(If such a place exists.)
Please keep in mind that there are a lot of small tweaks to be done in terms of presentation. This build is only a day old, and already a number of things have been done to make the game look and play better. But if you don’t mind title screens that are slightly off-center (ugh!), give the current build a whirl.
So how do I try this?
I’m so excited!
Except for Bloopi… ; )
PartnerNet is the Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360 Development Kits. So, you’d have to have one of the 360 dev kits and have it signed up to Live. Basically, this means this is only available to other Xbox 360 developers.
Shoot.
Does, uh, XNA count? : )
On the one hand, I am now (at long last) starting to get optimistic about playing this pretty soon.
On the other, I really don’t know what to expect in terms of a PC release; as such I expect the worst, that being..
..
Beautiful game so far. I played it to test it out, but now I feel I must wait for the truly finished product so I don’t ruin the experience.
The only thing that continually bothers me is the art style of the background and world in general clashes with the art style of the characters. Neither is bad, they just seem to conflict.
Just finished the game tonight. It’s truly amazing. The gameplay, the score, the story (oh my god the last level !) are fantastic. A wonderful experience.
I just played about 5 minutes in and it looks fantastic! I would have played longer, but I crashed it, which is probably for the best since I should be working.
Keep up the great work, I’m definitely buying this one when it lands.
Austin: The foreground and background are intentionally made very different so that they are extremely distinct and do not interfere with puzzle-solving. I do not think the styles are different, rather, they are complementary parts of the same style.
Doctor Fatty: How did you crash the game? There are not supposed to be any crash bugs in the game at this point, so if you could tell us where you were and what you were doing, that would be very helpful…
Leave it to an ex-QA guy to mess everything up…
Given my limited experience with the game, forgive my terminology. I ran through the first handful of levels just playing the game, and when I came back to the Apartment Building area I went back through the same door. I wanted to go back to the puzzle thing, since I had gotten more pieces. I couldn’t remember where it was, so I used door 2 (past all the books). Once I entered the area I got a hard crash; I couldn’t even pull up the Xbox Blade. I may have tried to go back through the door before the crash happened, I can’t remember.
Austin sez: “The only thing that continually bothers me is the art style of the background and world in general clashes with the art style of the characters. Neither is bad, they just seem to conflict.”
We received this criticism a lot back when the character art was still by Edmund McMillen … It was cool, but didn’t fit the backgrounds. I’m surprised to hear it again, now that I’ve re-drawn the characters to fit in better. I’m not really sure where you’re coming from, but I would sincerely be interested to know more specifically what bugged you.
I’ve been playing it as well, got a crash in world 5, when I got to the castle the art was all messed up, seemed to point to some random memory location. Shortly after the game crashed (maybe when the dino popped in) and I got the memory dump minigame (which was booooring, microsoft needs to make it more fun!)
I had been messing with the parrallel time flows a lot in the past few puzzles. But apart from that I did a normal playthrough.
So far (only got to world 6) it left me slightly underwhelmed, reminded me somewhat of toki tori. I’m digging the story bits though.
Man, I can’t WAIT. I’ll grab it tomorrow and play this way more than I probably should at work.
At work today I was telling someone about the game, and they were like “that sounds cool”. Then I remembered – we can check it out at work! So he loads it up and plays. Literally… five minutes before we were having a conversation that talked about story/narrative not mattering. And then he goes and reads every story book at the beginning of the game, saying it’s cool and about emotion and feeling, which is something totally different.
So, I think you succeeded on that. I didn’t play the game myself… deciding not to spoil the fun for when it officially comes out (And hell then you get my $10 dollars).
Manveer pointed this game out to me and I’m hooked. Some of the best puzzle design I’ve seen in a long time. It took 2 of us the greater part of an hour to figure out how to complete world 1. I don’t think I could have done it by myself, thouigh. I’m very impressed. Looking forward to the rest of it when I get a chance. A handful of people came by as we were doing the platform puzzle board puzzle and saw what was happening and immediately said “I’m buying this”. They were sad to find they couldn’t buy it immediately.
