Jason Thor Hall / PirateSoftware / Maldavius Figtree / DarkSphere Creations / Maldavius / Thorwich / Witness X / @PotatoSec - Incompetent Furry Programmer, Blizzard Nepo Baby, Lies about almost every thing in his life, Industry Shill, Carried by his father, Hate boner against Ross Scott of Accursed Farms, False Flagger

[Edgy But Dull]

In Jason’s non defense:
- Undertale’s coding is abysmal but still runs and does its thing
- Balatro is an endless branch of Then/If triggers
Now, the difference between those games and their coding is that they actually were published whilst Jason’s game has been stuck in early access limbo.

Neither of those games had a dev proclaiming "I've been in the industry for 20 years!" while presenting himself as some master game dev.

 

[Ducks Sorted in a Row]

there are highly rated games out there with absolutely horrific code.

Survivorship bias. If you give yourself tons of extra friction during the development process you're going to be _less_ likely to finish the game, not more. The fact that some people are successful while doing the wrong thing is not a good excuse to not bother learning the right thing.

 

[Nick Gars]

Furry, unironic SL fetishist, nepobaby, Earthbound faggot, boot-licking anti-consumer policy enforcer, mixed with delusions of grandure and an inability to tell his ass from his elbows if his code is anything to go by.

Nigger should of killed himself in the womb. This level of faggotry shouldn't be allowed to roam free.

 

[I've Seen Some More Shit]

He's not gay married.

If you date a guy, you're gay.
If you date a troon, you're gay because you're dating a man pretending to be a woman and you're in denial.
If you date a pooner, you're gay because you're willing to accept a woman pretending to be a man and you want people to see the part where you're dating a dude.

In simple terms, any tranny romantic or sexual engagement, regardless of what they were born as, is fucking gay.

 

[nukebot]

Theoretically, couldn't this game have been done faster with RPG Maker as just a narrative driven adventure game with a few addons and plugins? I feel like someone could slap together some 2D shit in RPG Maker and Unreal/Unity/Gadot with already coded mechanics and get it done a thousand times faster. I don't know, because, I am only learning from this whole thread.

 

[Avenue]

If you give yourself tons of extra friction during the development process you're going to be _less_ likely to finish the game, not more

This is correct if you refuse to iterate upon your coding. I'd argue that delaying development of your game due to not being confident you can do everything 'the right way' introduces about as much friction as just starting and needing to adjust or improve systems along the way. Game development is just like any other skill, better to just start head first and systematically adjust/improve along the way, you take those skills with you to your next project.
But enfin, this is not the programming thread so ill stop spering out about this.

 

[SevenEleven]

I agree that in terms of programming excellence(tm) the Heartbound codebase isn't the best but to keep discussion fair I feel the need to highlight why this might be the case. Thor believes that coding quality shouldn't stand in the way of you making a game because there are highly rated games out there with absolutely horrific code.

And to be completely honest I think he is right on this point. An indie game shouldn't be judged based on industry best practices, its a passion project someone barely pushed past the finish line. Yeah you can judge him for claims of being such an epic hacker proceeded by creating spaghetti but that shouldn't take away from the message about (indie) games not needing top notch coding.
(Yes I am aware that there are limits to not caring about your code, in the end your game still needs to compile run on an average system, looking at you mr Yanderedev.)

This is true, and one of the things I think is absolutely undeniably good about Thor is that he encourages people to just go out and try to make something, even if it's shite.

That said, I think he internalizes this mentality and uses it as an excuse to not fix up his hard-to-maintain code. His game has been in development for about 8 years, and is about 7 years late to its original promised release date. His awful codebase is undeniably getting in the way of adding more content, slowing development to a crawl as he gets deeper into the project. His game was crowdfunded and technically has not been fully released yet, something you can easily attribute to the difficult to maintain code. In addition to that, he also claims to be an expert with experience in the industry, despite only having showed off sloppy work. I think that absolutely warrants criticism.

For reference, his big inspiration Undertale was only in development for 32 months. A shitty codebase simply matters less to a smaller game with a shorter development cycle.

 

[Tari]

Theoretically, couldn't this game have been done faster with RPG Maker as just a narrative driven adventure game with a few addons and plugins? I feel like someone could slap together some 2D shit in RPG Maker and Unreal/Unity/Gadot with already coded mechanics and get it done a thousand times faster. I don't know, because, I am only learning from this whole thread.

