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.

“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?

It is excellent. It is brilliant. Everyone’s different, surely there are people who won’t like it, but for me it was top notch.

Yeah, exactly. If you read the Snowden leaks to learn the details of what some of their actual capabilities are (smuggling flawed keys into the DH exchange for most major web browsers for example), it makes this stuff look like kids in their basements fucking around.

I feel like this is kind of the amateur-hour stuff. It’s certainly dangerous, but in comparison to a lot of state-actor activities (or even committed-amateur activities), this kind of supply-chain attack is pretty blatant and easy to spot. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy to spot – I just mean would be trivial to volunteer and contribute some minimal fixes and enhancements to some open source project, and then at one point smuggle in a zero-day that will basically never be detected unless someone detects the intrusion itself and then works backwards from there with a ton of time to spend on it.

If you’ve ever looked at the obfuscated C contest it should be obvious that this kind of thing can be made completely invisible if you know what you’re doing. Some of the interactions and language features that lead to problems are basically impossible for a casual viewer to see, even if they’re paying attention, and the attack surface is massive and the amount of attention that goes into checking it for weird subtle vulnerabilities is minuscule.