Thanks for the comments. They do help motivate me through the current cruch period!
open dicht: Apparently there is a massive memory leak that happens every time parallel universes get created, so that probably did cause your crash. I am working on it now but it is being hard to find…
In Negative 3-minute mile, if you get the green glowy thingies, then die by falling on the spikes, you get stuck in an infinite death loop that you can’t reverse out of.
MSN
Yep Mat, that is on the Known Problems list. I have been postponing fixing it because I wasn’t sure how to do it without breaking the puzzle or making the gameplay rules more complicated — but I think I have a way to do it now.
For now all the player can do is press BACK and play that level over again.
Jonathan, this is an amazing game. I honestly knew nothing about it, and found it on PartnerNet during my daily check. I had to email everyone I work with about how great it is and tell them to drop everything and download it. I myself, refuse to play beyond the 2nd world. I want to wait for the true finished experience.
I just want to say wow, this is something really special. I’m green with envy I didn’t come up with this game.
How did you get away with that intro waiver wise? It’s absolutely brilliant, but the amount of fighting you must of done for it seems astounding.
Also wanted to say, Kevin is my Account Manager.
David: I took a while to play the game again today solely to try to figure out why I felt that way. The following are what I came up with, but you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t know the correct art terminology, I’m a programmer ;).
1. The art style of the background as well as to a lesser degree the foreground architecture seems to be broad brush strokes (ie, there are large patches of a singular color without defining lines). The characters on the other hand (and I’m primarily talking about the goomba looking guy and the main character) seem to be the exact opposite with defining lines and very small, precise brush strokes. This is certainly not true for all worlds (I’ve only played through/seen the first three, and I plan to keep it that way until it’s fully released), but that’s the impression I get. The grass seems to be included in part of that broad brush stroke for me because of the similarity of the colors even though it does in fact have defining lines (albeit small and not as noticeable as the main character’s).
2. The main character seems to have a whitish outline to him. It makes him seem like he’s not entirely part of the world. It’s almost, and forgive me for phrasing it like this, a bad magic wand tool job although I’m certain that’s not what it is, but it’s the easiest way I can try to explain it.
Hmm… I thought there was possibly more, but apparently not!
The cat sounds coming from the killer bunnies is hilarious.
Any idea how long it’s going to take to get through Microsoft’s certification process? Hopefully you guys don’t have to wait as long as I’ve heard it can take (3 months? ugh).
Austin, thanks for taking the time to consider and explain that stuff.
It’s true there are varying levels of detail throughout the game. In general, the more detail is in something, the more important it is to interaction. We have not followed that rule 100%, but it’s been our intention. Certainly there are a number of small, high detail “active” objects like Tim, the monsters, keys, gates, switches, etc.
I’m not sure how much we would be able to address the thing you’re pointing out before the game has to be done, but I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.
The white outline around Tim, however, is definitely going to go. It is just a temporary thing… wasn’t in previous versions, won’t be in future versions.
Yes, to maybe be a bit redundant, Austin, it sounds like what you are describing is just the intentional design decisions for this game as they relate to art: interactable things, or things the player will collide with, are high-detail; things in the background, or things deep in the foreground that the player could never reach, are low-detail. I would not say that they are different art styles; it’s one coherent style that is context-based.
This does break down a little bit when we re-used some foreground objects in the background (mainly to reduce download size and reduce the amount of time it took to draw everything) — in an ideal world, though, we wouldn’t have done that and everything in the background would lack high-frequency detail.
So, Jonathon…. when do you think I’ll be able to play this on my Xbox? I’m really excited about it; it looks fantastic!
And I know both you and David have heard this too much, but congrats on making (what I can tell from EVERYTHING I’ve read and heard) one great game.
Also, do you think Braid will have downloads in the XBL marketplace to flesh out the story even more, or just a level editor or something? That would be really cool.
Jonathan and company,
I had the opportunity to play this weekend and I feel it necessary to point out that the game is incredible. I’m completely blown away by how fun it is. Keep up the excellent work! There need to be more games of this calibre. Not just on XBLA (of which I’ll go ahead and posit that there are none like Braid in quality), but games in general would benefit from the quality of work you’ve produced.
I will certainly be picking up the game when it hits retail and playing through it again. Hell, I may play through it again this weekend if I can get away with it!
We have a short amount of time (measured in weeks) in which we are finishing up the game right now. After that, it needs to go through Microsoft’s cert process. I don’t have any way of predicting how long that will take, though hopefully it won’t be too long.
There won’t be any more downloads about Braid on XBLA except for some Gamer Pics. However, for a future PC version later this year, the level editor will be usable. (Originally I would have liked to make it available in the XBLA version, but Microsoft doesn’t want people to have free access to user-created levels. But frankly that’s okay, since it has been enough work getting the game done without the editor!)
Hmm, I thought I had posted a reply to Bruce, but maybe WordPress ate it.
I don’t exactly know that I have gotten away with the current intro — we’ll see how that goes. I had actually wanted it to be much more direct and streamlined than the version you can play now, but the 360’s API did not make that possible.
Thanks everyone for the positive comments. They are definitely helping motivate me through this crunch period!
First off excellent work, I was getting ready to go home the other day when I heard some of the sound effects playing upstairs and got pulled into an hour long session completing the game. I started on my own at about 7 tonight and finally decided I better give it a rest around 10:30. Best fun I’ve had in a platformer in a long time. I’ve gotten a really disconnected version of the story, but what I’ve got I’ve enjoyed.
Now the bugs:
I experienced the world 5(the parallel ability) crash as well, after I returned to try to get a piece I had bypassed originally, I think I then hit pause, don’t know if that helps you hunting.
I also witnessed an unusual bug on the climactic level where a certain object was not dropped, in fact it didn’t spawn in at all and resulted in a slightly broken sequence that caused some confusion.
Also the text for that level felt really out of place, any chance it could be in some nice speech balloons ?
I expect to have the world 5 thing fixed tonight… it has been a pain to figure out, but it’s good too, as it turns out that there are other ramifications in terms of longer-term memory leak stuff. Yay, computers.
Cameron: Can you email me about exactly what didn’t happen on the last level? jon@number-none.com. That would be very helpful.
In general, there are a significant number of cosmetic touch-ups that still need to happen on that last level, and some gameplay tuning too. It is the least-polished part of the game. That will be fixed over the next couple of weeks! (Including the rendering of that text!)
I want to reiterate Cameron’s comments. First off it is a beautiful game as a piece of art. I commend you on how well you integrated the gameplay mechanics (which on there own make a very entertaining game) into the story and emotional message of the game. It is absolutely what games should be going forward and demonstrates how they as a medium can be used to create emotional depth.
I did get the crash on level 5.
[Explanation of bug on the last level cut to avoid spoilers — thanks for the info, Daniel. -J.]
With Austin, I’ve heard mixed reviews here at work about the art style. Some love it and some feel that things aren’t gelling as they should. I felt like the backgrounds and foreground gameplay areas work out well and you put a lot of thought into it, but I think people are still feeling the separation from the characters. Having reviewed what the previously were I think you took great strides to bring everything together, There are certain elements that feel off when next to each other. I think this is only amplified because it is so close to working really well. That said I’ve also heard people who love the art.
On that note, congratulations and thank-you for an inspiration in game development.
Daniel, thanks for the feedback. If you or anybody has other reactions to the art, especially specific things, like what areas look less satisfying, I’d like to hear. Some of this stuff might be things we can still deal with. You can post here or email me at “davidlesson” … and that would be a gmail account.
I finished Braid yesterday; I absolutely love this game. It has the same feel as some of Neil Gaiman’s tragedies. Plus, I admire the restraint in not combining more than two or three of the time travel devices at once.
