PhilipTheBucket

This interview is really phenomenal. Among other things, they talk about why it took so many years to release the game.

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

The lengthy production wasn’t the result of development challenges or obstacles, they said. They just needed all these years to ensure that Silksong was exactly the game they wanted to make.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”

“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” Gibson said. “It’s also that problem where, because we’re having fun doing it, it’s not like, ‘It’s taking longer, this is awful, we really need to get past this phase.’ It’s, ‘This is a very enjoyable space to be in. Let’s perpetuate this with some new ideas.’”

The longer development lasted, the more pressure Gibson and Pellen felt to ensure that everything was as fine-tuned as possible. They’d already spent four years on it — why would they rush now? The more time they spent polishing some parts, the more time they needed to apply it consistently across the rest.

“There’s a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game,” Pellen said. “All the way the systems interact, all the hidden work that pops up later on. It’s multiplicative. As you add stuff, the process of tying it all back together just increases.”

Gibson and Pellen say they’re happy that the game is finally coming out — and even happier that they will get to keep working on it, which they still find enjoyable even after seven years. They haven’t burned out or shown any desire to take a break. Instead, they’re already making big plans to add extra content to Silksong in the months and years to come.

This is, of course, what work is supposed to be. But we have lost the way.

Yeah, and I'm only supposed to use this bong for smoking tobacco. It said so very very clearly when I bought it so you know they mean it.

Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.

It is a good joke but you missed the chance to call back to one of the better gags from Space Quest 3 by writing "Yes / Yes"

Honestly, man, I get what you're saying, but also at some point all that stuff just becomes someone else's problem.

This is what people forget about the social contract: It goes both ways, it was an agreement for the benefit of all. The old way was that if you had a problem with someone, you showed up at their house with a bat / with some friends. That wasn't really the way, and so we arrived at this deal where no one had to do that, but then people always start to fuck over other people involved in the system thinking that that "no one will show up at my place with a bat, whatever I do" arrangement is a law of nature. It's not.

Is that really true? I guess I have no reason to doubt it, I just hadn't heard it before.

I feel like at some point it needs to be active response. Phase 1 is a teergrube type of slowness to muck up the crawlers, with warnings in the headers and response body, and then phase 2 is a DDOS in response or maybe just a drone strike and cut out the middleman. Once you've actively evading Anubis, fuckin' game on.

"Why I got a bird hand? Why I got a bird hand? Oh..."

Yeah, it sits at this very satisfying cusp where it is clearly saying something, once you get over the "look at this upsetting thing I'm showing you" level, but I can also totally believe people coming to totally different conclusions about what it is saying. It's wild.

Updates are usually automatic (at least in the modern days with Steam), and DLCs are optional.

Okay so by that definition, this one is a free DLC. Glad we got that cleared up lol, that was why I described it as a DLC.

I don't think of DLC as having an explicit connotation of either free or paid, it can be either. Whatever. I've now edited the title again to what I should have titled it in the first place. Hopefully everyone can put this to bed and move on to some other equally urgent internet disputes now.

IDK what is the panic about the distinction between a game update and a game DLC. I posted it because I played it and it was awesome and I wanted to let people know. In any case, I edited the title to say "update," hope you're okay with that phrasing.

What in your mind is the difference between a free update, which you can download, that adds some content, and free DLC?