How To Make Indie Games In 2025 w/ Jonathan Blow — Full Time Game Dev Podcast Ep. 024

I chat with the legendary Jonathan Blow about how indies can make games in 2025.

[thomasbrush]

Can we give a round of applause emojis for Jonathan?

[krsso]

As usual, Jonathan interviews himself - what a legend.

[ali-]

I've never seen jon blow in such high quality before 😂😂

[RageRaccoon]

the thing that Jonathan was talking about at 1:28:15 is something I was thinking this entire interview. Coming from a music background, gaming is going through a similar shift that music did in the 2000s into the 2010s. Listening to the "indie" artists (not the genre, just self produced and published) talk about their experience, the thing I hear echoed the most is, back in the day it was 1 million fans for 1 band, but today it's 1 million bands for 1 fan. All you really need to survive as a small creator is around 1 thousand people who like your stuff and want to show you support, then you'll be able todo what you like. The concept of what is "successful" has shifted dramatically, and too many people are trying to chase an idea of success that's 10–20 years out of date at this point.

Ease of access to tools (game dev, marketing, and funding) has created a type of market saturation that just doesn't allow for the huge hits to happen at the same rate that they used to. Its not a BAD thing, I think it's actually the proper evolution and healthy for both consumers and creators alike. It's the playing field getting balanced in a way that lets more people do these types of things as more than just a hobby.

[netrunningnow]

As a programmer I completely relate on what he said about wanting to make your own engine... a programmer wants to program like a singer wants to sing and painter wants to paint.

[kafir]

hey, your automatic camera switching based on mic volume isn't working as intended and is distracting.
almost every time jon pauses in a sentence for a few seconds, the camera switches to you, and then switches quickly back to jon.
it feels awkward to get a reaction shot of you while jon is simply taking a very natural pause between words, not to mention how abrupt and random the cuts feel.
also, when you shift around, play with an object, readjust your mic, accidentally tap or bump int your desk, etc., the camera switches to you and then right back to jon as he's talking.

[twocatsyelling]

Jonathan Blow has a real knack for taking complex, technical things and putting them into plain English, in an interesting and, sometimes, even entertaining way.

Very rare gift, I find.

[grantla]

It seems that when Jonathan talks about his motivation for making a game, thomas can't quite understand, because they're very different in that regard.
thomas makes a game because he wants to earn money.
jonathan makes a game because wants to make a game.

[ScottGarryFoster]

I've never seen an interviewer seem so bored whilst the guest is being so interesting.

[Jabrils]

what Blow is talking about at 28:00 is currently what im going through with my game & its driving me insane. Basically, I am making an online game with a custom physics engine & has replays that have to stay deterministic, & who would of guessed that different devices calculate their floating point precision differently sometimes causing WILD desyncs 🤷‍♀

[axw]

I like listening to Jonathan Blow.
I don't like listening to the host adjusting the mic every few seconds.

[jevestobs]

This interview was kinda wild to me.


Tommy boy starts off like
"Hey I've figured out how to make $100, 000 a year making games and you can too if you buy my class" straight into
"Hahaha this industry is fucked and I have no idea what I'm going to do"

[imphonic]

What I'm getting from Jon's comments about the difficulty of making games is exactly what matches how I feel right now: it's easier than ever to get started, but it's harder than ever to finish and stand out. There's so many more features and so much more polish that you need that you could simply get away with not having back in the day. Optimizing is a nightmare too when the code behind it is a mess; Unreal's source code is a trainwreck, but it's got the tools I need to ship a game, so... oh well.

[GreedAndSelfishness]

Thomas just visibly dying from stress.

[bohmales]

It was sad to watch the "ADHD version of Henry Cavill" being distracted the whole time, playing with the microphone, and finally having to go pee. Anyway, thanks for this interview. Listening to Mr. Blow was very interesting and comforting.

[FireFy]

Finally a really smart guy with good thoughts, not just another salesman or emptyminded "personality"

[nindza]

He is right about the software declining. Around 2017 we worked on a game, and we updated the Unity version. Turns out, it didn't compile at all! You press "Build" and literally nothing happens, like the button was disconnected from a code it should execute. At first we were pulling our hair out if the project went to shit, then when we found nothing obviously wrong, tried the other projects, and also different machines (we had an iMac and Windows machines). Then my friend contacted Unity via support chat, and they were pretty responsive and chatty, again pointing us that our project might have an error, but we insisted that they have a major bug. It lasted until the guy tested that Unity version himself. At that point the support stopped responding, he didn't even say "hey, you guys were right, we'll look into it", nothing. I can only imagine a panic mode they went into when they realized that the game engine can't produce an executable lol. Tomorrow the patch was out fixing the issue :)

[bbok]

It feels like Tom is trying to insert himself while Jonathan talks and then he just gives up

[lonbpalmer]

JB: No one cares about the low level game engine concerns anymore, people just don't understand.
TB: *Looks around like he doesn't care about the low level concerns of the game engine*

JB is the last, remaining software engineer in the mold of Carmack.

[ShinDMitsuki]

I want to just take a moment to push back further than the assessment of Thomas that "it's easier to make a game because the engine will just do those things for you." Jon was nice about it, but it needs to be understand that it's unequivocally not true. A game engine obviously solves some problems, but you also inherit all the problems of that engine. Also, given how complex the tool you are using is, most of the time you also cannot feasibly solve those problems, even if you were using your own technology a solution would be feasible. In Unity's case, you can't even access the source code to hope to fix any of it. I have personally ran into this problem of waiting years on a fix in Unity for something, which is why I no longer use it or even consider it a reasonable tool for game dev unless you are a large studio that can pay for source access.

Jon brought up the problem of frame rate independence. "Just let the engine solve it for you." Unity can't solve it for you. Unity will do frame rate independence through fixed update. That is a solution with many drawbacks (go look at how it actually ensures you get a fixed update) Also, once you understand how it works, you know you cannot take user input there. Well, if you can't take input from the user in the fixed update, you run right back into the problem Jon was talking about. Also, even if you do use fixed update, you run into the other problem Jon talked about. By fixing the update interval, you are basically disallowing higher frame rate refreshes from occurring. How do you solve this? Interpolation? That's an extremely non trivial solution.

Unreal is the same way. AAA studios inherit it's shader combinatorics issues. That leads to in game stutters. Do you really think you are going to fix the massive beast that is Unreal's material system just because you have source access, when even AAA studios and Epic themselves have yet to do so? Yes, you can reasonably architect YOUR system to not have the problem, but can you do it for the multi million line codebase of Unreal? How about trying to get a temporally stable frame in Unreal? Very difficult task, given how they develop the renderer, it's actually borderline impossible.

There is no magic solution to these problems and a game engine existing is not some panacea that is going to solve all of these things and make them easier. You can choose to ignore all of these problems and say they don't matter, but then we run right back into the problem of mass produced subpar quality products. It is easier to ever to make something with reckless abandon, but the entire point here is that that is in and of itself a major issue.