I first mentioned the Kotaku Game Club here a year ago. After being active for a short time, the game club went on a long hiatus. But now, Brian Crecente has revived it. This week they will be playing Beyond Good and Evil, a highly-acclaimed game that you can download from Steam for $10.

If you’re interested in participating, you’ll want to download and play the game soon; they’re discussing the game in four parts, and the first discussion happens on July 7.

In case I didn’t make it obvious enough, the Kotaku link introducing the new Game Club assignment is here.

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It’s been a while since the blog was updated. I’m not dead — we’ve just been very busy finishing the game.

(This doesn’t mean Braid has passed certification yet. It means Braid has been allowed to go into certification. But it does mean we are done with the game. The XBLA version, at least.)

David Hellman has posted yet another entry in the Art of Braid series.

This posting is about the House where you start, and where you keep returning after visiting each world. We did a ton of work on this. It’s by far the most complicated level in the game.

A pleasant surprise! This music-oriented 8-way-shooter by Jonathan Mak was originally released on the PS3 last year.

Here is the Steam page for the game.

I highly recommend it.

The build of Braid on PartnerNet has been updated to a newer one. This one is less-crashy; it has some cosmetic changes, and some gameplay changes (the player now collides as his full height, the last puzzle on world 6 has been redesigned), and some text changes (the text has been lightly revised everywhere, and a piece of the Epilogue has been rewritten.)

To play this one, just delete your old version of Braid off the xbox and download the new one. Your saved game will carry over.

David Hellman has posted a new Art of Braid update. This time he talks about the title screen (which is one of the nicest parts of Braid), and how he took it from the original Programmer Art version into what we have today.

I’ve also added an Art of Braid link to the sidebar; it goes to an index of all the pages.

(If such a place exists.)

Please keep in mind that there are a lot of small tweaks to be done in terms of presentation. This build is only a day old, and already a number of things have been done to make the game look and play better. But if you don’t mind title screens that are slightly off-center (ugh!), give the current build a whirl.

 

Jason Rohrer has updated his Game Design Sketchbook column with a new game called Idealism that you can download and play. He also explains the concepts he meant to embed into the game design.

In other news, Jason’s NYU speech has been rescheduled for Friday, May 2, at 3:30pm.

In case anyone is reading this blog right now, we see on Game Design Advance that Jason Rohrer’s talk at NYU today has been postponed due to illness. Get better soon, dude!

David Hellman has posted a new Art of Braid, where he shows the process of revision we went through for the first castle in the game.

 

If you want to know why Braid has taken so long to get done, it’s because we want through this revision process for pretty much everything.