It's built as a full 3D game, and has extensive use of nice shaders for transparency effects like the crystals, water effects, particle effects, and more. This is all pretty standard game development stuff, you'd be able to do this pretty quickly with an off the shelf engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal. Godot is a good place to start if you want to learn some of this stuff!

However Order of the Sinking Star is also made in a custom programming language and custom engine. This is not at all normal for game development. There also doesn't appear to be a scripting system. Normally you have an engine built in C++ or something fast, and then a scripting system where you write a higher level language to script how the game runs. Engine development is more separate from scripting development. With Order of the Sinking Star, the game engine appears to be much more just like a library, and the same codebase runs the engine and game logic, with no scripting layer, as far as I can figure out from public hints.

Yeah, Blow has a generally unfavorable opinion of scripting in game engines. Jai (the language) gets around that by being very fast to compile debug builds, about 150 kloc/s, which he says he intends to optimize up to 1 mloc/s. Order of the sinking star compiles in about 2 seconds for a clean build, so iteration can be basically as fast as what you'd expect from scripting.

I am a little curious if there any interplays between Global Illumination, rastering and shaders that they are exploiting on account of having complete engine control. Techniques that something special about their engine might be allowing.

I only wonder because I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals, and that specific feel and style I have never encountered quite like that in any other game.

A lot of that is down to art and direction, but there's a raw quality of the lighting that just feels different to any game I have played. You can often feel a game's engine out if it's one of the big ones, through the feeling of its lighting. I suspect since all engines have certain default approaches and settings in their lighting setups and devs only move the knobs as far as they need to meet their artistic goals, leaving much alone.

> I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals

I don’t buy that. Even back then, as an indie developer, the only reason you build your own engine is because you want to build your own engine.

You have to be doing something truly technically impressive to need a new engine and The Witness wasn’t pushing the envelope.

I am pretty certain it was Global Illumination issues with their large always loaded world and the different indoor/outdoor transitions. They wouldn't have been using Unity or Unreal so it was probably trading off between one code only game library or writing their own, and yeah they probably just wanted to rather than fix the library.

He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.

Yeah, writing the engine was the point I think. They could have created a GI plugin or modified an existing engine’s renderer. He also created a whole new programming language to write the engine in, which is certainly the displacement activity.

Speaking of the custom programming language (Jai), thought it was supposed to be released (beta goes public) with the game.

He has said after the game. They wanted to get the game launched, early bugfixes, etc, and then follow it up soon with the language/engine, initially closed source, but eventually open source.

Just a guess based on the way he's spoken about it, but I'd expect an open beta in December-February. I'm not expecting that to be open source though (maybe the engine will be but not the language, unclear).

It’ll be a few months further down the line. The developer has said their first obligation is to fix any bugs found by the people who bought the game, so they wanted to leave space for that process.

He said that he foresees the effort to deal with open source community will be huge so I think he’s apprehensive of that effort

For how much Blow complains about modern software performance and bloat I was disappointed to hear a lot of reports that the performance is apparently bad, even for a type of game popular in the 8-bit era

I mean, Blow writes single-user software that doesn't have to interop with anything else, persist any meaningful state, or be modified after release.

He has a very limited view of what is required of software.

The problem is that he's not entirely wrong. The JavaScript-ification of everything is kind of a problem. Electron apps everywhere is an issue.

But a lot of issues are also just trying to deal with bad actors. Doing authentication or authorization wrong can have real consequences. And it is incredibly difficult. Because security is in opposition to access. And trying to make security invisible is even more difficult.

> doesn’t have to … persist any meaningful state

What is a game save file if not persisted state?

It's not meaningful however. If your save gets corrupted, you have to start over. Nothing of value was lost.

Except the 500 hours you've invested into the game, of course, but who ever valued their time and played games...

Or maybe a better way of putting it... a corrupted save annoys one user who has already paid you the $30 they're ever going to pay.

Compared to if you run a cloud storage company, a corrupted file might annoy a user that pays $1m every month, to store data that they themselves make money on, etc.

The stakes for a game save are a lot lower.

This game is also on consoles, can't imagine how much time it took to port the engine to all the proprietary SDKs

How did he program the [redacted]s to be so... adorable? They way they flail their little feetsies and tails. The animations. Or the animations of characters becoming uh, immobilized.

Reminds me of the buns in Braid.