All posts by Jonathan Blow

Braid Development, Braid Previews, Games as Art

Braid interview at the 1UP Show Podcast.

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The 1Up Show guys interviewed Jonathan Blow and David Hellman about Braid. Sadly, the interview doesn’t lay too much context about the game for people not familiar with it. But we still get into some interesting topics. The 1UP guys genuinely like Braid and are looking forward to its release; we were glad to do the interview with them.

Here’s the video:

(An embedded player from gamevideos.com was here. It used Flash, which browsers no longer support.)

Here’s a link to the entire podcast.
The other games in the show are Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Dark Sector. The Braid piece starts about 10 minutes in.

Games as Art, Other Games

Jason Rohrer’s new column at The Escapist.

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Jason Rohrer has just started a new column at The Escapist called “Game Design Sketchbook”. Once a month, he’ll be making a prototype game, putting it up for download, and writing about it.

Here’s a link to this month’s column.

Perfectionism (small)

The first game is called “Perfectionism” (pictured above) and it’s very interesting. You can easily figure out how to play it from the game itself; you don’t need to read the article.

Braid Development

The Art of Braid, Part II.

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David Hellman has made his next posting about the art process for Braid. You can read it here.

Early Braid Art Concept

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.

Braid Development

First-draft Asian translations are in.

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Traditional Chinese:

Braid Traditional Chinese

Korean:

Braid Korean

Japanese:

Braid Japanese

I cannot read any of these languages, but it’s nice to see.  For those of you who offered to help verify the translations, we aren’t going to do that quite yet.  There’s still a round or two of basic housekeeping that we need to do properly (making sure the game doesn’t word-wrap at inappropriate times, making sure things are positioned in the right places, fixing the totally messed up kerning in the Japanese file.)

Getting closer!

Braid Development

David Hellman on the graphic art for Braid.

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Braid has a unique art style, developed by David Hellman. Over at his blog, he’s begun explaining how the style came about. His first posting shows the earliest experiments in terms of color and style; I imagine he’ll go step-by-step through development until we get to the finished game.

Here’s one of the early prototypes:

Draft of Braid Trees

Also, don’t miss the link to the Braid page in David’s portfolio, which also has discussion of the art style, and why and how it came to be what it is.

Braid Previews, Game Criticism, Games as Art

Gamer Hate on Braid

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There’s a blog called Gamer Hate, run by a blogger with the imposing name of COMMANDERHATE. He was predisposed toward hating on Braid, so I gave him a preview version to play. It turns out that he really likes the game, and he has written a very thoughtful response after playing about halfway through.

He raises the concern that Braid might not find a large audience because it is so different. I think there is a danger of this, but at the same time, Braid’s being different is what makes it worth playing in the first place. Commander Hate had a strong positive reaction to the game; if there are enough people like that, and they tell their friends, then Braid will succeed.

Braid isn’t about trying to appeal to the maximum number of people — it’s about appealing to exactly the right people.

We’ll see how that works out. Then again, my favorite Xbox Live Arcade game of last year was Space Giraffe, which sold quite poorly. So, there is that.

Games as Art, Other Games

Jason Rohrer’s new art game: Gravitation

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Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

Gravitation is another art game. It’s good. It’s also easier for new players to “get” than Passage, which hopefully will help more people realize how interesting these games are.

Here is the link.

If you’re not familiar with Jason’s previous game, Passage, you can get it here.

If you’re new to this whole Art Game thing, you may want to check out Rod Humble’s The Marriage and the more-difficult Stars over Half Moon Bay.

It’s great that Jason is managing to create such good games in such a short time period. It makes me wonder if I’ve been going the wrong way working 3 years on Braid.