For Ron Gilbert:

1. Was using a pixel art in "Thimbleweed Park" your very first choice or did you consider some kind of stylized 3D, like in "The Cave"? What are the pros and cons of each approach in the project like this?
   


2. What was more important while designing the "Thimbleweed Park": to innovate and push the genre forward or to preserve that warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia? How hard is it to resist the sweet taste of member berries?
   

Pronounce my name as Tomash Roozhanskee, or check how to say it here

For Patrick Wyatt:
Regarding the prevention of cheating, how much of a difference does encrypting gameplay network traffic realistically make? I often hear it is important, but it seems to me it would only catch the lowest hanging fruit.

For anyone on the panel:

When debugging your code, are there obviously shortcomings in the debuggers you use? Are there any obvious things that debuggers should do to make debugging easier?

For anyone:
Game development and programming can be quite stressful and anxiety inducing at times, how do you tackle those situations?

Question for Jonathan Blow:
You sometimes talk about meditation in your lectures but don't really go into specifics, like what kind you do and such. Could explain your meditation practices in more detail?

For writer-designer-programmer hybrids on the board, what routines or habits do you use to balance each of those responsibilities?

For Jon, 1) what were some of your inspirations for The Witness? Was Thoreau's Walden a "source", by any chance. 2) Spoiler Alert! What came first? Drawing lines in the environment, or drawing lines as puzzles.


For everyone: what is the best way to break into the game industry today? Many companies say they will only take those with experience, yet how are we to gain experience, if we can't get hired into a studio? Can learning a complicated personal project, such as Handmade Hero, actually be an effective way to gain that experience? How does that look from an employer's standpoint?


Thanks everyone and especially Casey for everything you've done!

Nevermind.

To everyone:

This is a bit of a three-for-one, but they are all related so maybe that counts as one.

I wondered what your personal experience with the emotional and mental health struggles of long term game development have been like. What strategies have you taken to manage these types of issues and finish the game? Have you ever not been able to finish a project simply because of emotional or mental health reasons?

Questions for Pat:

For the Guild Wars updater (taking two files, finding the delta, compressing the delta and then after receiving on the client, applying to the client files): how did you approach programming it? I've used rsync before, but I wouldn't know where to start programming it.

You mentioned that in Guild Wars, when you were rolling-upgrading the servers that the servers needed to support both the new and the old protocols. More often than not, was this only for upgrading between one version to another? Or was it a design decision to always be backwards compatible?

Questions for Tommy

How is Nycrama, your crowd-source testing tool, coming along? Any interesting issues either with the tool or what it discovered?

Regarding your "at the top" rule for saving stuff in SWF files, what happens if an older object (like a tree from the list) needed to be deleted? I realize you would remove it, save it again and bring it into the editor, but was there a programmatic way to correct all the changes in the level editor? Or did it need to be manually done for each instance of that object?

Did the .DAT files that were shipped with Super Meat Boy contain the SWF files? Or did you have a more efficient way of storing the final assets?

Questions for Jon

When you make JAI available, will you work with developers and iterate changes to both the language and the standard libraries? Will you hesitate on breaking backwards compatibility? From observing both you and Casey's rants about C/C++ standards, it seems other than making dumb decisions, that not wanting to break existing code tends to limit the language from improving. Do you agree with this observation?

Questions for Ron

I've read "limitation breeds creativity". Having shipped games on hardware with such limiting resources, do you in some ways miss working on these platforms? Do you find having almost too much resources today?


Edit: Sorry Casey, forgot about what you had asked. Brian from Vancouver, Canada.

Question for Mr. Jon Blow
So since the witness had been released I always be amazed on how the game is good.
But I'm wondering how you menage to find if the player have made the right puzzle solution?
It would be good if you discuss how the algorithm work.
And a second think, how you verified that in the challange the random generated puzzles are solvabale?