If this is what experimental game design is all about, I definitely want more.
MSN
Thanks, Mat.
I definitely thought about combining the time stuff, but that seemed like it would lead toward ever-more-complicated puzzles, which is just too cheap (from a design standpoint). For me, the value in Braid’s puzzles is in the simplicity of the solutions. You can take any puzzle game and make the puzzles more complicated, but do they become more valuable to solve? I think after some point, probably not.
Jonathon, I just want to say, Braid has ‘inspired’ me to make my own platformer, which I’ve been wanting to make, but just figured out how to with XNA. Thanks for that; but no worries. It’s completely guarenteed I won’t steal any of Braid’s thunder….. : )
BTW: I’ve got 800 microsoft points reserved for Braid when it comes out! (Please say it’s 800!) Keep up the good work!
Wow. I am only through world 2 so far, but Braid is shaping up to be my favorite XBLA game yet. The platforming mechanics manage to capture a feeling lost in modern gaming, and the puzzles have been challenging and fun.
All that would be great by itself, but the art really is the icing on the cake.
Great work guys, I can’t wait to buy the final version.
Just did the complete run through and I can say I really enjoy it, I’m looking forward to looking a bit deeper at the story.
Just got a crash after completing the last level, went to black screen for transition and hardlocked. I was trying to change the rewind speed using both the bumpers and the left trigger, other than that wasn’t anything odd other than being a second run through.
Some notes I’d really like the epilogue to be accessible without having to complete the last level again, while I don’t really mind the run through, I like the idea of having all the story elements accessible after completing the game.
There was a puzzle in world 2 and one in world 5 that felt somewhat less intuitive than other puzzles, though admittedly I did get them in the end. I don’t know if you were looking for anything along those lines but if you’re interested I’ll email you the specific ones.
I haven’t commented on the art but let me just say it’s fantastic, I assumed that some of the foreground differences were for design concerns and also had a somewhat fictional basis.
Cameron; hopefully that crash you had is addressed by the next version that will be going up as soon as Microsoft puts it up. It’s been done for a day, hmm, I dislike having control over that kind of stuff.
In this new version the Epilogue is indeed accessible from the starting world. We’ve had that on our list for a long time, but only just got implemented.
Any feedback you have about puzzles could be helpful. At this point it’s unlikely that we would do any major redesigns, but you never know. Sometimes small changes can help a lot.
The only time I felt frustrated was in the last level of world 4 “pet”.
I like the concept of the level but I had been fiddling around with the key a lot, and it kind of seems a bit glitchy. Sometimes it keeps jumping back and forth between positions.
Maybe it would be nice to have a way to drop the key when you want to.. but I can see that has some big implications, perhaps suggesting to the player that the key needs to be dropped sometimes..
And when rewinding/forwarding time a lot, to get the timings of jumps right or whatever, I found the “picked up key” sound to get very irritating.
Apart from that, the puzzles are great but a bit easy.
@David: Art looks great imho, especially the clouds in world 1! The hill with all the bunny rabbits was pretty memorable too 🙂
Yes, that particular level is going to get touched-up before release. There are a few things annoying about it.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by the key jumping back and forth between positions. If you mean that it sometimes teleports, it is supposed to, because that is a natural consequence of the time rules in that world. (though there are some other things about the level that are a little unrefined which make it a little easier to believe it’s a mistake).
As for the puzzle difficulty — some people do find them harder than others. In general, though, the vision was not to make a game with really hard puzzles, but rather, with really interesting puzzles.
The puzzles could have been made arbitrarily big, difficult and complicated, but I don’t necessarily see value in that. Any kind of puzzle can be made difficult and complicated, but they they all become the same (puzzles about how many steps can you think about at once, like sudoku or something). I was aiming for puzzles that were as simple as possible while also each having a unique solution, so that the gameplay is more like a journey through different ideas.
Anyway, I’m working on it. That world 4 level is definitely on my to-do list.
I understand that the key jumps back to the original position but it gets kind of funny when you are at about the same position as the key. Then it goes back and forth a lot, depending on what you’re doing ofcourse.. I guess I was just messing around a bit.
Yeah I know the philosophy behind the compact puzzles and I like it. And it feels compact and trimmed as well, all these tiny snippets that make me as a player feel clever. It’s just that, well, it’s over so quickly 🙂 And leaving the players wanting is a good thing or so they say.
But you know, if I had to pick between The Lost Vikings and Braid… well, it’s still a tough choice because of that great last level (in Braid)…
Hi Jonathon, I’ve been following your progress with interest – sounds like an amazing game. Also found your talks and blog very interesting; great work. However, having recently been stung by XBLA DRM measures (I’ve now paid for a game I can’t play!), I will no longer buy content from XBLA. Do you plan on releasing Braid on any other platforms? Please!
Yes, there will at least be a PC version eventually (later this year), and eventually for other platforms too. The XBLA is the first release though.
Jonathon, are you using a physics engine for Braid, or a homemade collision detection algorithm?
I’m just curious to see what the pros are using.
I don’t know that I would exactly call it an algorithm.
I use a Minkowski Sum-based circle-versus-rectangle function that I got from Casey Muratori, and a rectangle-versus-rectangle function that I wrote.
For broad phase, since the levels are mainly horizontal, I just use a 1D grid (dividing the space into horizontal buckets) that gets recomputed from scratch every frame.
Braid didn’t even have a broad phase until 4 or 5 months ago — it was just everyone versus everyone. That was fine on the PC, but the Xbox 360 is slower when it comes to that kind of thing.
Braid isn’t trying to create physicsy-feeling physics — it’s trying to create platformer-feeling physics, which are very different (and a lot simpler).
Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Thanks for letting me know!
Hi. I completed the game earlier today. Lovely stuff.
Would it be possible to know the name of the composer? I’m sure it has been mentioned somewhere, but my google-power has failed me.
I too experienced a crash, although it was on the level entitled “Elevator…” something. I had just leapt from one of the platforms that make you immune to rewinds, and had been rewinding for a number of seconds when it happened.
There are a couple of different musicians in the game; they are listed in the credits (go to Help & Options).
Hopefully that crash is already fixed! We’ll see.
I’ve just started playing Braid a few minutes ago. It’s wonderful, and beautiful. I have a few small issues though. One is that the background music on the first level completely stops if you let it sit for a little bit. Another thing is walking against a rock makes you play your normal run animation, with weight and momentum playing at one frame a second. This looks a bit sloppy. Other games play an animation communicating to the player that the character is walking into a wall. One final thing for now, is that I use the d-pad mostly. During the puzzle scenes, the pieces move VERY slowly when using the d-pad. It forces me to move back to the analog stick, which I’d rather not use.
Sorry, correction. ALL sound stopped when I let it idle in the first level.
Hmm, the “running into a rock” that you mention is not supposed to happen. Maybe it is only happening in some places, in which case it can probably be fixed — can you let me know where that happened?
The sound bug seems strange but that may be covered in bug fixes that were made lately. We’ll see.
As for using the d-pad… wow… I find it nigh unusable on the 360 controller. So hats off to you for being able to do that. I think the pad is so slow just because I never use it and nobody has ever complained about it. Now that you mention it, it is easy to fix and I will do that now… thanks!
Also, by idling in the first level do you mean the place where you start the game, or the first level you go into that actually has gameplay (after the story screen)?
Sorry I wasn’t clear enough in the first post. The rock I’m talking about is above the first puzzle piece in the first area. At the time I mentioned it, I thought it was all walls, but I found out it wasn’t (the entire post was premature). Also, the bug where all sound stopped in the first level was a bad one, because it resulted in hanging my xbox completely, without giving me access to the blade or anything. I surely hope it was fixed. As for my d-pad usage, the d-pad is terrible on the 360 controller, but for 2D platformers/fighting games, I’ll take a crappy d-pad over an analog stick any day. I’m going to be playing with the d-pad all the way through, so I’ll let you know if any more issues come up there.
By the way, I got all but one puzzle piece in the first level. The puzzle the user has to solve before getting the piece before the last is brilliant. It gave me one of those rare “accomplishment/such a cool idea” combo feelings that reminds me of a reason I love videogames. If you have an email address I could dump some issues into, I’d be glad to send them your way through there. If you have access to my email address from this post, you can use that. I don’t wanna fill up your comments section. Also, I have a prototype you might be interested in seeing.
I’m seriously starting to think every good indie dev is a microsoft sell-out now because of XB Live …
Keep in mind that most people who play indie games hate commercial games and don’t own an XB360 … please!
First was Goo, now Braid …
I bet the next builds of Cortex Commands will be XB360-exclusive too …
Oh fuck, Gish 2 o_o
*kills self*
I’m really looking forward to this. Any future on the PC? I currently don’t have an x-box. Also really enjoyed the lectures you posted.
Yes, there will be a PC release later this year; I will start working on PC-specific stuff as soon as the Xbox version is done. (Thanks for the comment about the lectures, too!)
Victo — I don’t necessarily like Microsoft’s policies either, but the fact is that a lot of the audience for games like this is on the consoles. At core I am more of a PC gamer than a console gamer, but it’s just really hard for a game developer to release PC-only and make back the money they invested in the game. I think it *would* be selling out if I had to change the game in order to put it on the Xbox, but fortunately I have not had to do that (except for very minor things like some text in the menus, which I am willing to live with in order to get the game out to more people.)
My God I haven’t played anything this good in a long time. I’ve been pimping Braid to everyone within earshot at work and they’re loving it just as much. The only problem I’m having at the moment is keeping myself away from it as I want to play it at home when it eventually comes out. Some of the puzzles are just genius.
I really can’t gush enough about it, it’s pretty much perfect in every department. Well done to all involved, I’ll lose all hope in the industry if it doesn’t receive the praise it deserves when it’s released.
Ever since I discovered Braid for the first time on PartnerNet last week I have been addicted to it. Whenever something is building or I’m eating lunch, I turn it on and progress a bit further. Everyone at work who has seen it or tried it seems to think it is simply amazing as well.
To me, it has the same kind of originality, quality…aura that Portal has. Braid is a gem to be treasured, and nothing short of it. I really can’t think of anything to say except “Well done.”
“the fact is that a lot of the audience for games like this is on the consoles”
Hmm, how did you reach this conclusion? I would think that people who can be bothered to tinker with various hardware settings to get games to run properly would be more likely to invest some thought into their games. As opposed to consoles, where it’s a key point that you can just turn it on, sit down and have some fun – evidenced by the prevalence of action/sports titles.
Now, I haven’t done extensive research on this subject, so puzzle platformers may be selling like hotcakes on the XBox for all I know, but puzzle games (and by extension, puzzle platformers) seem far more suited to the PC, at least to me.
I could see a “smaller percentage of a larger number of people” type thing being in effect, though. Even then, I suppose you _could_ potentially reach out to more PC users, considering the widespread use of desktop computers. (Whether that’d actually happen in practice is another matter entirely…)
Eh, sorry for seemingly rambling a bit. I’m sure I have a point there somewhere. 😛
We know roughly how many copies indie developers tend to sell of PC games. And it’s much lower than what they sell of Xbox 360 games. There doesn’t need to be more analysis than that.
There’s always some possibility that Braid is going to somehow strike a chord in the PC community that it wouldn’t in the console community — but that seems like a big stretch.
“I would think that people who can be bothered to tinker with various hardware settings to get games to run properly would be more likely to invest some thought into their games.”
I see where you’re coming from, but where do you think the larger sample is?
A. People who tinker with computers and play games.
B. People who don’t tinker with computers and play games.
Even if you increase the probability of the computer guys buying a game featuring puzzles, you’re still going to get way more sales on a console. Which isn’t to say that the game shouldn’t be released on PC as well, just that consoles are more profitable.
