All posts by Jonathan Blow

Braid Development

Braid release date slightly delayed. (And other info).

218 Comments

The good news is, Braid is coming out soon! The bad news is, I am delaying it slightly, til April 10th.

The delay is just to fix some problems that came up in testing with various versions of Windows.

So far the game is planned for release on Steam, Greenhouse, Impulse, and GamersGate. If I have some more time to do the appropriate discussions, it may appear in one or two other places.

Also, we have a special surprise planned concerning the music in Braid.

So, sorry for the delay, I know folks have been waiting a long time for the PC version and it’s not so great to have to wait an extra 10 days, but it’s only so that I can try to ship you guys a version that works well (which frankly is impossible in Windows, but the best I can do is make it work for most people most of the time).

[Edit: This post incorrectly listed the new date as August 10th. It is April 10th.]

Appearances, Braid Development, Game Festivals, Games as Art

A video interview with NextGen Player.

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At the 2008 Montreal International Games Summit, NextGen Player interviewed Jonathan Blow about independent game development, games as art, and about how Braid was made. Here’s the video, which goes into some topics that haven’t been covered in previous interviews:

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

Sorry about the incorrect aspect ratio, but I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to fix it, with no success. The web is kind of sad sometimes.

Here’s the link to the article at NextGen Player.

Braid Development

Braid for the PC is now $15.

180 Comments

Yesterday, Stardock announced that they would be selling Braid at the end of March for $19.95. This price has proven to be unpopular in certain areas of the Internets, so I’ve reduced it to $14.95. Pre-orders from Stardock have not been charged yet, so if you pre-ordered at $20 you will still get the game for $15.

Some people have asked why I picked the $20 price point. The answer is, I just looked at some comparable games on the PC and saw how much they were charging. Crayon Physics Deluxe, World of Goo, and Aquaria, among many others, are all priced at $20. It seemed reasonable not to charge less for Braid than for those games.

But ultimately, I don’t care that much about the PC release price. The XBLA version was nicely profitable, and my goal with the PC release is mainly to get the game out to a wider audience. Sure, it would be nice to earn the optimal amount of money from that release — I have interesting ideas for games that I want to make in the future, and making games is very expensive, and I will probably have to hire people to help! But ultimately, I would rather have people talking about the game itself, what they like and dislike about it, than about how many American Fiat Currency Dollars it costs.

So, you’ll be able to buy Braid for $14.95. Stardock is one of two or three Windows PC-oriented download sites that I have signed with. The others haven’t made their announcements yet, but when they do, I’ll post it here.

Other Games, Tangential

Name That Game competition answers, and Why You Might Wish to Play All These Games

29 Comments

To celebrate the release of the Braid theme for the Xbox 360, we had a Name That Game competition wherein people look at small pieces of screenshots and try to identify the games they came from.

20 people have submitted the correct answers, and so the competition is now closed. (Actually, I mailed out 25 codes, because a few of the entries looked suspiciously like they were submitted by people trying to get more than one copy. But I can’t be sure about that, and the problem wasn’t big, so I just sent out extras.) If you haven’t received a reply, you didn’t win; sorry about the lack of personal replies, but there were too many submissions to respond to each.

Here are the answers. I chose these because they are all games worthy of your time and attention:

Continue reading Name That Game competition answers, and Why You Might Wish to Play All These Games →

Tangential

A demonstration that Direct2D is patently ridiculous.

70 Comments

The previous blog post expressed the opinion that Microsoft’s new Direct2D API is bad. Some people might have been thinking, hey, that’s just your opinion, Direct2D is actually kind of neat.

As responsible party Thomas Olsen says on his blog, Direct2D is layered on top of Direct3D. The goal of such an abstraction layer ought to be to make the underlying functionality easy to understand, use and debug.

It seems like a natural question, then: if we take that hideous Rectangle demo application and re-implement it in Direct3D, what does it look like?

I have the answer for you; today I wrote a Direct3D version of this application. The output looks like this (click for full-sized image):

Continue reading A demonstration that Direct2D is patently ridiculous. →

Tangential

The Jeff and Casey Show on Visual Studio 2010 and Direct2D

51 Comments

A while ago I posted an excerpt from the Jeff and Casey Show, on advertising in games. That seemed to go over well (there sure was some animated discussion!) so let’s do some more. This episode is mainly for programmers who have to work on Microsoft platforms.

