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Comment by npn | Hacker News Reader

Eh? It is not his duty to public his language. It is not like publish the language is the end of story, you need to deal with the flood of feedback, that not always from good wills. The drama could cause him to lost time, effort and motivation, and hinder his game dev process.

It is pretty understandable he needs to hold back before he releases his new game, or even more.

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If he raises interest in the language by saying it will be open source (which he did), I think it's fair for people to dismiss the language until he does actually open source it.

Putting stakes into a language that will essentially be DOA, like the author does seems like a crazy decision.

you are not wrong. but like I said it is entirely his choice, which is also reasonable considering the budget Order of the Sinking Star already burned (I heard it was at AA level already)

it is not like he can get the funding via opensourcing the language to cover the development. what he and his company needs is the game to finish and release and get enough profit to cover all the expense. making a new engine is already risky enough.

you just can't ask a man to ruin his whole career/life because it benefits you.

I'm not asking him to open source anything. I've given up any illusions that that would be happening ~10 years ago.

I'm just cautioning other people to put any stakes into a language that's from its organizational bones doomed to fail for any outside party.

While it is not open sourced yet (to be honest it is not as important as you think, many programming languages are mostly implemened by a dozen people, even a single creator is not rare) it is not like he forbids anyone to ask for being beta testers, just like the blog writer.

Mostly a note, but the game was released 2 weeks ago. We'll see how well it sells, but it seems to be getting good reviews on Steam so far.

Yeah, even when the choice itself might be exempt from critique, stating one thing and then doing another surely isn't. Misleading posturing which can't be proven to be dishonesty but is impossible to differentiate from it seems surprisingly common for reasons I can't wrap my head around.

This happened years ago with the V programming language making a bunch of claims about the existing feature set that were not accurate and future roadmap that did not at all reflect how things went down, and it was all very bizarre and seemingly avoidable if the developer were truly committed to communicating better.

Another development process this reminds me of is the development by modders to port Oblivion to the Skyrim engine. After maybe a decade, the developers made a huge deal at the end of 2024 that they were going to finally release by the end of 2025 and made a lot of noise about it, but by the fall when no more details had been announced, someone asked in Discord about it and the lead developer directly said that it was not going to happen, with an announcement that it was "delayed" to 2026 not getting made until after people posted screenshots of this. We're now in October of 2026 and it's not clear it will be out this year, but trying to give feedback on the communication gets construed shouted down with exhortations to "let them cook". As far as I can tell, a large number of people seem to think that a suggestion that it's fine for the developers to just not keep announcing when things will be done so that they can take as much time as they want without confusing people is synonymous with telling them they need to release immediately.

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