Updates on the development status of Braid (its completion, where it will be available when finished, etc).
On the Xbox 360, that is. You can play it now. PC version will come… in a while.
As always on Xbox Live Arcade, there is a free demo.
If you get stuck, don’t forget to consult the handy walkthrough.
Thanks to David Hellman, Sean Barrett, Harry Mack, Edmund McMillen, and everyone else who contributed to Braid over the past several years. We made a good game.
Here’s the page with the award.
Braid beat Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. (And Winterbottom. Sorry Matt… but I think it’s pretty damn sweet that a student game is in this list to begin with. That’s got to look good on the resume.)
Thanks to Bruce Morrison for bringing this to my attention.
Update: Braid also won Best Xbox Live Arcade Game, beating out all the other games in the Summer of Arcade promotion!
Braid was also a runner-up for best artistic design, Special Achievement for Innovation, and Best Downloadable Console Game. That’s 2 awards and 3 runner-ups!
Also, I am making an About Braid page to answer peoples questions, provide some background to the game and links to reviews. It is not nicely-formatted yet, and will eventually have more information, but anyone who wants a sneak peek at it can look here.
Finally the veil of secrecy is lifted. Braid is being released on Xbox Live Arcade on August 6th, 2008 (a mere 9 days from now!)
This is part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion, wherein they publish good games on XBLA all in one big bundle. Here’s the full list of games:
Here is Microsoft’s official Summer of Arcade site where you can find more information, including contests that some folks may be interested in. Disclaimer: We apologize for the way Microsoft chose to present our game’s logo with the big word “Braid” covering the interesting part of the picture, along with popping-out animals on it to make it look XXXTREME like the other games. This is not much like the art we submitted to them; our tastes don’t run that way.
Not long ago, I posted that Braid had entered final certification. It seems the game has passed cert on the first try, and is now set for release. A release date has been scheduled, but I can’t announce it, since that date is under Microsoft nondisclosure.
Thankfully, we didn’t get caught in certification hell like these guys.
It’s been a while since the blog was updated. I’m not dead — we’ve just been very busy finishing the game.
(This doesn’t mean Braid has passed certification yet. It means Braid has been allowed to go into certification. But it does mean we are done with the game. The XBLA version, at least.)
David Hellman has posted yet another entry in the Art of Braid series.
This posting is about the House where you start, and where you keep returning after visiting each world. We did a ton of work on this. It’s by far the most complicated level in the game.
The build of Braid on PartnerNet has been updated to a newer one. This one is less-crashy; it has some cosmetic changes, and some gameplay changes (the player now collides as his full height, the last puzzle on world 6 has been redesigned), and some text changes (the text has been lightly revised everywhere, and a piece of the Epilogue has been rewritten.)
To play this one, just delete your old version of Braid off the xbox and download the new one. Your saved game will carry over.
David Hellman has posted a new Art of Braid update. This time he talks about the title screen (which is one of the nicest parts of Braid), and how he took it from the original Programmer Art version into what we have today.
I’ve also added an Art of Braid link to the sidebar; it goes to an index of all the pages.
(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.
David Hellman has posted a new Art of Braid, where he shows the process of revision we went through for the first castle in the game.
If you want to know why Braid has taken so long to get done, it’s because we want through this revision process for pretty much everything.