But he isn't able to kill his game whenever he wants by removing access to the save file (steam achievements) that way!

 

[Relinquish]

His Discord messages when /g/ discovered his Second Life account


He's talking about the Interview at Con where you can hear his real voice

 

[Shinkai]

Another super relevant Terry quote

R.I.P King Terry the Terrible

 

[fedoralordjish]

Running with Scissors also responded in the comments.
View attachment 6295432

rws is winning as always

 

[Stay Mad]

Theoretically, couldn't this game have been done faster with RPG Maker as just a narrative driven adventure game with a few addons and plugins? I feel like someone could slap together some 2D shit in RPG Maker and Unreal/Unity/Gadot with already coded mechanics and get it done a thousand times faster. I don't know, because, I am only learning from this whole thread.

Seeing as he is in the camp of "games are disposable slop that should generate money then be deleted and forgotten", if he actually was a 20 year industry vet and knew what he was doing, he could have made this shit so fucking fast with the tools that are available these days. He could hire a cheap artist to do the MS Paint pixelart, and use one of a hundred visual branching-story-structure tools that exist to pump this out in a year. I can't imagine he is doing anything crazy in-depth, and the slow development is purely a result of bad decisions from a lack of skill and experience, mixed with being an online personality that does a lot of talking instead of doing.

 

[Ducks Sorted in a Row]

This is correct if you refuse to iterate upon your coding.

Agreed, it's often worth "just getting it working" and then figuring out where the pain points are for adding new stuff and ironing them out specifically. That said, considering Thor seems to have blown way past 600 different global variables and at least one of his switch statements has over 1000 cases, I'd say he's not someone who follows the second half of this good practise, and I'm going to have to assume that his advice does NOT include the part where you refactor later down the line, since he doesn't implement that himself (I will also shut up now).

rws is winning as always

Not quite always, Postal III...

 

[fedoralordjish]

Not quite always, Postal III...

we are not talking about it

 

[Terror Sandwich]

that the games save file is the achievement list on steam so it is "Unpirateable"

So the game has only one save file and you literally can't "start a new save" without using another steam account and sharing the game through family share?
What a great system.
Not that anyone would ever want to replay this gross fucking game, but still, it's a retarded design.

And to be completely honest I think he is right on this point. An indie game shouldn't be judged based on industry best practices, its a passion project someone barely pushed past the finish line.

This is something I completely agree, as long as the game does what it's trying to do well and isn't broken, then it doesn't mater if it was made with spaghettis code in rpg maker, or if it was coded from scratch and can render 3d raytracing at 600fps on a SNES.
If it's good, it's good.

And there are so many examples of excellent games made by complete amateur programmers: Hollow Knight, Rain World, Cruelty Squad and of course Undertale.
However, the one thing they all have in common is that they were all great in some of their artistic designs: music, art, and/or unique game design. The people that made them are actual artists.
Ffs, Toby Fox is one of the best video game composers of all time. Who cares if he can't code when he drops banger after banger.
Thor seems to have no artistic skill whatsoever. Heartbound looks like shit, sounds like shit and it's literally just an earthbound clone. The only thing Thor has going for himself is his "epic codding skills" which, when compared to actual professionals, fucking suck.

 

[Oddity]

His Discord messages when /g/ discovered his Second Life account
View attachment 6295758
View attachment 6295766
He's talking about the Interview at Con where you can hear his real voice
View attachment 6295761
View attachment 6295762

He definitely lurks /g/ and maybe /v/. It's a matter of time before he might make an account here...

 

[Bob Barbas]

He definitely lurks /g/ and maybe /v/. It's a matter of time before he might make an account here...

I hope he does, I love it when cows try to join the cool kid's club.

 

[SFINAE]

It's a matter of time before he might make an account here...

His best course of action would be to pull a Rossmann and actually engage with the criticism (ignoring shit he can't/doesn't want to defend). Huge though.

 

[CaptainGarbage]

[Insert ten head ross dunking on nepobaby for 40 mins]

Wow, this is a literal how to on how to dunk on someone utterly and completely without targeting them specifically. Ross is a good man, a better man than me. I would have trashed the retard.

[Running with Scissors suplexing a malding furry dev's take]

A common RWS W. I'm so glad RWS posted this, it further backs up what I said in the other thread about developers wanting people to enjoy their games. Nepobaby some how has the take that developers want to watch their games die and be forgotten about. It's like saying that a painter would want to watch their paintings burn. Absolutely braindead.

