Comments on: The PartnerNet version of Braid has been updated.

By: Edo

Edo — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:41:31 +0000

Looking forward to go on with my quest then! 😉

Thanks.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:24:42 +0000

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.

By: Edo

Edo — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:43:44 +0000

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.

By: Leroy

Leroy — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:44:57 +0000

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)

By: Meeg

Meeg — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:39:39 +0000

This game sounds pretty fun and interesting. Am I going to need to buy an xbox to play it?

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:05:01 +0000

Oh! Thanks for sharing that with us.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:38:28 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:28:48 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:31:35 +0000

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…

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:00:03 +0000

Jonathon, I’m very curious on how you make the rewinding effects and such for your game. Could you possibly explain a little insight?