David Hellman has posted Part V of The Art of Braid over at his blog.

This time he moves away from the Visual Art side of things and gets more into the Emotional Art territory (of course, these two territories are inseparably intertwined — how things look are a dominant factor in how you feel about them). He discusses the ways in which we make the player cry and become more socially conscious, and in the process reveals why Braid is taking so long to be released. Really we are revolutionizing the emotional landscape of the player experience in ways that mainstream games could never hope to match.

David Hellman has written another installment about the art of Braid. This time, he discusses the way we build the in-game scenes: the different elements that we compose together, and what the editing process is like.

In comments to previous Art of Braid postings, people asked specifically about these topics, so it’s cool to see that David is addressing them directly.

David Hellman has posted The Art of Braid, Part III over at his blog. This entry goes into a lot of detail about the early art concepts, as they developed once we became serious about trying to lay out a level.

This entry makes it sound like I just kept saying “No, that’s no good! That’s no good either!” about 100 times. Hmmm, maybe that’s how it was.

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

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.

Traditional Chinese:

Korean:

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 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:

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.

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!

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. →