It’s easy to see why the bulk of people prefer consoles. Plug and play. People work at things all day at school or their jobs, and when they get home it’s nice to just turn on your console and not have to deal with any problems.
Additionally, it’s nice to know that in 50 years you’ll still be able to play a console game, because the console and the game won’t have changed. Can’t say the same about some of the old computer games I loved as a kid.
Out of curiosity, exactly how much (and how little, in case of PC indies) are we talking about here? The numbers I found for XBLA sales are in the range of a few hundred thousand units. Whereas GalCiv2, which I’d consider a fairly niche game, sold somewhere above 300K units – so I’d think Braid could do just as well.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that GalCiv2’s sales are disproportionately huge for some odd reason beyond my understanding. Or that XBLA games simply sell even better than a few hundred thousand.
GalCiv2 has sold very well, but it is an extremely rare exception.
Last year I was talking to the Steam guys about publishing Braid. They gave me a predicted number of sales. I can’t tell you what that number was, but it was very, very far from 300K.
whatever you do, just PLEASE don’t make the PC version a straight copy of your xbox version…
Not everyone has a next-gen PC to play the PC builds of Goo, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one scared of that happenning to Braid as well …
To me, indie games are games you don’t need to “fit in” to play…
I sincerely don’t have another couple hundred dollars to spend on a new graphic card or more ram, already upgraded that, 2 years ago, and can’t even play the latest Splinter Cell game …
If PC Braid dies, I’m never playing a PC game ever again…
I finally beat Braid yesterday, and it was great. I’ve since been reading these posts a bit, and I’ve noticed that the developers are trying to make Braid a game that anyone can play through and enjoy. I think that is a wonderful goal.
With that in mind, there is a part in the ending that might be too difficult for your average gamer. I found it to be a perfect challenge, but I know my girlfriend would not feel the same way. 🙂
It’s the part in the final room where you need to jump on enemies multiple times to get to the switch, then make it through the small tunnel at the perfect time to not get hit by the enemies wandering through it. Hope that doesn’t spoil anything for anyone.
Anyway, this part is a pretty hefty challenge that anyone hoping to beat the game will need to overcome. I think the most difficult part of it is that it requires a bit of a streak of perfection; you have to be on top of things as you jump over the spike pit, perfectly bounce on the guy to get up to the next level, then keep bouncing and move right at the perfect time to make sure you can get to the switch and drop into the tunnel at the perfect time to just narrowly miss the tunnel being clogged by enemies.
Like I said, I loved it and thought it was a perfect challenge, but I can imagine it would be pretty frustrating for casual gamers.
Yeah, thanks for the feedback on that. The timing in that area has been relaxed a little bit in the newest build. Not necessarily to make the game better for more casual gamers (though that is a side benefit), but really because it’s not important for that area to be super-hard. It should be a reasonable level of challenge, but also shouldn’t stall the flow of play for too long.
Just finished Braid (the first PartnerNet version) this evening. I’ll be looking forward to playing it again (and recommending it to everyone) when the final version is released on XBLA. You guys have made a great game. Very challenging at parts (but always logical) and absolutely beautiful.
The wording at the end of the epilogue made me feel like there was content in the game I had not yet completed, although I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Coupled with some other elements in the epilogue (the green books and the lever/platform in the second to last screen), it left me a little bit confused and feeling like I missed something.
I started playing this and stopped a minute later; I want to pay for and play this game at home. It remains to be seen if I can restrain myself. 🙂
I did want to say: that’s the best-looking leaderboard I’ve seen on any 360 title. MS has a lot of stipulations, and you’ve nailed them. I’ll be anxious to see if it makes it through cert like that, but I’m betting it will. Grats.
Thanks!
