All posts by Jonathan Blow

Conferences, Game Festivals

Experimental Gameplay 2009 is now open for submissions.

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The Experimental Gameplay Sessions occur every year at the GDC; it’s a two-hour showcase of unusual and cutting-edge game designs. Each designer gives a ten- or fifteen-minute presentation of each game, including a live demo.

We’re now looking for submissions for the 2009 workshop, which will be happening in March. If you make unconventional kinds of games, I encourage you to apply. Our Call for Submissions document discusses everything in more detail:

Experimental Gameplay 2009 Call for Participation

Also, here’s the main page, for those who are just generally curious about the event.

Games as Art, Other Games

Passage is now available on the iPhone.

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Jason Rohrer’s art game Passage, a work that has inspired many developers since its original release a year ago, is now available on the iPhone for the low low price of 99 cents.

Passage is a game that I recommend everyone play, especially if you are interested in game design. And if you’ve already played it, here’s your chance to have a portable version, and to support the art game community, all for a meager sum.

The PC version of Passage is still free; you can get it at Jason’s web site.

Braid Development

Braid PC Release

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A lot of people are writing in asking about the release date for the Braid PC version.

I had originally announced the release date for the end of 2008, but for various reasons, this hasn’t happened. Once we slipped into mid-October and all the big Christmas-season blockbusters started coming out, it just seemed like a bad idea to schedule Braid for that time period, as it seems likely it’d get released and then disappear.

At this time, we’re looking at a window of February-March 2009 for the PC release. I know this isn’t good news for those of you who have been waiting a long time for the game, but there sure are lots of games out there for you to play in the meantime.

I am also in talks with someone to do a Mac version (native code). The release date for this would be hopefully not long after the PC version.

There are no plans for other platforms in the near future, though as I’ve mentioned before, a PS3 version a little later on remains a possibility (though again, this depends on whether Sony is interested in the game).

Thanks, and have a good New Year.

Appearances, Game Criticism, Games as Art

A new lecture about story and game design.

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This lecture was given by Jonathan Blow (introduction by Jason Della Rocca) on November 19th, 2008 at the Montreal International Game Summit.

Here it is as a zip file (about 33 megabytes) containing the slides and an mp3.

This lecture focuses on the story-centric paradigm that we use to design a large number of games, and why I think it is problematic. Both pre-authored and dynamic story are discussed. It’s a heavily-revised version of this lecture given a few months ago in Brighton; This new version is probably better.

Tangential

A query to other game developers out there.

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Do people do anything interesting for authoring conversations for RPGs?

I want to be able to just edit a conversation as a text file, but it starts getting a little hairy because I don’t want the conversation to be structured as a strict tree. (At a point in the dialogue, there are some things you can talk about, but for example other things you can always ask about no matter where you are in talking to this person, and a lot of options that are hidden but triggered by variables, etc).

Add to this the fact that I want to support some markup in the text (bold, italics, and such) and it’s looking like I want to go all XML.

Which kind of pains me, because I dislike XML. But, that is obviously one way to go — just make my own markup tags that mean things like “conditional based on a variable”, or whatever, and go from there.

But before I do that, I thought I’d check and see if anyone pursues alternatives. Even if they rely on some huge proprietary in-house thing that took man-years to make, it’d at least be interesting to hear about what the approach is.

Thanks!

-Jonathan.

Game Festivals, Games as Art

Videos have been posted for Sense of Wonder Night 2008

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This year at the Tokyo Game Show, the Sense of Wonder Night event was held for the first time ever. This was a session where developers from around the world gave 10-minute presentations on their unconventional game designs, the idea being to inspire the designers in the audience, and give them a good summary of some of the things being done on the avant-garde.

Even if you follow the Western indie game scene, there will probably be some surprises there for you; often games that are made in Japan don’t become well-known in the West, because of the language barrier.

You can follow that link to the Sense of Wonder home page, where videos of all the presentations are posted (they are on YouTube).

(In related news, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop page is a bit out of date, so we are going to update it soon and also put out the Call for Participation for 2009; and the fact that SOWN is posting videos seems like a really good idea, so we are going to try and do videos for 2009 as well).

[Note: Thanks to Tim at the Indie Games Blog for posting the original notice of this.]

Braid Development

Attributions for Shira Kammen’s track “Downstream”

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One of the first songs you hear in Braid is Shira Kammen’s “Downstream”, from the album Music of Waters. In the credits for the Braid I credited the entire song to Shira Kammen, but it turns out that’s insufficient, as some melodies are by other musicians.

So as not to distort anything, I’ll quote Shira directly:

Although I recorded these pieces, and arranged and played them, parts of them are by others or are traditional, and I don’t want to misrepresent them.

Downstream has three different tunes – the first one is by me, and is called Downstream (The whole cut is called Downstream, just named after the first tune).

The second tune is from the Galician group Luar na Lubre from their album Plenilunio and is called “O Son do ar”, composed by Bieto Romero (Canciones del Mundo), and the third tune is called ‘Borrela d’Aragon’ and is by French bagpiper Eric Montbel. (I thought it was traditional, and just found out in the last couple of days that it was written by Eric).

The Lullaby Set is a combination of Manx and Irish traditional tunes.

So, there you go!

Braid Development

The Art of Braid, Part 9

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David Hellman has posted the latest entry in the Art of Braid series, part 9. This entry explains in great detail how we came up with the final look for the story screens in Braid, and shows all the revisions along the way, explaining our thought process. It is possibly the most informative Art of Braid yet. If you’re interested in game development or the art process for a modern 2D game, I recommend looking at the entire series.

If anyone out there is wondering why Braid took so long to finish, then just look at how much work was done here for a single 1280×720 scene, and extrapolate that to every set of graphics in the game.