JAI (programming Language)

Jonathan Blow (born 1971) is an American video game designer and programmer. He is best known for his work on the independent video games '' Braid'' (2008) and '' The Witness'' (2016).

Born in California, Blow developed a passion for game programming during middle school and later pursued a double degree in computer science and creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of college and briefly worked as a software developer before he started a game company with a friend. Once the company closed a few years later with the dot-com bubble bust, Blow worked as a game development contractor. He co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and wrote a monthly column for '' Game Developer'' before he started part-time work on ''Braid'' in 2005. The game was released in 2008 to critical acclaim, made Blow a millionaire, and is often credited with catalyzing a period of independent game development in the years following its release. He co-founded investment organization Indie Fund, and is one of the subjects of the 2012 documentary film '' Indie Game: The Movie''.

Blow began work on ''The Witness'' shortly after the release of ''Braid'', using most of its revenue to fund development. Blow hired many people to work on ''The Witness'' full-time, forming the company Thekla, Inc. in the process. After more than seven years of development, the game was released in 2016 to critical acclaim. It was financially successful, and received several nominations for British Academy Games Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards. During development of ''The Witness'', Blow became frustrated at using C++ to program its game engine, and began designing and creating a new programming language for game development. Full-time work on the language, codenamed Jai, and a new game written in the language, began in 2016. By working on both Jai and the game at the same time, Blow is able to test out the design of the language, improve it early in its lifetime, and demonstrate the capability of the language. Jai has been released in a closed beta, and in December 2021 its compiler reached beta version 100.

Early life

Jonathan Blow was born in Southern California in 1971. His father worked as a defense contractor for TRW, and his mother was an ex-nun. He has an older sister. He was raised Christian, Blow noting "we went to church every Sunday". Blow attended middle school in Northern San Diego County. While there, he attended a fifth or sixth-grade computer class with Commodore VIC-20s which provided him with his first introduction to programming and computers. Blow said "That was my favorite thing at school. I got it right away." When his parents noticed that he was very interested in computers, they got him a TRS-80 Color Computer, on which Blow learned how to program in BASIC, often using exercise books from RadioShack. In high school he also programmed games on a Commodore 64. Some of the games he programmed were inspired by Indiana Jones and '' Pac-Man''.

Blow attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate in 1989, majoring in computer science and creative writing. He started as a physics major, but switched to computer science because he "just felt called in that direction". Blow said that of the computer science major "you had to know what you were doing", while the bachelor's degree in english was "all about bullshitting things". He was a member of the university's undergraduate computer science association, the CSUA, going on to become a president of the club. Blow said he wrote some science fiction during college, but published it under a pseudonym. His favorite game in college was made by some fellow UC Berkeley students called Netrek, which Blow described as "like playing football with Star Trek ships". He spent five years at UC Berkeley, but dropped out with less than one semester to go. When asked about why he left, Blow said "I was really depressed about being at school, I didn't like it. I didn't have a good time."

Career

19942000: Career beginnings and ''Wulfram 2''

After leaving UC Berkeley, Blow worked at a "really boring" enterprise software company for six months, before taking up a contracting role at Silicon Graphics. There he ported ''Doom'' and ''Doom II'' to a set-top box. Blow noted "trying to play ''Doom'' on a TV remote is terrible, but I had it working."

Around February 1996 Blow started a game company in Oakland with a friend from college using $24,000 of savings. They worked on a game which Blow described as an "online-only, 32 player drop-in drop-out science fiction Hovertank combat game". The game was playable in 1997, but they kept working on it to make it better. The name of the game went through several changes; the final version of the game on the internet was called ''Wulfram 2''. The company signed the game with Total Entertainment Network (TEN), which made it available through a subscription service. Blow said the contract "kept us alive at subsistence level for some amount of time". After TEN was shut down in 1999, Blow brought the game to Interactive Magic. Blow said his company lasted until the dot-com bubble bust of the early 2000s, after which a former business partner of his ran the game for free on the internet.

In a 2020 interview, Blow said he was convinced that 1996 was the hardest time in history to start a video game company, because of the transition from 2D to 3D titles. A number of components of the game were challenging to implement, but Blow learned a lot from the experience. He summarized "we went broke, and I was burned out for several years after that from working hard... but that's how I became a good programmer."

20012004: Contracting work

After Blow closed his first studio, he did contracting work with a number of game studios with larger budgets. Games he worked on included '' Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee'', '' Deus Ex: Invisible War'' and '' Thief: Deadly Shadows''. In 2002, together with Chris Hecker, Doug Church and Robin Hunicke, Blow co-founded the experimental gameplay workshop at the Game Developers Conference. Around this time, he also wrote ''The Inner Product'', a monthly column for magazine '' Game Developer''.

During this time period, Blow moved to New York City where he was introduced to an IBM research project about servers based on cell processors, which IBM had partly developed. Blow pitched them a proof of concept of a physics-intensive online multiplayer game about giant robots attacking a town. The idea was that the server would run the physics simulation of the game and then send the results to the clients. The robots in the game, for example, moved not through fixed animations, but by physics simulation of forces applied to the robots' joints. The players could shoot and destroy these joints, and the game's server would simulate the results. Blow and Atman Binstock did most of the programming for the game, Blow writing the client-side code, graphics, and gameplay, while Binstock wrote the physics engine to run on the server from scratch. After submitting their final report to IBM, the team tried to bring the game to EA, but Blow said, "they were like, 'Yeah, we're not impressed'".

Further contract work for Blow included particle effect programming on '' Flow'' (running on the PS3, which used the cell processor), and code review when MTV purchased Harmonix "to make sure there weren't legal landmines" in the company's code. Blow said of this part of his life "I didn't really know what I was doing in life yet, I was just stumbling forward like people do sometimes, and doing the best that I knew how to do, which at that time was programming."

20052008: ''Braid''

The 2D puzzle-platformer ''Braid'' (2008) was a landmark of independent game development. Released on the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), the game was "an immediate sensation", and a critical and commercial success. ''Braid'' demonstrated that it was possible for indie developers to release games on storefronts (instead of through publishers) and remain financially successful. The game "is often credited as the catalyst for the indie ameboom of the following years".

In ''Braid'', the player solves puzzles using a combination of platforming gameplay and the ability to rewind time. The puzzles typically require the player to figure out how to move the character to the jigsaw pieces located throughout the world. Rewinding time is usually an essential part of the solutions to the puzzles, and the precise mechanism of the rewind changes throughout the course of the game. The plot is told through a combination of textual exposition between worlds, environmental art, and gameplay. The story initially appears to be about the protagonist searching for a princess, although Blow stated that the narrative was "big and subtle and resists being looked at directly."

Blow created a prototype for ''Braid'' in December 2004, and began work on the game proper five months later. Much of the work was part-time as Blow also did consulting work for a stable income and invested time into martial-arts training. By December 2005 Blow had finished the first version of the game; however, he felt the graphics and artstyle "looked extremely amateur". After many "false starts" trying to find a good artist, he hired David Hellman, who would eventually create all of the game's art. For the game's story, Blow drew inspiration from a variety of his favourite books and films such as ''Invisible Cities'' and ''Mulholland Drive''. Blow used licensed music for the game as this allowed him to choose high-quality long tracks which worked well with time reversal while reducing development costs.

In mid 2007 he signed with Microsoft to release the game on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade. Blow felt that time spent meeting the XBLA certification process would have been better spent polishing the game, but added "for the most part, working with Microsoft has been great". He noted that Microsoft was "very hands-off" with respect to game design, and that "the final game is exactly what I wanted to put there". Blow estimated that he spent more than $180,000 of his own money to develop ''Braid''.

The game was released digitally in August 2008 to critical acclaim and commercial success. The Xbox 360 version holds a score of 93 on review aggregator Metacritic, and the game sold more than 55,000 copies during the first week of release. The game made Blow a millionaire. Available only through download, the game represented an early shift in video games from physical to digital stores. The success of the game inspired many other indie developers; in particular, a designer at Supergiant Games claimed the studio wouldn't exist without the success of ''Braid''. By 2010 some other indie games had also found commercial success, leading Blow to cofound Indie Fund in 2010. Blow was featured in the documentary film '' Indie Game: The Movie'', where he discusses his experiences developing and releasing ''Braid''. By mid-2012 the game had sold more than 450,000 copies, and in 2014 Blow stated that sales had brought in more than $4 million in revenue. Blow used most of the revenue to fund ''The Witness''.

20092016: ''The Witness''

Blow's next project was ''The Witness'' (2016), a first-person game in which the player explores an island while solving a large variety of puzzles on panels. The panel puzzles require the player to draw a path on the panel, and the puzzle is solved if the path satisfies a number of rules. Blow wanted to create a game utilizing non-verbal communication, and as such, the puzzle rules are never explained with words. Instead, the puzzles themselves teach the player the rules. Blow felt that solving puzzles in this way could generate epiphanies for players, and tried to design the game so that the player experiences "miniature epiphanies over and over again". The game includes around 650 panels, and Blow estimated that solving every puzzle in the game would take more than 80 hours.

Work on ''The Witness'' began shortly after the release of ''Braid'' in 2008. Blow created prototypes of several different game ideas before choosing the one he liked the most, despite it being a 3D game which he "absolutely didn't want to do". Throughout development, Blow hired people to work on the game full-time, forming the company Thekla, Inc. in the process (he remains its president). By the time the game was revealed to the public in 2010, three people were working on the game full-time, and by 2015 this number had grown to eight. Blow had hoped to release the game as a launch title for the PS4 in 2013; however, work on the game continued until its release in 2016. At the time, it was virtually unheard of for a small independent game studio to spend more than seven years on a game. Blow said that ''The Witness'' ended up being "a much bigger game than I thought", and that "as long as it looked like we were going to have the money and time... we decided to make it the best thing we can."

The game was released on Windows and the PlayStation 4 in January 2016 to critical acclaim and commercial success. The Windows and PS4 versions hold scores of 87 on review aggregator Metacritic, and several popular gaming publications awarded the game perfect scores. The game received several BAFTA and Game Developers Choice Awards nominations. ''The Witness'' debuted at $39.99, a price point that was met with outcry in some gaming forums. Blow stated that the price point was "fairly reflective of what the game is", and journalists noted that other independent games of a similar scope and quality debuted with the same price. Blow reported that the first week sales revenue of ''The Witness'' totaled over $5 million USD, and that it had sold more than 100,000 units. Blow noted that after release ''The Witness'' was one of the top downloads on illegal BitTorrent websites, and was pirated "just as heavily" as ''Braid''. He noted that piracy "will not help heklaafford to make another game."

2017present: Jai Programming Language, untitled sokoban game, and ''Braid, Anniversary Edition''

Towards the end of development of ''The Witness'', Blow became frustrated with C++, the programming language Thekla used to implement the game's engine. Blow considered C++ to be fiendishly complex, and noted "C++ is a powerful language in some ways... but it makes oftware developmenta lot harder than it should be." He looked into the de facto alternatives to C++ at the time (namely Go, D, and Rust), but found none that addressed his concerns. He then released some videos on YouTube where he tried to convince people that game developers "could do better than get off C++." Blow estimated that by eliminating some of the tedious techniques required for game development in C++, a new programming language could reduce development time for a typical game by at least 20% and advance the art form by making programming more enjoyable. Further, he anticipated that the language would be relatively easy to create, predicting that it would be a quicker project than a game like ''The Witness''.

