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:

I just sent this to a mailing list that I am on, but I figured I’d post it publicly too since there is some useful information here. However, it is probably very dry if you are not a programmer.

Internationalization is a requirement for XBLA (and probably any other console deployment)…. Well, I have finally started on that process.

Someone before mentioned gnu gettext() and after reading up on the file format it seemed simple and like the right thing. There is a text file format (suffix “.po”) that you can type stuff into, and then if you want there are tools that convert that into a binary format (suffix “.mo”) that you can just load as one chunk of memory and use (it even has a precomputed hash table inside the file). I didn’t want to link to a big library, and it seemed simple enough to implement, so I just wrote a reader for the binary file format. This did not take long; it was 166 lines of code, 20 of which are just the hashpjw function which I pasted in after looking up the license terms.

Continue reading A Development Note about Internationalization →

This week Braid passed the Xbox Live Arcade Alpha Milestone (I guess that’s like passing a kidney stone, but less painful). That doesn’t mean too much for anyone not developing the game, except to serve as a concrete sign that the game is getting nearer to release . This milestone means that all of the Xbox functionality is in place and working, but there will be a lot of tweaking and fixing of little bugs a on the way to a finished product.

At the GDC this year, I gave a talk at the Independent Games Summit about indie prototyping, and how it differs from mainstream-industry prototyping. One of my main points was about scheduling: you can’t schedule insight. It comes when it comes; so if you tie your prototyping process to a specific schedule (“X weeks of prototyping and then we start the real game”, for example), you will probably not give the proper insight the chance to blossom. Sometimes you need to sit on an idea for months, or years, before it is ready.

  Continue reading Post-Braid Project Update. →