Comment by chadgpt3
9 hours ago
Jonathan Blow found it convenient to represent all assets in a large number of text files, to enable merging. For instance he'd have one text file per entity on a map. The game and editor could read either this or the compiled binary version.
Jonathan Blow works with extremely small team sizes relative to the big studios. When you only have a couple people working on a project you don’t need all of the same coordination features.
He and Casey Muratory make a lot of cool instructive content, but their condescending attitude towards the industry always made me thing "Huh, must be really nice working alone and making all the decisions yourself."
I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base.
He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it.
I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.
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I’ll chip in here and say theres ime a world of difference between the amount of condescension and acerbic noise produced by Blow versus Casey. Casey comes of as grumpy but fundamentally pretty respectful in the stuff I’ve seen him in.
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IMO this is just garden variety effects of being a programming influencer. It’s a weird position to be in.
I think being influential just does that to people, with high regularity.
And then they usually back their words by doing things like "you claim that outputting text to a terminal emulator is a PhD level problem, so here I did it in a weekend".
Huge teams are more often than not the sign of bloat and inefficiences.
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Isn't that kind of the point though? Doing more with less?
He's also the sort of person who I suspect works in a very idiosyncratic way, which is great for him and his mind but probably not everyone else. (This is not a criticism.)
That's fine for database-like meta-data (e.g. game entity properties), but not for images, videos or audio files. Just writing those as hex dumps into text files doesn't make them any easier to merge.
You really can't merge binary data, such as textures, meshes, audio, etc. It doesn't matter if you base64 encode the data and stuff it in a text file: it's a jumble of data (assuming this is the implication of what Blow did).
He uses SVN and specifically has stated that Git isn't suitable for the work he does due to big binaries in source control.
How do you merge changes to a texture, mesh, audio file, etc?