Their first rant is about Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, the upcoming version of the IDE that most game developers use for Windows and the Xbox 360 (and sometimes other platforms as well):

(Here’s a direct download link).

I’ve tried to correspond with lead members of the Visual Studio team in the past about issues like this, and they seemed to just be in complete denial that anything was less than perfect.

The second rant is about Direct2D, Microsoft’s upcoming API for fast 2D drawing in Windows 7. I could see that maybe Direct3D is too complex an API for the general-purpose use of people who just want to draw 2D stuff, and so you’d want something simpler and more robust, and that’s probably why the project was conceived. How they got from that initial idea, to what has now been presented as the Direct2D API, requires such a sheer volume of incompetence that it’s nearly inconceivable that this happened. Somehow they made a 2D API that is more needlessly complicated, more brittle, and less readable than Direct3D… which provides a superset of all the functionality anyway.

The code sample that Jeff and Casey go over in this rant is not a joke. If you want to follow along, you can find it here on Microsoft’s site.

(Here’s a direct download link).

God help us all.

You can listen to all the episodes of The Jeff and Casey Show by going to jeffandcaseyshow.com.

Game Festivals, Games as Art, Tangential

About the WGA’s Video Game Writing Awards

43 Comments

The Writers Guild of America recently announced the nominees for their 2nd annual Videogame Writing Awards. Anyone familiar with the games of this past year, though, will consider this a very odd and deficient list. Conspicuously absent are most of the games that stand out as well-written.

Ben Fritz at Variety recently wrote a column wondering why there’s so little industry participation in these awards, and postulating that it’s because the industry is anti-union. After all, to be eligible for the awards, game writers only need to join the Video Game Caucus and pony up some cash ($75 a year). No problem, right?

Continue reading About the WGA’s Video Game Writing Awards →

Other Games, Tangential

Giveaway: Free Copies of Braid (Xbox 360)

80 Comments

To celebrate the release of the Braid theme, I wanted to give away a bunch of copies of the theme for free. But Microsoft says I can’t do that. However, I am able to give out free copies of the game itself, and I have about 20 spares.

Let’s have a Name That Game competition. Posted below are pieces of screenshots from 10 games. Correctly identify each game!

The first 20 people who mail competition@number-none.com with all the correct answers will each win a code for a free copy of Braid on the Xbox 360. The competition ends as soon as all the free copies are gone, or at 11:59pm GMT on March 23, 2009 — whichever comes first. (My bet is that at least one person gets them all within a day… we’ll see!)

If the competition ends without all the free copies having been given away, they will go to the people who got the most right answers. So even if you can’t figure them all out, send in what you’ve got — you still might win.

I reserve the right to deny people who look like they are spamming the answers to win multiple copies, or something.

The clues are after the fold. Update: The contest is now over. See this posting for the answers.
Continue reading Giveaway: Free Copies of Braid (Xbox 360) →

Braid Development, Tangential

There’s now a Braid dashboard theme on the Xbox 360 Game Marketplace.

56 Comments

When the new Xbox dashboard launched, we decided to do a theme for it. That theme is now ready to download. For some strange reason, it is not showing up in the New Arrivals list, so you have to go look it up by name.

Currently you can find it in Game Marketplace / Themes & Gamer Pictures / New Arrivals, but I don’t know how long it will be up there.

In the long term, you can find it at:

Game Marketplace / Arcade / Browse / B / Braid

… then click on All Downloads, and it’s “Braid Premium Theme” at the bottom of that list.

Unfortunately, we had to charge the standard Premium Theme price of 250 Microsoft Points (which is about $3.10 in American money). We want to make it free, but Microsoft doesn’t like giving things out for free. But if you do buy it, you can be secure in the knowledge that you own one of the few Premium Themes that is not an advertisement — there is no text in the Braid theme anywhere. (Seriously, Microsoft, what is with the Subway: Eat Fresh Theme?)

Here are some screenshots David took, showing how the theme looks when installed: