The Chaparral High School Alumni Theatre’s production of Braid: A Movement Piece during the summer of 2010. Using a unique combination of content movement and contact improvisation dance techniques, Braid follows the story of young scientist Tim on his quest to find a Princess.

Earlier this year, some friends and I, all successful independent game developers, put together the Indie Fund in order to help support newer folks with good ideas. All the hoops involved in setting up such an organization have been passed through, and we are now open for general submissions. If you are an independent developer who needs money for a project-in-progress, go check out the Apply page to see what kinds of games we are looking for.
Thanks, and good luck!

(Cross-posted from the blog for The Witness, a new game in development from the designer of Braid.)

Today we are announcing a fund that provides very good terms for talented indie developers working on high-quality games.  Our terms are much friendlier than what publishers offer.  Our goal is to help indies become stronger while retaining their independence.

The past couple of years have been good for independent game developers.  Through download services like Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and Steam, independent developers have found a very large audience.  Some of us have been lucky enough to develop hit indie games that were very financially successful.

Braid was one of those games.  The success of Braid has allowed me to undertake more-ambitious projects like The Witness.  At the same time, I felt that I wanted to do something with the profits that would help other indies with their own games.  More recently, while talking to publishers about The Witness, I felt that the business climate around publishing and funding these smaller games had not caught up with reality: it’s a model where the standard terms are tuned for budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.  Because publishers want to stick to this model even for low-budget games, it was very hard for indie developers to get a fair deal.

It turns out that other successful indies felt the same way, so we have pooled our resources and launched this fund.  We will be announcing further details soon.  At the GDC, Ron Carmel will be giving a talk about the problems that exist in the current publishing model for indie-budget games.

We’ve had the timing of this announcement planned for a while, but it seems like some kind of strange synchronicity that we’re revealing our existence just as all this trouble is happening at Infinity Ward.  When you’re a mainstream developer, and you’ve made one of the most successful and profitable games of all time, and then just a few months later your publisher and parent company is willing to so bald-facedly mutilate your company, well, what conclusions can be drawn from that?  If publishers of that size are so megalomaniacal as to be incapable of seeing the importance of a developer’s talent — instead believing that the game’s success is somehow due primarily to their brilliant marketing strategy or their CEO’s charming personality — then how will this ever change?

If Infinity Ward can’t be treated with respect, then who can?

Independent developers can.  That’s one answer, at least.  Indie Fund is here to help make that independent existence a reality for as many talented developers as we can.

Here’s a link to the main Indie Fund site, with an email you can use to contact us.

(Cross-posted from The Witness Development Blog.)

If interested, email me: jon@number-none.com. Please have substantial 3D game development experience and be good at what you do.

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:

1. Adventure

by Warren Robinett, Atari VCS, 1979
 

Just about anyone who owned an Atari VCS played this game, and there were a lot of VCSs out there. Like all home games of that time, Adventure had to be pretty minimal (the VCS only had 128 bytes of RAM!) Adventure put the player into the role of a knight searching for the Holy Grail (err, the “gold chalice”) which he must return to the Gold Castle. Depending on the difficulty level, the world would change between 3 different layouts; items would be scattered around somewhat randomly so that you didn’t quite know where to go and what to do.

Something about the minimal graphics and game design helped Adventure flourish as a mini-system. As a player, I cared about the map of the world, small as it was. I wanted to experiment with the various objects. The gameplay was about searching and exploration in a very focused way. Many games were influenced by Adventure, but it seems that with all our modern riches our ability to create that simple kind of joy has mostly atrophied. (In, say, Fable 2 the world is very lushly rendered but I don’t care what’s in it because it somehow doesn’t matter; I barely see what’s being drawn on the screen as I fight guys or run on my way to the next waypoint.)

Recently I did get some of that old-style exploration-based feeling of joy from a couple of games: Mark Johns’ stdbits and Sean Barrett’s Lost in the Static.

2. Gamma Bros.

by PixelJam, Flash, 2007
 
 
 

Gamma Bros. is a simple space shooter with loads of character, playable for free on the Internet. Though simple in presentation and game mechanics, it manages to give you the feeling of an epic journey; by the time you get to the end of the game, you feel like you’ve been through something big, even though this game is “small” compared to today’s $60 retail games. Among the most notable elements contributing to this long-journey feeling are the sound design and the smooth way in which waves of enemies flow into and out of the player’s area of concern.

3. Strike Force

from Midway Games, Arcade, 1991.

