All posts by Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow interviewed by Jeff Lindsay over at Gamehelper.

February 17, 2008 Jonathan Blow 24 Comments

This email interview of Jonathan Blow was conducted by Jeff Lindsay a few weeks ago. Please disregard the excessive personality-glorifcation at the beginning.

This was a good interview to do, because I managed to clarify several points in my thinking about game development. Here’s an excerpt:

Marketing is not, in fact, a need. Getting enough people to buy your game such that you make money is not a need, if you really care about the integrity of what you are making. That integrity is the primary need; earning enough money through selling that thing, such that you can make more without taking up another job or whatever, is a luxury. People bend to this luxury all the time. There are lots of ways to rationalize it. But I think it is usually due to weakness — or rather, lack of commitment to principles.

Among indies there is some kind of desire to be more like bigger companies, to be “professional” about making games. Owning a business and making money and having business cards is all part of that. But if you really care about games, it’s a huge mistake, and being “professional” will only hurt your work and cause it to be mediocre. Business is, inherently, a corruptive influence on everything that is non-business.

Braid Development

If you are fluent in a language, drop me a line.

February 16, 2008 Jonathan Blow 57 Comments

I’m looking for a handful of volunteer playtesters to help verify that the translations of Braid into various languages are doing a good job.

Braid is in the process of being translated right now. The translators seem like they know what they are doing, so I have no explicit reason to be worried about the quality of the translations. However, it would seem weird to me to just take the translated version of the game and put it out into the world without doing some kind of due diligence on the result (especially given how many badly-translated games we have all seen!)

So if you are fluent in one of the following languages, drop a note here with a way to contact you (it doesn’t have to be public; just let it go into moderation and I will read it). And I will set you up with a playtest copy of the game. I mean seriously fluent, i.e. speaks the language like a native; not, hey, I had a couple of years of that in school.

The languages are: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese (which I guess means Mandarin non-simplified?)

Thanks!

Conferences

Nuances of Design next week.

February 13, 2008 Jonathan Blow 5 Comments

Nuances of Design is a session I am running at the GDC next week, on Friday, February 22nd.

The idea behind this session is to let the audience play games in real time while the presenters guide them through the experience to make certain points and encourage certain observations. Because games are about interactivity and not passive absorption, it always seemed weird to me that we used passive absorption (listening to lectures) in order to communicate about games.

If you’d like to participate, please bring a laptop that can run small games well (i.e. Windows XP or Vista, though I think last year a few people managed to run with Macs and emulation), and also a pair of in-ear headphones. (With headpones like these you can stick half in one ear, to hear the game, and leave the other ear open to listen to the presenter). We will pass around USB flash drives containing the games.

This will be the second time I’ve done this session; the first one, last year, went very well.

I’m also potentially looking for one more presenter/game so if you are interested, and have a game that you don’t mind people getting copies of, which is conducive to being played in a short session, then email me (or post here). Thanks!

Braid Development

Ad Blitz, Part 2.

February 5, 2008 Jonathan Blow 25 Comments

Most people vocal enough to post had negative reactions to the proposed ad we put up last month. So, we put together some images that are less literal and more moody. Many possibilities are shown here for you to look at; if you like any of them especially, please post and let us know.

Continue reading Ad Blitz, Part 2. →

Appearances

Another lecture, this time from Denmark.

February 2, 2008 Jonathan Blow 15 Comments

I gave this lecture as the keynote at the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen. You can download it as a .zip file containing the PowerPoint slides, along with an mp3 of the audio.

(Nordic Game Jam lecture, 35MB).

It’s about how to develop high-quality games as an indie or a student; but unlike the prototyping lecture I gave before, this one revolves around the different categories of development tasks, and the ways in which people get stuck creating games that fall far short of their real potential.

Continue reading Another lecture, this time from Denmark. →

Appearances, Games as Art

A lecture I just gave at Game Focus Germany.

January 25, 2008 Jonathan Blow 17 Comments

The title is “Programming is Easy; Production is Harder; Design is Hardest.” I gave this lecture on January 24, 2008 at the Game Focus Germany conference. Casey Muratori and Electronic Arts are the absent guest-stars of this lecture. I’m still not sure exactly what this lecture was about, but people seemed to like it all right.

Here is the link to the lecture, which is a .zip file containing PowerPoint slides and an mp3 audio track. The full zip is about 30 megabytes.

This lecture was not a keynote, so its subject matter is smaller in scale than the past couple of lectures I’ve posted.

I like hanging out in Germany. I would definitely come back next year!

Other Games, Tangential

Battlefield: Heroes

January 21, 2008 Jonathan Blow 27 Comments

It’s sad, really.

Thanks to Casey for forwarding this from the Molly Rocket Forums where Tom Forsyth posted it. I don’t know where he got it, though.

Braid Development, Tangential

Ad Blitz.

January 5, 2008 Jonathan Blow 47 Comments

The title is a bit of an overstatement. But recently we were thinking about what the ads for Braid would be like. (It’s actually a requirement of Xbox Live Arcade for a game to have some bitmap ads made, which can be placed on the Live dashboard and on the web site).

I deeply dislike ads, but I took this as an exercise to come up with something simple that communicates useful things about the game in a straightforward way; that is faithful to the nature of the game, without being base in the hope of attracting peoples’ attention; and that is respectful of the viewer’s attention. After some back-and-forth with David we came up with the following:

We did not put a huge amount of effort into these; we feel it’s more important to put the real effort into the game. But I think they’re relatively sophisticated and communicate a lot about the game in a simple fashion. (For example, most people who have played platformers will probably understand the genre just from this picture).

One thing they don’t communicate, unfortunately, is that this is a sophisticated puzzle game about time manipulation. But that seems like the kind of thing that is difficult to communicate in a bitmapped ad like this, without resorting to lots of verbiage and betraying the aesthetic of the game, or else just being ineffective.

So we’re settling with conveying the art style and the conflicted sense of emotion, and from there people can download the free demo and see if they like the time stuff.

Tangential

New Year’s Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies.

January 2, 2008 Jonathan Blow 6 Comments

Gamasutra and Game Career Guide recently published an article coaching enthusiasts on what they can do in 2008 to break into the game industry.

Chris Hecker pointed it out to me, because it was such a bad list, and would actually be detrimental to anyone following its advice. We chatted for a bit about what the real list ought to be; then he wrote it up, and you can read it here. [You can find a link to the original article at the beginning of that one; it’s bad enough that I cannot conscionably link it here.]

Continue reading New Year’s Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies. →

Braid Development

New Braid screenshots.

December 29, 2007 Jonathan Blow 16 Comments

I’m enjoying how well the game is going lately, so I thought I’d post some new screenshots to close out 2007.

Here’s a shot of the title screen. It’s been improved since last time; its full coolness, however, is only revealed when you walk through it and get all the nice parallax.

Here’s what the story screens look like now:

Here’s a level well-remembered by those who have played it:

Leaping into a pit:

Being chased by… enemies:

Each level has a title now, along with an icon to help you remember it. (These icons are what you see on the doors in the story screen shown above). The title and icon are presented when you enter a level; then they fade out and gameplay begins.

The demo is level-limited; you can play for as long as you want, but can only get to a certain portion of the game world. When reaching the ends of important areas, you’re given the choice to upgrade to the full version, or continue with the demo: