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.
I played through part of the game at the art of play, and I have to say I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to play through the rest.
But why the camera is always statically centered on the player? The centered composition seems unrefined in comparison to the rest of the game, and I hate when a game just jerks the camera around left and right as you move without treating the composition more dynamically and fluidly. sing time? Could the camera at least have an ease in and out to its tracking of the player?
The camera has bugged me for a while, but I always find more important things to work on. In recent weeks we have added some more environmental cueing for the camera to make things smoother (for example, when entering or leaving the house).
But part of the problem is, it’s not exactly clear to me how to make the camera system better without turning it into a big AI system that behaves wrongly sometimes, or without doing tons of markup on all the levels. If I had time to really think about it, though, I might come up with a good solution.
I haven’t played much of the new build, but the part that I have is the Epilogue, and the camera transitions here just don’t feel right. You get to the edge of the screen, and the camera quickly moves towards the next, but then it slows down, and it is this slow down that makes it feel bad.
When you reach the edge of the screen, you want to see the next screen; you’re done with the last screen. When the camera slows down, it makes the fact that you have to wait for the camera transition to be over extremely noticeable. I would love for the transition to happen at a constant speed (with maybe some springiness on the very end, if it feels necessary).
Part of it might be the way I’m playing, though. I walked to the edge of the screen, then stopped moving because I knew I had reached the edge and needed to wait to see what lay before me. I tried again later and kept the character in motion and the transition didn’t seem as bad.
Wait… how did you revise the text if it’s already gone through translation?
– Casey
The translation isn’t entirely a batch process; things get actively updated a bit. Though, I bet the translators would get pissed off at me if I changed every string in the game.
That’s pretty cool – I didn’t realize it worked like that. Having never been involved in the whole translation thing, I had assumed that it was this one-shot deal, so you basically had to hit content freeze (or at least “text freeze”, I guess 🙂 before you sent things to the translation service.
– Casey
I think it works that way in theory.
I am one of the few who loved the Oddworld games. Intelligent side scrollers are the shit. Ive watched the arguements. This game seems to be awesome in a strange new way… (or brave new way)
I was wondering if you have a release date?
No release date yet. We are almost done with the game, but then it has to go through the console certification process, and we’re not in control of how long that takes.
Jonathon, I’m very curious on how you make the rewinding effects and such for your game. Could you possibly explain a little insight?
Do you mean the actual functionality of rewinding, or the visual effects? The visual effects are pretty basic right now (we are working on something a bit better) so it seems unlikely you are asking about that…
The functionality of rewinding. How it is in Braid seems very effectiva and flawless and I’m just interested to see some of the measures you took to make it so good. But, I completely understand if it would be giving away too important of aspects of the game and you didn’t want to explain! 🙂
But, it seems like you’d make an arrray of Tim’s, and… whatever from there; I’m trying to look at it from a programmers perspective.
Each frame of gameplay gets recorded by serializing all the entities into a buffer that gets saved.
Entities that are “constant” (will never change after the level starts, like walls and stuff) don’t get serialized.
To keep the serializations small, the recording works like mpeg video P-frames and I-frames, or whatever they are called. Every 60 frames there is an I-frame, which records all the state for all the entities. The in-between frames are P-frames, which are just diffs from the previous I-frame. So to decode the world state for any given frame index, you need the P-frame for that index, and the nearest previous I-frame.
But then, to make the I-frames small, they are also diffed against the default state for the entity type. So if you construct a Cloud, without putting it in the world or anything, it will have certain default values in everything, and what’s in the I-frame is just a delta from that.
To avoid saving tons of data, Particles are deterministic and get computed from scratch every frame. This is a little bit of a pain in the ass since it has meant the particles are pretty slow (to the extent we have had performance problems on the xbox 360, one of the main factors has been particles. [The other one is ogg vorbis decompression.])
There are some other mechanisms in place for where particles can’t be deterministic, like the backgrounds of world 6; but they require more memory to record.
Oh! Thanks for sharing that with us.
This game sounds pretty fun and interesting. Am I going to need to buy an xbox to play it?
Maybe you should put a little disclaimer on the site that says when Braid is prospected to be released and on what platforms it will be, since you get asked about it so much
(It will come out on PC after the Xbox360 release which is in the next few months)
I’ve just played for a half-hour or so, but I was really impressed by the game. The time rewinding mechanic is pure genius and the gameplay seems really well balanced.
The art direction is outstanding, but one thing: Tim.
Why did you choose this Harry Potter/music director-like guy?
I got a strange feeling that he didn’t really well stuck along with the rest of the artistic direction (more fantasy-oriented I would say). I would have picked some non-human creature as a protagonist instead, like Abe in the Oddworld series.
Jonathan, did you just pick him up as another Super Mario Bros reference (a plumber – a human being that looks out of place in fantasy world) or there’s something else?
Thanks.
I’m glad you like the game so far!
Without the character being a realistic person, the story-part of the game just wouldn’t make any sense. This will become increasingly obvious as one plays further through the game.
There are a lot of reasons for the suit and tie. Being out of place is definitely one of them. (The other reasons are perhaps more important, but I don’t want to go into them right now).
One of the things I wanted to do with Braid was to take a genre and attitude that is typically very childish (bright-sky happy platformer) and make it more sober and adult. I think platformer games have enough animal and creature mascots, and the persistence of this is part of the infantilization of the genre.
Anyway, it’ll probably make more sense further into the game!
-J.
Looking forward to go on with my quest then! 😉
Thanks.