The Art of Braid, Part II.
David Hellman has made his next posting about the art process for Braid. You can read it here.
It’s interesting the way this one follows a bunch of early concept drawings that iterated on one of the early programmer-art screenshots. I look at some of these and can envision entire alternate histories of How Braid Might Look Very Different Today If We’d Made Different Decisions or Had More Coffee One Morning or Something.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:27 am
Looking at these, I think you two should have a Braid-inspired series of desktop backgrounds made. I know I’d download one.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:25 am
Yeah, that would be nice. I liked the way the concept art progressed into the final art, looking back it seems like it has changed a lot, but I definitely like the final result best.
I know most of it was ‘just’ concept art, but did you want the game to become a bit more abstract when you just started adding proper art? Abstract is perhaps the wrong word, but it seems there has been a big focus on surreality and style.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:56 am
We were definitely aiming for that. David can probably say more about this but I had a couple of personal goals: (1) Surreal but not “wacky melting Dali clocks” surreal. (2) The art should add to the game, not just be a slave to the game by illustrating it more nicely.
This becomes clearer when you can actually play the game, but the story is about thinking about stuff. So it seemed like a good idea to have graphics to match that overall approach. “Mental landscape” is a phrase I tossed around a lot.
March 15th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
The art showcased here is quite stunning and I can’t wait to have the chance to actually play the game! I have read and heard several times that Braid is not tile-based… I am currently in the design phase of a 2d platformer built on the XNA framework and am very interested to know how you achieved this look without tiles. If you aren’t able to divulge such information, do you have any resources that I could reference? I would love to works towards something that has the dynamic and vibrant look of Braid. Thanks for your time and again, I can’t wait to see more of your game!
March 15th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I’m not sure that there is much to say… they are just pieces that are not tiles, splatted on top of each other. Sometimes in many layers. There’s not really anything tricky about that part.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for the quick reply! I guess my question would be, how are the pieces arranged? Are they uniform in size, or are the sizes random? How are the pieces stored as game elements… Like, are the pieces placed on a sprite sheet of sorts and loaded from there? I’m sorry to be so specific, but I am just trying to get a better idea for how this was achieved. Thanks again!
March 16th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Erik, I’m not totally sure I understand your question. But yeah, abstraction and surrealism were important. Like Jon said, the worlds in Braid are “mental landscapes” or “thought conjecture worlds”. We wanted to suggest that somehow with the visuals. One way of doing that was leaving certain areas less finished/more abstract. You know, a drawing that is highly refined across its surface can approach photorealism. It creates a “reality” that, within its borders, is thorough and consistent. But a drawing that doesn’t reach to the edges of the page, that looks sketchier in places, remains a drawing. You look at it and imagine the hand of the artist. You know it was made by a person and expresses something about that person. That’s the sort of thing we were going for with the graphics for Braid. It’s supposed to be a “created world,” an expression of a thinker, not a world whose integrity, veracity and permanence we never question.
Josh, in the next “Art of Braid” or the one after that, I’ll show what some of the individual pieces look like. They’re all rectangles, but with transparency so the image within the rectangle is irregularly shaped. And they can be any size.
March 19th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Thanks, yes, that answered my question.