Braid playthrough with director’s commentary
At GameCity in Nottingham, UK in September 2010, I played through select portions of Braid and gave commentary. I had been under the impression the session was officially recorded, and I’ve been waiting for an official video to hit the internet, but at this point I am not sure this was done. Fortunately someone in the audience had a handheld camera, and has posted the footage to YouTube. This is by far the most I’ve said about Braid in one place…
April 3rd, 2011 at 9:18 pm
That’s fantastic! Do let us know if the “official” video comes up.
April 3rd, 2011 at 10:25 pm
Brilliant.
I love the way that some of the puzzles were really well thought out – and others presented solutions, combinations and consequences that were unexpected.
Looking forward to The Witness.
Thanks for sharing
–Phil
April 4th, 2011 at 6:17 am
I was really hoping you’d talk about the final puzzle piece in “Over the gap.” For me this was without question the most difficult puzzle piece in the game — and I think the only one whose solution I discovered almost completely accidentally (and therefore the one from which I gained the least satisfaction).
Thank you for sharing the video! It was incredibly entertaining to hear your thoughts on the design of the game. I feel like I’ve learned a great deal about general game design theory from this talk. Braid is a fantastic game that has haunted me for years.
April 4th, 2011 at 8:37 am
Brilliant!
Do you do any other talks? Would you be interested in talking at my university to Games Design and Games Programming students? (In the UK)
April 4th, 2011 at 11:45 am
I just finished watching this, i really enjoyed it and as i closed the fullscreen window i noticed this link in the side:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpWdLXGiZk&feature=related
Apparently your not the only “artist” in your family
by that I mean that i consider braid to be a work of art.
Btw how do you feel about people borrowing your design concepts? =) (cant come with anything concrete at the moment since I’m doing a 3D fps physics puzzle game, so its a rhetorical question =) )
all that said, I’m a huge fan of braid and can’t wait for the witness to come out =)
April 4th, 2011 at 10:05 pm
This reminded me how impressively you used unstoppable reason to create this pristine and succinct game. Although some of your reasoning, like when you talked about breaking the pattern of the puzzle boards, seems to be a vague after thought compared to the rigor you apply to the rest of the game. Fantastic game no matter what and it was great hearing your thoughts behind it.
April 8th, 2011 at 6:05 am
That was intriguing to watch
I found it particularly interesting to see the original Braid prototype game as a comparison to the final product.
Hopefully, the official recording will appear sometime soon!
May 2nd, 2011 at 7:32 pm
Warning: Spoilers
One question, what song starts playing in the last level after you touch the princess (by that I mean that you get half way through the level and then everything reverses)? I have looked through the soundtrack with no luck….
May 4th, 2011 at 8:17 am
Fantastic presentation. Did we miss out on much after the recording cut out? I really like how you went through mistakes too. It shows how much you thought about it and are still able to critic your own work, and admit you could do better. The concepts and thoughts you went through also filled us in with valuable information about production! Presentations and commentary like yours are what inspired me to do my own commentary for a presentation I did for an assignment in uni. I also wanted to go through original thoughts/concepts and mistakes. http://youtu.be/S8ZiRKG5KBc
May 5th, 2011 at 5:57 am
I was in the audience for this talk (I remember sitting next to Adam Atomic and being too nervous to say hello, too!) and had also been waiting for the official video to be posted. It’s such a shame that so little from the event has actually been released to the public, as I enjoyed the openness of Game City a great deal and had wanted to catch up on the talks I’d missed.
In any case, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for a very insightful and humorous talk. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to make it to your Witness reveal, but I’m very much looking forward to exploring that world when it’s ready, too.
May 18th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I’m writing a PhD dissertation which discusses Braid in relation to the video game as work of art. Your recent talk at Game City resonated with an article I’m writing concerning Braid, psychology, phenomenology, and the work of art. I would be very interested to study Braid’s prototypes in detail, similar to reading an literary author’s early drafts or correspondences. Please contact me if this is a possibility. Thanks.
January 1st, 2012 at 9:21 am
In the video you say (at 22:13) regarding the two initially unobtainable pieces in The Cloud Bridge (level 2-2), that “I changed my mind about this late in development, and I wanted to change this level [to make the pieces obtainable, but] this level had to go somewhere… it would have been a massive rearrangement, like four levels, I waited too long.”
It seems to me that this should be pretty simple to fix – in fact you could fix it via a small patch, even today (very Braid-like, no?). All that needs to change is which pieces are acquired where. Obtaining the second two pieces requires that two other specific pieces (the ones depicting the platform) have been obtained previously. So simply place the platform pieces in level 2-1 or in the first half of 2-2. 5 puzzle pieces are acquired prior to reaching the two unobtainable pieces, so there is plenty of opportunity.
January 2nd, 2012 at 12:43 pm
It’s much more difficult than that, because there are not many puzzle pieces that are acquirable before you hit that puzzle frame; I think there are 4. So to keep the current way it’s set up (where the platform is split across two puzzle pieces), half the puzzle pieces would have platform on them. Then, you look at them in the mostly-empty frame, and it is much more blatant, more obvious.
Fixing this somehow involves moving the frame to somewhere later in the game, but the only other place for it is 2-4, which is maybe too late (one function of these frames is to be a sort of break time to help alternate what activity is being performed, and to give the player an idea of progress so far, and, well, what is the point of that if you put it at the end of the world just before the player goes back to the house where all the puzzles are, anyway?)
It can’t go in 2-3 because 2-3 is a tightly-integrated one-screen level.
So basically all of world 2 would have to be redesigned into something completely different. I didn’t have the energy to do that and I felt that what I come up with could well be worse anyway, all things considered. The ideal would have just been to make the opposite choice early on and let world 2 organically grow into something different.
Game design, when done in a high-quality detail-oriented way, is really complicated.