I tried to keep the leaderboard very clean, because I think it’s ridiculous how many confusing labels are usually on XBLA leaderboard screens. Nobody seems to have had a problem with it yet (except for making me change the names of the views to comply with standards, which is annoying, because the standards are much less clear and meaningful than my original labels… but “overall” that is not a big deal.)
There is one problem that we are having an argument with Microsoft about before going into cert… autosave. The same problem that N+ had, and that forced the developers to break the game and cause frustration for many players. I am hoping that the example of N+ helps me convince them that time-restricting autosave is a horrible idea. If they won’t budge, then I need to take some more time and make the game save to disk instead of the profile, which is probably at least a week-long endeavor, bleah, bleah.
MS has been pretty cool about most things, though. They permitted the game to not show an XBLA splash screen (provided there was no developer splash screen too) which is part of why it can launch right into the game.
Yeah, I’ve found MS in general to be a lot more flexible than the language of their TCRs implies. For our last title, we did most of our leaderboard design before we recognized their flexibility, however, and so it ended up pretty cluttered, much to the irritation of the guy who designed it–like you say, their terminology isn’t always the clearest. _Braid_ doesn’t have a MP aspect, does it? MS’s terminology surrounding networked MP–ranked versus player matches, quick match versus join and create–nearly drove him around the bend with its obscurity.
Save/load, however, was my department. For the game we were working on, our saved profile was too large to fit in the title-specific profile settings, so we put it on devices from the beginning. You definitely don’t want to go there if you can avoid it; I think you’d find the time you spent longer than a week, for no real gain provided the profile settings are a viable alternative. What is it that you’re trying to do and that MS objects to?
The problem is that someone at MS was strictly objecting to the fact that the game, in order to autosave whenever the player solves a puzzle, may sometimes write to the profile more often than once every 5 minutes. It didn’t matter to them that the total number of such saves is bounded (by the number of puzzles in the game, which isn’t all that high considering the total playtime).
I have switched to using XContent instead of the profile already. It only took a couple of days to program, but man, it is a mess once you combine it with switching devices and asynchronous signins and signouts, and giving people the option to continue without saving if they have a problem, but to also recover from that later, etc, etc. So there is undoubtedly some further debugging to be done.
Hmm…so they didn’t consider the period from puzzle piece to puzzle piece to fall under the heading of a “single interactive game session”? We had some very short levels in the game that I was developing, and as a consequence had the potential to perform stats writes for leaderboards as frequently as once every few seconds, but since they were distinct levels–each its own “single interactive game session”–the five-minute requirement of this TCR didn’t apply. I asked our liaison at MS whether auto-save for our future titles would be governed by the same standard that our stats writes were for our last one, and he indicated they would be. I’d be surprised if you couldn’t plead your case on those grounds–I assume that the “interactive game session” is such a lawyerly phrase precisely because MS wanted to give itself some wriggle room on what exactly constituted a level.
It’s a significant question because of exactly what you say: the edge cases regarding device removal, insufficient space, corrupt data, and untimely signouts are monstrous. I feel like a human version of the sign on the gates to hell: abandon all hope ye who enter here. 🙂 It’s not that you avoid all of them with profile-based saves, but you avoid a whole bunch, and being able to skip the device-selection thing all by itself is more in keeping with the clean flow that you’ve implemented so well elsewhere in the game.
Best of luck, and feel free to email with any questions; you’re doing great!
Indeed they did not accept the reasoning. It sucks, but I have got the new stuff fully implemented — we’ll see what problems they manage to find with it.
My MS liaison had at first been convinced that the autosaves in Braid would not be a problem, but apparently that turned out not to be the case. I think there was a big discussion.
Hi,
I just finished this excellent game.
I was a little disappointed that there was a bug in the Elevator Action section where I didn’t need to get the second puzzle piece. The one next to the dropped ladder (which bounces twice).
I shut down my game after many attempts, then when I started again, this piece had moved to another spot which I had already done and I didn’t need to work out this puzzle.
I haven’t seen this reported anywhere on the internet. I managed to work out the ladder solution, because I didn’t want to not solve it.