 
 
 

4. Netrek

Kevin Smith, Scott Silvey et al
UNIX workstations (later spreading to Windows, MacOS and other platforms), 1991.

 
 
 

Netrek is one of the best video games ever made. It’s hard to say more than that. It’s a team-on-team game of realtime action and strategy in space. The quality and richness of the intense team-oriented gameplay has never been surpassed, though maybe Counter-Strike came close. (Yet, Netrek provides more opportunity for strategic-level thinking).

Netrek is a client/server game that can look a little different depending on which client you use. The image for the competition was rendered by the Client of Win; the full-screen shot is from a later client.

This full-game shot is nice — it shows an offensive starbase pressing forward to cover an enemy planet so that it can be taken. When this happens in a tournament game, it’s a very intense time. The defending team is under a lot of pressure to destroy this heavily armed, armored and escorted thing, but it’s a big risk for the offense too: if you lose your starbase in this game, your team is screwed for a while.

The base in this shot is piloted by my old teammate Mojo Riser (hi Tom!) and it looks like he’s not getting enough help from his team, and is going to have to back off quickly after this failed attempt to take the planet (the lower explosion is a Romulan ship that was trying to drop armies but didn’t make it). No Rigel for the Romulans today! But maybe while the Feds chase the starbase away, R9 and Rd will take Organia and the Roms will at least get some fuel near their front line. This map layout is rough for them!

5. Space Giraffe

by Llamasoft, Xbox 360 and Windows, 2007
 
 
 

I’m not sure what to say about Space Giraffe that I haven’t already said, so I’ll refer you to my previous blog posting about the game (and the comment thread will show you a wide variety of opinions about the game).

Space Giraffe sold poorly in its original release on XBLA and got mixed critical reviews, mostly lukewarm. However, with its recent PC release the game seems to finally getting some critical respect; for example, PC Gamer UK recently gave the game a review score of 92%.

Space Giraffe requires your attention and a very large helping of Benefit of the Doubt, but if you give it those things you’ll find it to be an extremely rewarding game of consciousness expansion, and an experience unlike any other.

6. Gravitation

by Jason Rohrer, Windows / MacOS / UNIX, 2008.

 
 

7. リズム天国ゴールド (Rhythm Tengoku Gold)

(Soon to be released as Rhythm Heaven in America)
from Nintendo SPD, Nintendo DS, 2008.
 
 
 

Some Japanese game developers seem to be adept at creating feelings of pure joy. Katamari Damacy has this kind of feeling, but achieves it mostly through the characters and the music. Rhythm Heaven definitely uses characters and music to good effect, but because the player’s actions are tied so closely to the music, the feeling of joy is closer and more intense.

Rhythm Heaven is a collection of mini-games, with each game requiring you to do a different kind of action in response to the music. The first time you reach the end of a section, where the song you play along with is (spoiler deleted), it feels like a wonderful tour de force, amplified because the idea is so simple and so natural and yet nobody had done it before now.

8. La La Land 4

 
TheAnemic, Windows, 2006
 
 
 

This game is freely downloadable. It is short to play. If you play it with an open mind, you’ll have an experience unlike those given to you by mainstream games.

We game developers can work so hard and spend so much money and development time to try to scrape together certain kinds of feelings, yet this less-than-no-budget-game gives you that stuff in a concentrated form.

Also, it’s Punk Rock.

9. The Gostak

by Carl Muckenhoupt, Z-machine 5, 2001.
 
 
 

The Gostak is a work of Interactive Fiction, a genre in which everything happening in the game is communicated through text, and similarly, the player performs actions by typing text. Click on the full-screen image above to get a readable version; that will give you some idea of what this game is like. If you read onward without doing that, you’re treading into spoilers! In fact, I recommend you download and play the game before continuing.

The title of the game comes from an old example in linguistic philosophy. I’ve shown this game to some friends, and a lot of them can’t be bothered to play it: they read the intro and think “yeah, yeah, I get it, the point is to decode what all these words mean,” and they just feel like they are busy or just don’t want to do the work, and quit.

But that’s not actually the point of the game, except at a very coarse level, because why would you assume that these words have English equivalents? The further you get into the game, the more you realize that things don’t work the way you are used to. Yes, you can think of English-language terms that are similar in some ways to the words you are learning, but whatever model you have in your head is likely to contradict with the way the world works, in some obvious way. This is a truly alien world that you’re in, yet you have learned to exist and succeed within it. That’s one of the most fascinating things about this game: a depiction of alien-ness that comes from interacting with the objects in the world, and that only works because the game is text rather than graphics. As such it feels deeper, or truer, than you might expect.

