Wookash Podcast

Jonathan Blow, the independent designer behind Braid and The Witness, discusses his upcoming puzzle adventure Order of the Sinking Star. They explore the pressure of finishing a decade-long project, nonlinear worlds, trustworthy mechanics, emergent puzzles, and designing difficulty that rewards thought. They also dive into visual clarity, player-driven wonder, and the game’s October 8 launch.

Joran Dirk Greef, software engineer and founder of the open-source database TigerBeetle, explores specialized transaction processing and why general-purpose databases hit scalability limits. He breaks down TigerStyle, a safety-focused approach built on static allocation, explicit bounds, assertions, minimal dependencies, and deterministic simulation testing. The conversation also covers reliability, performance, and engineering velocity.

Jason Rohrer, an independent game designer behind One Hour One Life, discusses Chessamphetamine and his custom minimal engine. He talks about tiny, fast microdose games and rediscovering the joy of rapid iteration. He explains C89 + TCC for blazing builds, no-malloc static memory safety, hot-reload with RAM snapshots, and designing non-deterministic pieces like rockets.

Aleksander Rostov, Estonian painter and illustrator behind Disco Elysium portraits and Portraitura, blends digital and oil techniques. He discusses starting with silhouettes and values, using brushes and textures, conveying emotion with subtle facial shifts, designing portraits for games, and balancing detail with clarity. The conversation highlights process, tools, and shaping character through portrait choices.

Jason Rohrer, an independent game designer known for experimental, artful titles like Passage and One Hour One Life, joins to discuss his journey from early programming to indie game creation. He covers procedural graphics, making games on Linux and Steam, concise memento mori design, two-player storymaking, and bold experiments in real-money and persistent-systems games.

Anton Mikhailov, a programmer/technical artist behind the Naut graphing calculator and 3D tooling, and Nic Barker, a seasoned programmer who built the Clay UI library and co-founded Ostrich Effect, talk about building a programmable RTS from scratch. They cover meeting via Clay, the assembly-like unit programming model, terrain and tool pipelines, rapid prototyping with a custom engine, and design choices to avoid trivial micromanagement.

Taha Torabpour, an independent game developer and graphics engineer known for deep technical posts and demos. He talks about why realistic lighting and perception matter in games. He contrasts real light vs approximations and explains path tracing, shadows, penumbra, and lightmaps. He also covers shadow mapping issues, practical debugging, and engine trade-offs.

Erin Catto, game physics engineer and creator of Box2D, talks about the origins of his physics work and how simple, robust algorithms changed game development. He discusses solver challenges, lifetime-safety handles, and the evolution from Box2D to a new Box3D for multiplayer. The conversation covers performance, stability trade-offs, and lessons from building physics-rich games like Legend of California.

Jonas Kyratzes, Greek game writer and narrative designer behind indie hits and audio dramas, talks about shaping game stories from gameplay structure. He describes integrating narrative into puzzles, evolving tone across sequels, choosing between games and audio drama, and collaborative workflows with composers and dev teams. He also reflects on creative freedom, monetization challenges, and future ambitions like Talos 3.

Tyler Cloutier, a distributed-systems engineer and founder of SpaceTimeDB, built a co-located server+database architecture for real-time web and game apps. He discusses why bundling server logic with state speeds things up. Short takes cover reducers and deterministic transactions, single-core serializability, benchmarks vs Postgres, scaling trade-offs, and how this model reshapes developer experience.