Jonathan Blow - How to program independent games - CSUA Speech

Why HN readers recommended it

HN recommends it as a talk whose advice on simplicity and avoiding unnecessary work applies well beyond games.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Alexandre Franco

Topic

indie game programming

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

9

HN mentions in dataset

12

Recommendation years in dataset

2015–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Jon Blow's "How to program independent games": [VIDEO] It's about much more than games. To me, it's about identifying and not doing unnecessary work. The second half of this video is a Q&A session, which I would skip.

• Every time I get stuck on a project, I watch this video. It's about games, but IMO a lot of it applies to software projects in general, especially MVPs. How to ship something that works before it collapses under its own complexity. I think the …

• Really excited to go through all the other talks listed here I'm not familiar with! Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software: The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - [LINK] …