Ultima IV has been a huge influence to many game designers, and it’s started to pop up again in current game design discussions. Clint Hocking gave a lecture in 2007 that discussed the ways in which Ultima IV prompts self-exploration, and how we might pick up on that in the future. I gave a short rant in 2006 talking about how Ultima IV’s mapping of RPG stats to real-world moral values was an interesting way to grant new meaning and importance to a traditional game strucutre.

This game is very different from the RPGs of today; if you haven’t played it, give it a go on an emulator!

 
That’s that. Congratulations to all the winners!

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):

The source code is here.

You can compare it with Microsoft’s version: header file, cpp file.

My version (Direct3D) is 308 lines long. Microsoft’s version (Direct2D) is 519 lines long, or 69% bigger. There are some reasons why this code size comparison may not be equally weighted, which I’ll discuss at the end of the posting. But let’s get to the important point.

Just look at the code for the two of these examples. We know that 2D is a lot simpler than 3D. So, looking at the Direct2D code, it should be much easier to understand, right? Looking at these samples side by side, do you find that to be true? Honestly?

There are a couple of functions in the Direct3D code that might be confusing to someone who hasn’t done any 3D stuff; I think rendering_2d() is the main one. But (a) hey, if I were to write a 2D API, that function would just be the default and the user would never see it; (b) at least it is only confusing in terms of having some obscure numbers being computed — not in terms of having control flow go somewhere surprising, or having resources allocated and destroyed behind your back and not understanding the scope of when things exist (both of which are much, much worse).

Which brings up an important point:

The Direct3D version does not need to allocate permanent resources that would need to be tracked, destroyed on a reset, etc. Direct2D has you allocating ludicrous things like solid-color brushes, which for some reason are intimately tied to the device and need to be reset all the time. The D3D version of the code proves this isn’t necessary. The only allocated objects in use are the D3D interface and device. This makes the program easier to write, easier to understand, and more robust.

Now, about the code length comparison:

• I started with the Microsoft .cpp and edited it. I kept the ridiculous 5-6 line block comments that don’t say anything useful, just to keep the size comparison more even (though the more you write fundamentally-understandable code, the less you find it necessary to drown the code in comments). I couldn’t bring myself to add these huge block comments to new functions, though, so if I were to do that, my version would be a bit longer. Also, I don’t have a big copyright notice.
• I am not using their bloated overkill DemoApp class or any structure related to that. This results in a significant drop in program size, and an increase in understandability. Some people would say that it’s bad style not to use a wrapper class or something like that; those people are wrong, and probably believe too much of what they were taught at school. But the point is, if I were to write the Direct2D app without using that DemoApp structure, it would be smaller and simper as well (but not to the degree of the Direct3D app, I think). But then the real point is, Direct2D is designed by people who think this kind of DemoApp structure is a good idea.
• Again to keep length comparisons fair, I kept their 1-function-argument-per-line style in places like the CreateWindow call, but again, I couldn’t bring myself to do that very many places in the new code that I wrote. Hint: If you are so scared of function arguments that you need to put each one on a separate line or else they might bite you, then you are making way too big a deal out of calling a function. You are signaling that maybe you find calling a function a little difficult — maybe you can barely manage it! Mr. Microsoft, I think you’re making the problem more difficult than it really is.
• I didn’t vary the thickness of the grid lines or the non-filled rectangle in a device-independent way. This would be some more lines of code (10-20 maybe?) but again, that is something that would be built into a well-designed 2D API at a fundamental level, so it’s not really part of the comparison. Because…

My point is, “what would a Direct2D sample program look like if it were exactly Direct3D except with appropriate simplifications?” And the answer is, “like the program I wrote here, but simpler.” And that of course raises the next question, how could they have made this so much worse?

My impression is that Microsoft is pushing this API as the new thing for app writers in general to use when they do 2D stuff. It’s a noble aspiration to want to replace GDI, but this train-wreck of an API is about the worst they could have chosen.

Direct3D used to be terrible; in its initial release, it was very hard to make games with it. Over all the many versions from DirectX3 to the DirectX9 used here, Microsoft slowly learned to cut the bullshit and aim the API toward things that people actually want to use. (They never got all the way there; an OpenGL version of this app would be even shorter and simpler, and a more-complicated OpenGL program has none of the annoying problems with reference counting that Direct3D has; Microsoft, cut it out with the reference counting already, you are only making life harder!) With each revision of DirectX, game developers had to rewrite their games. But we did that, because hardware was evolving rapidly, and our games got big benefits out of being redesigned every 1-2 years anyway.

This will not work for general application authors. Whatever Microsoft releases as the initial version of Direct2D, however horrible it is, they are going to be stuck supporting it for damn near forever, with full backward compatibility. That’s going to make it harder for them to revise the API, to evolve it toward something reasonable.

For these reasons, I hope Direct2D doesn’t catch on. I hope it is DOA. Because if it goes into widespread use, software developers’ lives are going to get a lot more complicated for no particular reason. Software itself will become that much harder to write, and thus will become even slower and more bug-filled.

I think I have ranted about this enough.

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.

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?

Being self-employed and having no employees, I have no reason to be pro- or anti-union. But I am definitely anti- these awards; they are insulting to game developers and serve no real purpose for anyone else except the WGA.

The problem is that it’s not really an award ceremony. It’s a membership drive masquerading as an award ceremony, and that’s a large part of the insult. You can tell it’s not really an award ceremony because of their decision to exclude most people from qualifying! So, here’s what’s going on: they are giving out pretend awards, in order to get people to join their caucus. Implicit in this action is the message that we are too dumb to notice what they are doing, or else vain enough that we don’t care what’s going on as long as we get some awards. I don’t take either of those as a compliment.

I would not mind participating in an award ceremony that is honestly trying to recognize the best in video game writing. When the WGA sat down to create their awards, they could have made this their priority: that the awards would go to the people most deserving, and over time would build a reputation of respectability, giving game writers something real to aspire to. Along with the award nominations they could have sent out a letter saying “Hey, please join our guild; guild membership does not influence the awards in any way, but we feel that we have a positive contribution to make to the game industry.”

Instead, they mandate caucus membership, with the obvious effect that the awards probably won’t go to the best games. So the structure becomes this: you give them a little something by making their guild more powerful, they give you a little something back by maybe giving you an award. It’s just slimy, and if the public were to assume that these awards were chosen based only on quality, then it would be fundamentally corrupt.

I said that all this was just part of the insult. The rest of the insult is that, apparently, by joining the caucus you are not even a real member of the WGA, because hey, just because we are giving you an award for outstanding video game writing doesn’t mean you are a real writer. This is made very clear on the first page of the application (see the sentence that I’ve hilit in yellow):

Video Game Writers Caucus membership does not provide the right to vote in WGAW elections, to run for office or to attend WGAW membership meetings for the Writer’s Guild of America, West Inc.

The bolding and italics are theirs. They want to be very sure about this point!

Suppose a video game writer felt very pro-union and wanted to join the WGA. After reading this he might feel a little miffed, and wonder, okay, if this doesn’t make me a real member, what does? So he goes to the WGA’s web page to find out. What he sees is that he has to accrue a bunch of points by doing radio, TV and movie stuff. In other words, there is no path available to him for actual guild membership.

But wait — what about authors of books, short stories, poems, and whatever else? That’s writing, isn’t it? Oh, those people join the Authors Guild, a completely separate entity.

Since the writing in Braid is patterned after book writing, not TV or movie writing, I then feel especially out-of-place in this whole arrangement — hey, I should be submitting the game to the Authors Guild Video Game Writing Awards, except that those don’t exist.

Braid also has problems with the WGA awards because the game contains no explicit writing credit, which one of the documents says very clearly disqualifies Braid immediately, though a clause elsewhere says that maybe I could petition them. But this, and other parts of the application, make clear that the WGA is targeting large-team industrially-created games, and that indie games are out of their area of concern; this reinforces to me the notion that this is about business, and money, and union power, rather than being about quality. (I guess to appease them for my next game, instead of saying “A game by…” in the credits, I can say “Designed by Jonathan Blow, Written by Jonathan Blow, Programmed by Jonathan Blow, Business Development by Jonathan Blow, Producer: Jonathan Blow, Key Grip: Jonathan Blow,” and try to put my name in there as many times as I could before I get to David Hellman, Edmund McMillen, Sean Barrett and Harry Mack. Yeah, that would be a lot more elegant.)

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t participate: I do not feel that these awards are worthy of respect. This has nothing to do with my feelings about the WGA as a whole; I don’t know anything about the WGA, so I can’t form an opinion. But this was a horrible way for them to try and make a first impression with an industry they’d like to break into.

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.

Here are the clues:

1.

 
 

2.

 
 

3.

 
 

4.

 
 

5.

 
 

6.

 
 

7.

 
 

8.

 
 

9.

 
 

10.

 
 

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: