this looks amazing, nice way to "reveal" complexity in 3 layers, only when needed

Nifty. Trey Smith is totally channelling Steve. Man, I've missed that enthusiasm. 😂

I found this really disheartening. I'm almost certain that precisely zero of the "never been done before in a game maker" claims are true. That was an immediate red flag for me. The actual programming features they're building are, well... • a slightly nicer UX (eg: animated preview thumbnails) for the "Behaviours" from Director and Flash • a slightly nicer UX (eg: live editing) for the "triggers" of GameMaker / RPGMaker / StarEdit / Fear & Loathing / every game builder tool. • and then you bottom out in a pretty gnarled scripting language in a tiny little feature poor editor window. What I found most disheartening, though, were all the "hyper-causal" games being demoed and discussed, and the implication that this tool is your ticket to the top of the app store. I don't mind casual games, but these all seemed woefully unpolished... almost mass-manufactured. Like a resurgence of shovelware. Call me a snob, but I like my games — from itch.io to AAA — to be finely crafted. I didn't see passion for games anywhere in this video — I just saw passion for the games market.

Yes, the reality distortion was strong! The only novelty I saw was in the semantics (as far as I could tell) of their node language: not data-flow, not a state machine, not a flowchart. Instead it looks like you start at the initial point on each behavior iteration and walk down the DAG. (So a little bit like Max Cycling though Max is probably best thought of as a bunch of objects that send with gray wires as pathways where symbolic messages might be could be sent and dashed wires for more continuous data-flowish signals.) Moreover, the whole system looks to suffer from the common problem of hidden data and state, which naturally leads to the what-the-hell-is-going-on so endemic to programming.

the startup world is like that, every launch is a revolution that will change the world. I've seen most of those parts in other places but they are put together in a nice package and allow to create powerful things for non technical people, I many times wish programmers created for ourselves what we create for game developers

Mind with 50 years of interactive computing behind us, anything new is more likely bad than good. (Though I do think Buildbox's node thing is pretty interesting and might work out well for them.) In fairness Trey Smith, one can simultaneously present well, exude enthusiasm, overblow the horn of promise, know it's part of the game, recognize shortcomings, and hopefully be aware of it all. Many of the best do.

nobody recognizes the shortcomings in the launching event

I could not agree more. A launch is not the time to post the front page of the issue tracker!

the casual gaming part could be managing expectations of what's possible with the tool or just recognizing that there's a niche where the tool works

Yes, I think he played that well both to customers and investors. The best things (presentations, products, what have you) tend to be at the edge of get-hype, get-out, and cough-bullshit.