Work with a small team on a puzzle-exploration game that is philosophical, and quiet, and is being made for reasons other than crass profit motive. Run by the designer/programmer of the critically-acclaimed game Braid, the team is fully-funded and pay is high.

This game places a heavy emphasis on the way things look, and will be a refreshing project for those who value nuance.

Candidates who can work full-time in San Francisco are strongly preferred, but if your personal style is the right thing for the game, exceptions can be made.

Duties:

Job duration: An estimated 2-year development cycle; possibility of a permanent position.

The ideal candidate understands the subtleties of storytelling via environmental cues and has a good feel for the use of color and lighting.

Please have a good portfolio. The ideal portfolio would include both indoor and outdoor 3D environments as well as everyday objects. Please no monsters or weapon models. Thanks.

To apply, send email to jon [at] number-none.com.

Work with a small team on a puzzle-exploration game that is philosophical, and quiet, and is being made for reasons other than crass profit motive. Because the team is small, your work will be a large influence on the look of the final game. The team is run by the designer/programmer of the critically-acclaimed game Braid; the team is fully-funded and pay is high.

Remote work is a possibility, but the ability to meet regularly in San Francisco is preferred.

Duties:

• Help determine the visual style and tone of the game.
• Sketch locations to help determine spatial relationships among objects in a scene.
• For each major location in the game, working with the designer, iterate from the sketches through full-color concepts, so that at the end we have a clear picture of how color and shape will interplay in each scene.

Job duration: An estimated 6 months of full-time work, with light work available afterward through the conclusion of the project.

The ideal candidate understands the nuances of storytelling via environmental cues and has a good feel for the use of color and lighting.

Please have a convincing portfolio, good traditional art skills and the ability to self-direct, working without micromanagement.

The majority of the portfolio should consist of things absent from the following list: Girls With Big Tits; Barbarians Wielding Axes, Covered in Blood; Aliens; Space Ships; Gangsters Getting Shot in the Face; Orcs; Giant Robots; and, of course, Postapocalyptic Wastelands.

To apply, send email to jon [at] number-none.com.

You can get it over at Greenhouse. Soon, it will be available in a lot of places. As always, there is a free demo you can try to see if you like the game.

This is a native-code port to the Mac (not an emulation). The porting work was done by Hothead Games, the folks who brought you Penny Arcade Adventures.

(Starting Monday at 13:00 GMT).

Major Nelson’s blog has the official announcement. That’s $5 off.

The Deals of the Week appear to be only for people who have Gold accounts; that’s unfortunate for Silver members, but on the plus side, this means Microsoft is now giving people more value than before for their gold-level subscriptions.

Inevitably with software, problems happen. There are (at least) two bugs in the current version of Braid available on Xbox Live; I am talking to Microsoft about how to fix them.

The first bug is that, if you play the game on a different console than the one you bought it on, the game may get confused and think it is the free demo instead of the full version. (This might happen, for example, if you unplug your hard drive and plug it into a different Xbox). While playing the free demo with a profile that bought the game, you may be able to get the game to realize that you bought it, but then you are in danger of erasing your saved progress. (This can happen because when a game starts up in demo mode, it is not allowed to load your saved game; if, then, it comes out of demo mode later, it starts saving based on that fresh game). I’m not exactly sure how to fix this, since really Braid is just asking the Xbox operating system whether it should be in demo mode or not; but there might be some nuance to that function call, or some workaround that I can do.

The second bug is that sometimes puzzle pieces can get stuck together when you are in the puzzle screen. This seems to affect only a small number of people; but when it happens, it is pretty bad, since there is no way to fix this problem except to restart the game. I haven’t yet reproduced this bug; if anyone out there knows how to reproduce this and can make it happen at will, please leave a message here. Knowing how to reproduce this would help me fix it quickly.

Thanks, and I apologize for the problems that people have had due to these two bugs.

Could someone who edits Wikipedia please remove the massive Braid plot spoiler that was added today? Not only is it a spoiler, but it is wrong (and it is against Wikipedia policy, since it is POV.)

I would do this but Wikipedia has my IP range blocked for some reason.

If anyone is interested in having a semi-regular San Francisco Bay Area game design meeting, drop me a line. It’d be every 2 weeks or every month, and focused on advanced (or at least non-standard) game design thought. If the logistics of recording the meeting work out, I would also edit it into a podcast.

This would be a semi-private meeting: attendance by invitation, but you could email and get an invitation as long as you’re not a random person.