You're like, I don't even know why I don't understand it because it looks really simple and I just can't figure out what's going on."

"And then an instant later, you suddenly, you know, there's something that flares up in the mind and you suddenly understand and see.
And so it's a game about exploring different ways that that can happen and creating the possibility for that to happen over and over again in different ways."

"You can't force people to have that experience, but you can maybe set something up where maybe they will.
You're actually reading my mind right now.
I'm surprised because that's what actually happened to us in terms of...
Let me share my most special moment with the game."

"We were exploring the island.
We were solving puzzles, getting stuck in others and then getting back.
But that was like the regular experience.
And we didn't really know... Little spoiler alert here."

"Those puzzles could transcend the panels and be used in the world and be solved in the world and in the environment.
So in that house, you have this wall and the lemon trees outside.
And that was my first moment."

"But we were like 20 hours into the game.
And then that was when I realized I could draw my lines in nature.
It still gives me the goosebumps.
So I don't know how you really measure how players are going to really find out about that thing or..."

"It's difficult, right?
I mean, it's extra difficult because...
Like if the main concern was I want to make sure nobody finds these by accident, right?
Then you could hide them somewhere or make them really hard to see."

"But then it's like not fair or interesting, right?
So what makes it work is that this stuff is right in front of your face the whole time.
So if you played for 20 hours, you walked by a lot of things that you didn't just...
It didn't register, right?
It was right there on the screen."

"And in fact, a lot of this...
The art style of the game, for example, was determined by this, right?
So the game is in very bold, saturated colors.
Colors are very strong."

"And shapes are not broken up by a lot of texture details and lines.
It's like fields of color.
And that was because we wanted shapes to register very clearly in your mind.
And we didn't want to hide things by camouflaging them."

"We wanted to hide them by like...
You just didn't understand that that was important and now you do, right?
So it's a very strong experience when you say, Wait, I walked past this thing 10 times."

"And the 11th time I finally see why it's important, right?
It's daring. It's you daring to go outside.
In my case, it was like, can I touch here?
And then that kind of fire."

"It was like religious divine to me.
So it was amazing.
I don't know if you designed the game for it to be best when it's a shared experience.
It's something we played short bursts every day."

"Like 15 minutes, then go to bed.
I played with my wife.
And I've been sharing this experience with other journalists and other players.
And many of them have shared."

"And I think it's really good to share and to find the different perspectives, each player and the different ways and approaches to puzzles.
I don't know if you think it is best shared experience.
So that was something that I hadn't been thinking about in the original design."

"But then very early we did some playtesting and we saw people playing it that way.
And I was like, oh, that's cool.
That's nice.
And so I would say for most of development, we had the awareness that people might play it that way."

"I don't know if that changed anything major.
But it's definitely something we were thinking about.
And I realize that the reason that that works is because it's really, you know, it's a game about looking at things and understanding them."

"It's not that much a game about controlling in the world.
There's a little bit because maybe you want to go somewhere and look at a specific thing.
It's not like an action game or something.
And so multiple people can participate at about the same level, even if one of them is at the keyboard or the controller."

"And so I didn't plan for that.
But once I saw it, I was very happy with it.
Because it's nice to have games that people could play that way, for sure.
Are we getting to play The Witness on new platforms?
Eventually, probably."

"Like right now, you know, we spent a long time working on the game.
And even if you're working on a very good game, the team gets tired of it after a while and wants to do new things.
So we're doing new things for now."

"But we'll probably do some more versions of it later.
I guess you get many requests.
We do. We do.
But yeah, for now, it's been enough on that."

"All right. Closing one.
What else are you working on at TechCloud?
Of course, there is the development of the engine.
I mean, the programming language itself."

"But then you've been prototyping some stuff on it.
And there is a new game that I don't know if you can share anything on.
We haven't even announced this game officially yet.
So I can't say that much about it."

"But, you know, we're making this programming language.
But if you just make a programming language without really trying it out for real, then you may make bad decisions about how it works."

"So we're also making a game at the same time.
So we're building a new game engine in the new language and building a very interesting puzzle game in that engine.
I don't know when that's going to be done."

"I don't know when it will be released.
It won't be seven years from now.
It will be less than that.
But it also won't be this year."

"So somewhere in between.
Does it happen to you when you were creating The Witness that you looked around the environment and you tried to go, I'm seeing these shapes and I'm trying to go and find the path."

"It happened to me when playing.
Yeah, maybe a little bit, but not as much for me as for other people because when you design something, it just lives in your head in a different way."

"Whereas when you experience it as a player, it's just different.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for The Witness.
Yeah, thanks a lot."

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