Post-Braid Project Update.
At the GDC this year, I gave a talk at the Independent Games Summit about indie prototyping, and how it differs from mainstream-industry prototyping. One of my main points was about scheduling: you can’t schedule insight. It comes when it comes; so if you tie your prototyping process to a specific schedule (“X weeks of prototyping and then we start the real game”, for example), you will probably not give the proper insight the chance to blossom. Sometimes you need to sit on an idea for months, or years, before it is ready.
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[One of the main differences between indie prototyping and the mainstream, is that mainstream prototyping is almost always scheduled, with no way around it. So they don't have the luxury of letting an idea sit.]
In a different session of that conference, I demoed a project that I had been working on during breaks from Braid. At that time I felt it was a very promising project, with a lot of great aspects to it; but it wasn’t quite a great game. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to improve it. If it had been my main project at the time, and I were pressed to release it, I would have been disappointed, feeling that I had missed the boat.
It doesn’t feel good to be excited about a project but also know that it sort of sucks. For a little bit I got the idea that dynamic music generation was the thing needed to make the gameplay compelling, but this was a misguided notion; after some experimentation I saw that, and just let the game sit.
Yesterday I picked it up again after not looking at it for at least a month; suddenly, I just knew what to do. I only spent about 2 hours working on it, but the ideas just all came through. So now I have a big roadmap of things to do that will improve the game greatly. I don’t know if that will become the final iteration of the game, but wherever it ends up, it’ll be much better than it was back when I was distressing about it.
The new ideas all seemed to burst forth suddenly, but I know they happened because my mind had been subconsciously working at the problem all this time. The ideas aren’t forced or contrived, because I didn’t force myself to sit down and “come up with good ideas”. The ideas are natural and they fit.
Your subconscious is powerful. Let it work for you!
[Let it be noted that this screenshot is still in the Icky Prototype Graphics Phase. It is not intended to look good.]
May 21st, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Here I thought you were going to reveal something about the next game, but instead I’m supposed to be patient and wait until my own flash of insight. Disappointing!
Good point, anyway.
May 21st, 2007 at 10:54 pm
I realized after writing this entry that it was awfully … vague … about the actual design. It reminds me of one of Casey’s updates, which I think are kind of ridiculous.
But, I realized that I don’t really know how to explain the new ideas in a way that would really make sense, yet. You saw some pieces of the game at the GDC, so you know what it’s sort of about. I think that if you read the new ideas, you would be, like, “wtf, that is exactly like the game I saw.” And it is, sort of. But it’s just a shift in perspective that lines things up, turning something pretty good into something really good. Things like that can be too subtle to talk about effectively, and yet make all the difference in the finished game.
The most concrete I can get is that, in the new version, the game is very much about setting up unique set-pieces for the player to encounter, inasmuch as that is possible given the abstract nature of the gameplay. Whereas before my big emphasis was on noticing subtlety — the game would sort of ooze you into a mode, and the idea is for the player to notice the subtle differences between 30 seconds ago and now. Well, that is kind of interesting, but I think it is also really hard to get players to feel that without being really heavy-handed. So now, it’s more like, every once in a while the player enters into a new situation that doesn’t get slowly oozed into; it has a distinct beginning and end, thus providing some closure, and it makes more obvious what the things are that they’re intended to notice, and what space they are playing in.
But yeah, that is still really vague. Even after I put in my new list of changes (which is going to take a while since Braid is the #1 project), to a casual observer, the resulting game will probably not look different from the prototype for Raspberry… but in reality they are very different games.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Too bad the game as submitted is called “Eight Dots”!
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:05 am
Hopefully they, uhh, let me change that.
May 28th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
I think you meant Casey’s updates are kind of _fabulous_, not ridiculous… just a typo, I’m sure