He definitely lurks /g/ and maybe /v/. It's a matter of time before he might make an account here...

I swear I've seen him in /vg/ in /vgdg/ posting his furry game, but maybe not and it's just that furry trash looks like all furry trash. In any case, if he starts talking about JSON and refactoring fartbound any time soon, he probably has read the thread here. He's not ever mentioned JSON in any of the streams I watched and it was quite a number on 2x + skipping dogshit takes on unrelated trash. Plus all the comments in live chat sound and read like they are literal children, so I doubt his viewers would have that kind of knowledge. He could have mentioned it before but I seriously doubt it, if he has he's an even bigger retard than I gave him credit for.

~
Here's some spoiler hidden programming spergin, and I'll shut up about dev after this too, unless I find some crazy dumb shit that warrants that kind of post.

Spoiler: Code sperging while dunking on thor and fartbound

Holy shit, this looks like decompiled code that something like IDA would produce from a binary. How embarrassing.

That's actually a really good analogy.

I agree that in terms of programming excellence(tm) the Heartbound codebase isn't the best but to keep discussion fair I feel the need to highlight why this might be the case. Thor believes that coding quality shouldn't stand in the way of you making a game because there are highly rated games out there with absolutely horrific code.
And to be completely honest I think he is right on this point. An indie game shouldn't be judged based on industry best practices, its a passion project someone barely pushed past the finish line. Yeah you can judge him for claims of being such an epic hacker proceeded by creating spaghetti but that shouldn't take away from the message about (indie) games not needing top notch coding.
(Yes I am aware that there are limits to not caring about your code, in the end your game still needs to compile run on an average system, looking at you mr Yanderedev.)

If you're new to programming sure, use whatever that helps you make the thing your trying to make. The main thing for new devs is ask questions and search things before you commit to something so large, get people to take a look at your demo code before you do something like mald and commit to it for years. Even if you're not new; use all the arrays and switch cases you want. I don't really care what you subject yourself to, you do you. However, I can and will point out that retardation whenever I see it. I know what it's like to be given a codebase and having to retroactively edit, maintain, and add new things into code bases like that, it's not fun or enjoyable at all, it's actually quite painful and a huge man-hour waste. I don't wish to see anyone subject themselves to that kind of torture, yes, even a lolcalf like thor. I even went out of my way to give advice on both how it should and shouldn't be done. I could have just left the entire post as the "fun roast summary", but I didn't because I wanted to help anyone reading it. Imo, it was extraordinarily fair to a 20(+?) year games industry vet. He's honestly lucky I wasn't meaner and I really could have been. I was more specifically trying (probably should have made this more clear) that his code style was the entire reason his game has been stuck in limbo all this time. I even said "I have a feeling this is why his game is taking so long to make." That was really the whole point of the post and expounding on why I felt that way.
-
If he had used something like JSON at the start, or right after the demo was made, the game would have been finished and released already. And it's not like JSON is some magically super dev secret, even the fucking gamemaker forums have tons of posts about it and why you should use JSON, specifically for games like fartbound too. This is the kind of thing that really casts doubts on his experience level, someone with that level of experience would absolutely know about JSON or at the very least know enough to search for solutions before committing to such an array filled, switch-case atrocity. This would never be a go-to solution for someone even 2 years into programming let alone someone in the industry for 20(+?) years. Shit, my wife can write better code and that's because she's had to listen to me sperg about code by being my rubber ducky for decades, (yes im old). Programming can be osmosis-able via spoken word, given enough time. If he really was anywhere near game devs for that long, he'd have heard enough war stories to, at the very least ask questions and use google. It makes me question not only him, but bliztard as a whole. I really do feel like he's coasted his entire career and life, and never had anyone say anything bad to him or his processes because of his dad's position at bliztard. After bliztard, he's only held jobs for relatively small amounts of time, which to me proves the guy doesn't know what he's talking about and gets dunked on at work so badly that he has to change jobs. I've been around long enough to have seen the type and even hired + fired the same kind before.
-
He mentions Undertale is a gigantic switch statement and how bad that is, but then goes and does essentially the same thing. This is the problem with his statements, they are incongruent. I think he's saying things because he's heard them before but doesn't understand why they are actually said. If he understood why that kind of development is bad, he would have never written it that way in the first place. I have no issue with Undertale's code, the guy never really programmed anything before, you can't expect someone like Toby to write greatness. Again, mind you, mald/thor is the dude that keeps championing he's been in the industry for (over?) 20 years. Sure make your first game terribly, that's no issue. Hell make your first 100 games terribly, but at some point you have to try and strive for greatness, or even just slightly better, hell, strive for fuckin mediocrity. Lord knows his code is less than mediocre. Otherwise you're literally insane. My real problem is that he claims he's some industry vet while pumping out the hottest of dog water. He really shouldn't be propping himself up as a guru of anything besides furry sex models, if he didn't want to get his code torn apart by someone who knows more. If he was saying, "yeah I don't really program at all and all my code is really bad, pls don't reproduce" I'd really have no reason to trash his code and I honestly wouldn't. I mean fuck, his messaging would be so better received if he said "If I can do it while writing this trash, you can do it too" But that kind of statement wouldn't jive with the view he's trying to project onto himself and the world about his 1337 h4x0r sk!llz. The problem really is the "hey guys i'm toootally credentialed and toootally amazing. you should listen to me because I've been around for sooo long, btw did i mention my dad and i worked for blizzard." shtick. That shit is annoying, exploitive and deserves every bit of criticism. In my opinion this kind of dual-action tom fuckery actually dilutes his whole messaging about anyone can and should make games. If only he'd have made himself out to be a fucking retard trying to make a game originally, I don't even think this thread would exist and his take on SKG wouldn't have been met with such opposition.

Theoretically, couldn't this game have been done faster with RPG Maker as just a narrative driven adventure game with a few addons and plugins? I feel like someone could slap together some 2D shit in RPG Maker and Unreal/Unity/Gadot with already coded mechanics and get it done a thousand times faster. I don't know, because, I am only learning from this whole thread.

You're more right than wrong. I don't know enough about GameMaker or RPGMaker to know for sure, but yeah his code isn't doing him any favors on that front. I know for certain I could program a game like his in a weekend using raw-c++,ue4/ue5/raw python, and I have via game-jams. Fuck, any random weekend game-jammer would and could out publish thor multiple times over. (A game jam is a friendly competition where people come together to create video games in a short amount of time, usually within a day or a weekend, sometimes weeks or months. in fact many games started off as game-jam projects then got polished and published)

This is true, and one of the things I think is absolutely undeniably good about Thor is that he encourages people to just go out and try to make something, even if it's shite.

That said, I think he internalizes this mentality and uses it as an excuse to not fix up his hard-to-maintain code. His game has been in development for about 8 years, and is about 7 years late to its original promised release date. His awful codebase is undeniably getting in the way of adding more content, slowing development to a crawl as he gets deeper into the project. His game was crowdfunded and technically has not been fully released yet, something you can easily attribute to the difficult to maintain code. In addition to that, he also claims to be an expert with experience in the industry, despite only having showed off sloppy work. I think that absolutely warrants criticism.

For reference, his big inspiration Undertale was only in development for 32 months. A shitty codebase simply matters less to a smaller game with a shorter development cycle.

I completely agree about the encouragement sentiment. Like I said above in response to Avenue, I think that kind of messaging would be much more meaningful if he touted himself as a newbie not a professional, imo. The whole "see guys im just like you" actually goes really far. But it is a good thing, no doubt.
-
I personally don't think he's smart enough to know how to fix it himself and can't be burdened to ask people because he's too proud and has sniffed his dad's and his own farts for far too long. The dude can't even be bothered to search for solutions before he acts and commits to something. Not searching before acting upon and committing to it long term is exactly the kind of thing that's unforgivable to me while he's expounding for the 9001'th time he's a 20 year game industry vet.

View attachment 6295761

Guy seems super self-conscious about his career, weight, and voice. Interesting. I wonder if the whole furry and tranny thing really boils down to self hate.

 

[Chernabog3000]

He's obviously fucking those ferrets. That's the most weird thing about this dude for me. Owning 5 fucking ferrets or whatever the fuck is one thing. Being a ferret furry is another. Mix those 2 things and there is no quicker way for me to assume you fuck ferrets. Not that that was much of a guessing game. I mean he may not actually being fucking them. But there's just no way there isn't something scandalous going on with the pet ferrets.

Also from what I recall didn't his dad also work at Blizzard? Dude got generational degeneracy in his dna.