In 2014, Blow began work on designing and programming the new language, which is codenamed Jai. Among other things, Blow hopes the language will improve the experience of game programming and allow programmers to build more functionality with less code. When asked about the real name of the language in 2020, Blow quipped that for many projects "people put all their effort into the cool name" before working on the project itself, and that he was "doing things in the opposite way". For about the first year and a half, his work on Jai was part time as Thekla was busy shipping ''The Witness''. In mid-2016, full-time work on Jai began, including a game engine written in Jai and a sokoban game built in that engine. By working on the sokoban game, its engine, and Jai at the same time, Blow is able to test the language's design and adjust it early in its lifetime. Blow has noted that no previous programming languages have debuted with a piece of demo software as large and complex as a game. The game is intended to prove the capability of the language, thus reducing the risk associated with adopting Jai when it is released. During a 2018 conference talk, Blow demonstrated that a clean non-optimized compilation of the 80,000-line sokoban game took less than two seconds on his laptop. Blow predicted that as work on the compiler continued, the compilation rate would increase significantly, with a target compilation rate of a million lines of Jai per second for a clean non-optimized build. In July 2018 Blow felt the language had already improved his productivity by 15%, and thought that given time the language could improve productivity by 50–80%. Blow intends to release much of the source code of the sokoban game upon release, and said Thekla is trying to structure the code of the game to be "very malleable", so that when it is released it can "provide an in for people who actually want to start experimenting with a program." The Jai compiler is currently in closed beta and reached beta version 100 in December 2021.

The Jai-based sokoban game combines puzzle elements from a variety of other sokoban games while adding ideas of its own. For example, the majority of characters from Jonah Ostroff's ''Heroes of Sokoban'' trilogy appear in the game, as do the lily pads and skipping stones from Alan Hazelden's ''Skipping Stones To Lonely Homes''. By combining so many puzzle elements together, Thekla is able to "explode out the combinatorics f the puzzle spaceeven further than Thekla did with ''The Witness''." In mid 2018, two programmers were working on the game, and the art team consisted of five people. The sokoban game had over 700 levels as of May 2021, and Blow stated that it will probably have more than 1000 upon release. Work on the sokoban game, its engine, and Jai are regularly streamed by Blow on his twitch channel.

In August 2020, Thekla announced ''Braid, Anniversary Edition'', a remastered edition of ''Braid''. The game's art is being repainted with significantly more detail, and will have smoother animations and enhanced sound. The new edition will include detailed and thorough developer commentary from Blow. Players will be able to toggle between the original and upgraded version while playing. Blow explained that the remaster will be faithful to the original, remarking that ''Braid'' will not get the "Greedo shoots first" treatment (a reference to a change made to Star Wars). Thekla planned to launch the game in early 2021.

Long-term project

In 2013 Blow began making a prototype for a singleplayer game that was not a puzzle game. In 2018 Blow said the game had 40–50 hours of playable gameplay. He intends for Thekla to make the game using the game engine being developed for the sokoban game, once it has matured. He plans to work on the game over the course of 20 years, releasing the game in installments. Each installment will make the game larger and add complexity.

Blow noted that one of his goals for the project is to expand his design abilities, and stated "I want to design something that is out of my comfort zone that will make me better designer" Another goal is for the game to be similar to ''Gravity's Rainbow'' in having a "high dynamic range" and in how the work "is not afraid to leave you behind when it flies. It expects you to do some work and come with it".

Views on video game industry

Blow, a strong proponent of ethical game design and the potential of video games as an art form, has expressed his views in interviews, blog posts, and public speeches. He's claimed that ''World of Warcraft'' causes societal problems by diluting the meaning of life to "running on a treadmill". On ''FarmVille'', Blow claimed the developers' goal was to degrade the quality of players' lives, calling its game design "inherently evil".

He has received praise, being called "the kind of righteous rebel video games need", and "a spiritual seeker, questing after truth in an as-yet-uncharted realm". Blow has spoken of the potential for games to be greater and his own attempts to make more adult games. He's noted that in the future games could have a "much bigger role" culturally, but current game development does not address this potential, instead aiming for low-risk, high-profit titles. As a former physics major, Blow has expressed that games could examine the universe in similar ways that a physicist could.

Despite ''Braid''s success on the platform, Blow has criticized Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade certification process as a major deterrence to developers.

Blow is a member of Giving What We Can, a community who have pledged to give at least 10% of their income to effective charities.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Blow, Jonathan
1971 births
American computer programmers
American video game designers
American video game programmers
Indie video game developers
Living people
People from San Francisco
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Video game writers