I want to be a cutting-edge, modern game developer: not just during the creation of a game, but also during post-release support. So I have done a little something for the players of Braid: I’ve written up our own, official walkthrough. Because it’s straight from the source, you know that it’s accurate and contains the best solutions to all the puzzles.
WARNING: This walkthrough contains spoilers!
Only read it if you are stuck.
(If you are looking for information about Braid the upcoming Xbox Live Arcade game, click the banner above. This blog is for general information that might be interesting to people who like Braid.)
This essay was delivered at the Opinion Jam (organized by Ste Curran of One Life Left) at the Develop Conference 2008 in Brighton, England. It was written to be 3 minutes long when read aloud.
The essay is after the fold. If you want the accompanying PowerPoint slides, click here.
Continue reading A Short Essay about Serious Games
GAME, the European retailer, announced that they want to experiment with self-publishing games.
If they are interested in dealing with PC games, I think Braid could be an ideal case for them, for various reasons. I hate cold-calling, though, so I wonder if anyone reading this blog knows someone in a relevant position at GAME. I will owe you one!
In 2007, the indie developer messhof created FLYWRENCH, which I felt was a very interesting game. I recommend that all game designers play it. You can download FLYWRENCH here.
In February 2008, I created a game prototype called Nicewrench, which was about experimenting with FLYWRENCH’s design: what happens if you take a game that is about mercilessly killing the player, and remove the possibility for player death?
You can download Nicewrench on my game prototypes page, here.
Both FLYWRENCH and Nicewrench were shown (and played by a room full of attendees) in my presentation at Nuances of Design 2008.
There’s more in the way of design musing in the README, which is also copied here, after the fold.
Continue reading Nicewrench, a new game prototype, has been posted.
It’s sad, really.
Thanks to Casey for forwarding this from the Molly Rocket Forums where Tom Forsyth posted it. I don’t know where he got it, though.
The title is a bit of an overstatement. But recently we were thinking about what the ads for Braid would be like. (It’s actually a requirement of Xbox Live Arcade for a game to have some bitmap ads made, which can be placed on the Live dashboard and on the web site).
I deeply dislike ads, but I took this as an exercise to come up with something simple that communicates useful things about the game in a straightforward way; that is faithful to the nature of the game, without being base in the hope of attracting peoples’ attention; and that is respectful of the viewer’s attention. After some back-and-forth with David we came up with the following:
We did not put a huge amount of effort into these; we feel it’s more important to put the real effort into the game. But I think they’re relatively sophisticated and communicate a lot about the game in a simple fashion. (For example, most people who have played platformers will probably understand the genre just from this picture).
One thing they don’t communicate, unfortunately, is that this is a sophisticated puzzle game about time manipulation. But that seems like the kind of thing that is difficult to communicate in a bitmapped ad like this, without resorting to lots of verbiage and betraying the aesthetic of the game, or else just being ineffective.
So we’re settling with conveying the art style and the conflicted sense of emotion, and from there people can download the free demo and see if they like the time stuff.
Gamasutra and Game Career Guide recently published an article coaching enthusiasts on what they can do in 2008 to break into the game industry.
Chris Hecker pointed it out to me, because it was such a bad list, and would actually be detrimental to anyone following its advice. We chatted for a bit about what the real list ought to be; then he wrote it up, and you can read it here. [You can find a link to the original article at the beginning of that one; it’s bad enough that I cannot conscionably link it here.]
Continue reading New Year’s Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies.
In my lecture “Design Reboot”, I urged designers to think not just about the good feelings that people get from playing our games, but what the consequences are of those feelings (and of the time spent playing the games). This is a difficult concern to express to people who don’t already understand, and I am trying to come up with more effective ways of explaining.
This month, Bill Moyers interviewed Benjamin R. Barber about modern capitalism and its undesirable effects. I encourage everyone to watch this interview (it’s 23 minutes long, broken into 3 parts). Barber’s points are ideologically in the same neighborhood as mine, but his scenario is much bigger in scale (applying to everyone in the world, not just game players).
Here are links to the interview:
One thing I find interesting: to consider the picture he paints regarding the infantilization of the modern adult, and think about how that dovetails with modern game design (especially reward-schedule design like MMOs or Diablo-style games or even Peggle).
In my previous post I talked about how I was doing internationalization for Braid, and wanted to use a standard format, but ran into a bunch of hassle that seemed unnecessary for something so simple. Thatcher Ulrich suggested that I post the code under the MIT license, and that seems like a good idea, so here it is:
I actually haven’t tested it yet in the case where the endian-ness of the file is reversed. I am just kind of assuming that part works. I will be testing that within a week though (using the PC-generated .mo file on the Xbox 360) and if there is a bug then I will update the code.
Hopefully this is useful to someone!
In a recent posting, Stephen Totilo lamented the absence of landmarks in games: