PC Version of Braid gets a level editor

Turns out the PC version has a built in level editor.

that popping sound you hear is aspiring developers brains the world round exploding in rapid succession.

Oh, and it got a trailer too:

Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.

Braid finally ships on PC

Braid has finally shipped on PC. Jon's shipping on a number of distribution services, so you get your pick. It's up on Steam (Valve), Impulse (Stardock), GreenHouse (Penny Arcade dudes), and GamersGate.

Braid PC release announced: Mar 15, $15, no DRM

Jon's announced the first release of the PC version of Braid (he's doing several releases with different distributors). This one is with Stardock, whom you may have heard of from their forward-looking anti-DRM stance. Initially it was announced at $20, but Jon dropped the price to $15 following grumblings on the web. Note the DRM stance:

Where possible, the game will be released without DRM. Some online publishers include their own DRM as a matter of policy, and of those guys, I am only signing with the ones that have light and non-intrusive DRM. My goal is to give people a reasonable choice about where to get the game, and if they don’t like someone’s DRM or someone else’s launcher client, they can get it from whoever they like most.

Now everybody be good boys and girls and buy the game! Support indie development and don't provide fodder for pro-DRM folk to say "I told you so".

Oh, and I love this comment from Jon in the discussion thread, where someone criticized his late PC release as indicative of his being 'anti-PC':

I’m not some kind of weird platform loyalist. The PC is not some sports team that is playing the Xbox 360 for the World Cup.

Indeed, it's not, though I think the PC would kick the 360's tail if it did! (Though continuing this analogy, it would be more like a soccer match of 16 pro athletes on one side, against 1600 guys on the other side, most of whom weren't in as quite good shape.... but I digress).

Braid coming to PC in Feb/Mar

Jon's commented on the PC release of Braid:

At this time, we’re looking at a window of February-March 2009 for the PC
release.

I also liked this little addition from him in the comment thread when asked if it was releasing on Steam:

"Oh, and about Steam: Originally they did not seem very interested in Braid, but
now that it’s a successful game they seem to have changed their mind. I haven’t
signed a contract with them, but they seem interested, so the biggest factor now
is just me finishing the PC version and giving it to them."

MIGS (Post 4 of N): Jon Blow closing keynote

Jon got a massive turnout for the closing keynote of the show. I took some notes, but didn't post till now as thurs/fri were pretty busy and then in transit. Anyhow, In rough form, here they are:

"A fundamental conflict in contemporary game design”

Inspiration to be found for those of us to think about problems

Goals: To touch people, to change there lives.

Other media have no problem doing this.

Today we limit ourselves to 'If it was profound  to you, it was from a game designer standpoint, not an emotional standpoint.'

Things that we do as a matter of course that prevent us from reaching those goals.

How do you make something important, profound, meaningful?

It musn't be.. Fake unimportant meaningless.

Two ways to be important to people. By expression. By introduction of activity.

Story games (fable, half life 2, GTA)

Activity games (Madden, Wii sports, Pacman, Go)

Developers are always trying to make better stories.

Academics are working on dynamic story techniques.

Fallout 3, far cry 2, attempting dynamic story.

Story games are inherently conflicted.

People can sense a conflicted work. It wont strike them deeply. Disharmouious. It won’t resonate. How can we remove the conflict?

Conflict 1: story meaning vs dynamical meaning.

Dynamical meaning.

Art games (very small)

Communicating via behavior and perceptual primitives.

The Marriage by rod humble.

“Here’s what Rod’s marriage feels like”

Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

Expressing “real life” themes through rules of interactivity.

Behavior/interpretation

Stares become ice blocks/ideas become concrete projects

Blocks preven you reaching child – projects interfere with family.

(bug) (weird interpretation)

Imagine I introduce a new element:

Ice block score decrease changes with a powerup. (stops counter)

What does this freeze mean in this game that is a metaphor for work/life balance.

More rules added, less pure interpretation, more of a mishmash

By adding/subtracting rules you travel a continuum. The resulting game will always have some meaning.

In the games industry we ignore this interpretation

Extend this to any game

Any time we stet up a system of behavior

“dynamical system”

…that system communicates something to the player, whether intentional or not.

This is the dynamical meaning.

(see Ian Bogosts “procedural rhetoric”, doesn’t need to be rhetorical or procedural)

Gravitaiton has thematic elements but does not tell a story.

Conflict 1:

Story meaning vs dynamical.

Mainstream designers not thinking about dynamical meaning. Rather implmenting story and basic gameplay mechanic that is “fun”. The story and fun mechanics have separate meanings that often clash.

Like having a scoring of film “happy carnival music" through a funeral scene.

We have happy carny music over every funeral…

How does this manifest in some popular games?

Altruism vs balance.

Bioshock: Rules showed very small token difference in ADAM whether or not you saved the girls.

GTA4: “I like Kate”. No, I don’t. The game rules expressed to me that I don’t care about her.

HL2: Alex relationship vs game progress.

We want to prevent these games from  seeming fake.

How to resolve these conflicts?

-          Don’t use story

-          Don’t use dynamical meaning

-          Make dynamical meaning match story.

A)     Don’t use story

Story gives you “interesting mental stuff

What happens next, people doing things, Themes, moods

Can we supply interesting mental stuff that doesn’t come from story?

Whereas Rohrer-style games are hard, anyone can write a story?

How could we scale Gravitiation up?

"Any dumbass can write a story from a game, and if you look at our games, a lot of dumbasses do"

The trend will always be toward the easiest things to throw money at (known quantity)

B) Don’t use dynamucal meaning

-          Technically impossible. It’s automatic

-          You could navigate to 0. So this devolves to case C.

C) “Tight coupling” (Bogost) or elemintate conflicts.

Like pressing bubbles out of wallpaper.

“change aspects of story that don’t fit story, vice versa (gameplay)

Designers not trained to consider dynamical meaning.

AAA production models do not support this. (late gameplay changes are very expenseive!)

2) Conflict 2: challenge vs progression.

We base most mainstream games on story, and also challenge.

Why challenge? It’s viscreral, fun, etc, but more fundamentally.

Challenge communicates to you that your interaction 'means something’ that it is important or necessary.

Story needs to occur, challenge is a friction preventing you from getting there.

Story is a reward

Challenge is about withholding that reqard until we deserve it.

Leads to dramatic presentation of non-difficulty ‘God of War, Fable 2 – seems like there’s a challenge – dramatic presentation of stuff that isn’t difficult.

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment.

The Arrow can’t go to zero

“like “suspension of disbelief”

But for games and importance.

A reason to exist.

Without ANY challenge, that suspension is hard to maintain.

Faux challenge is unlikely to impact someone deeply, to change the player’s life.

Challenge is a precious thing: we can do it much more derictly that other media. We waste this. [Note: Braid makes a good case for this, doesn't it. The difficulty of some of the later puzzles really made the reward of progress that much sweeter; to me anyhow]

Challenge substitutes

Not difficult, but interesting.

“invitation-style” alternatives.

Open Problem: how to make game meaningfully response to player’s choices, without blocking progress.

Conflict 3: Intreactivity vs pre-baked delivery.

Trying to create Drama or Crafted Impact.

Required careful pacing and framing

Delivery.

Interactivity sabotages delivery.

You don’t know where the player came from, or what he just did.

Deus Ex spoof from “old man murray”

Interactivity sabotates structure!

Chehkov's Gun

“if you say in the first chapter that there’s a rifle hanging on the wall, then in chapter 2,3 it better go off”

Economy of audience attention.

Sideeffect of foresshadowing and justification

In a good story, it’s not random out of context gun.

Requires and intense preprocess.

Story is a filtered presentation of events that have already happened. ß games haven’t already happened.

Why is the gun there? What’s the history, etc.

Drama manager – “intelligent dramama manager? Yeah, show me… Can never match a human drama manager. A human drama manager can never match a human writing a pre-baked story.

Character animation analogy: Pre-baked CGI vs Live Physics {<-- ooh, good point!]

Recap: story telling techniques we suck at:

Foreshadowing

Justification

Pacing

Potetic adjustment

Tone adjustment

Vocal emphasis

Body language

“importance”

-- 

Dynamic stories are

Pretend stories

Poorly structured

Poorly delivered

Will always be awkward second fiddle to linear media. Not a good core value proposition for our medium.

Don’t use story. At least as not as a core value prop. We said this was hard

What does story provide people, can we provide it in a different way?

Why not pursue examples from other forms? Music, sculpture, painting, etc.

Art games are a good place to start. How afar can we go in this direction?

To try completely, we art game authors must abandon “the message model of meaning”

The message model of meaning is insufficient

"The moral of the story is”

High school: Taught to read works and say what they are about.

Gamers get mad at art games. Inherently pretentious. Being condescended to. This is often true! If the message model of meaning is applied, whe the works are created. Trivializes meaning. (high school 5 paragraph essay)

[Frank Lanz quote, I missed part of it, so my apologies for perhaps butchering it...]

"...meaning which is less specific, less concrete and deliberate, harder to define, harder to pin down, trancends the author reader conduit model of message styles. "

Message model author is at least a little deluded. The true meaning of a game is multidimensional and fuzzy. … more complex than what you set out to build.

"if I understand it, it can’t be that important."

Instead, what if I build something that readhes beyond the eduge of my understanding and we all explore it together. They will have a play experience that is very deep and very precious and meaningful.

So what does Freeze mean? I don't know, but I think I'll stop here.

Zero Punctuation takes on Braid

Jon suffer's Yatzee's wrath:

Braid & Indie 'Escape Velocity'

[OK. Last Braid post for a while, I promise.]

I checked out the Metacritic score as of this morning, and it's weighing in at 92, which makes it the top rated XBLA title, and the #10 ranked title of all time, just nudging ahead of Mass Effect, a multi-million dollar title from a large team. Braid cost under a quarter million.

[Update: A few people picked up on this post, and the WSJ one saying Jon invested $180k of his own money into Braid, as concrete evidence of the development cost of the game. I should clarify: Although I had some involvement with Jon, I have no idea what it cost to make the title. That's his business, and up to him whether to disclose. Secondly, my *estimate*, having given it some thought, are that its much higher in total. Likely more like $300k-$400k. Jon's $180, plus an unspecified amount borrowed, but let's assume it's a significant amount, plus the costs that MS covered as advances on royalties for localizations, ratings, etc. Jon talks about some of these here. Anyhow, if you look at it as a $400k dev cost, that's still about 40k unit break-even. More if you consider the tax issue that Jon mentions. And let's not forget that 'break even' isn't the goal, or at least it shouldn't be.]

Now Metacritic is useless in many ways (e.g. there are interweb thoughts on MC scores of Wii not being indicators of sales; or MC scores being too harsh on XBLA titles, etc), but it's still followed closely by console manufacturers and publishers as an indication of what does well and what to aim for.

Which means that people are going to be looking at Braid and trying to emulate it/follow it. This is not unlike how Geowars inspired a publisher/platform vendor thirst for small two-stick shooters (e.g. I courted Everyday Shooter for some time as a more 'arty'/indie title, but Sony wanted the title far more than I did. There are a ton of other examples, both good and bad).

I think there'll be a few misguided publisher/developer/console companies that look at Braid's success and say "we need painterly-rendered platformers with time mechanics!", but I think they'll be small in number. They'll also be wrong in pursuing those as root causes of Braid's success.

What I think is shining through, and what I think the majority of the industry *will* get, is that Braid's success comes from the delivery of a game containing an undiluted form of its creator's passion and vision. Which is, IMHO, what the overused "Indie" moniker is really all about. It's not about small teams, small budgets, or "wackiness". It's about artists taking the vision in their minds eye, and wringing it out in blood, sweat and code.

And if you think about what might happen if the companies in the industry actually take that to heart, well, that's interesting.

If it were to mean a willingness to fund, pubisher or otherwise support titles, while acknowledging that their success will come from completely relinquishing control to those with the original vision, well, that'd be good for 'indie' games now wouldn't it? It would mean 'escape velocity' for indie games, where the metaphor refers to the gravitational pull of the mainstream and the dollars that fund it.

Of course, at some point, those converations within those companies will start to include words like "risk aversion", "focus group", "market trends", etc, and then it'll be hard to stay hands-off, but one can always dream.

Braid mention in Wall Street Journal

In addition to the glowing reviews of the game, WSJ has a nice write-up here with some background on the game's development.

Braid is out!

Braid has *finally* released on XBLA.


I only had a few minutes to play at 5am this morning before heading out, but was so happy to see the final product.

I believe it's one of the most beautiful things on xbox360, and I also believe it's THE most beautiful thing to happen TO xbox360. (Metacritic scores up so far seem to agree)

Congrats to Jon for seeing his vision through, and for keeping nose to the grindstone for SO long (I first talked to Jon about it at IGF 2006, so he started 2005?2004?). I stand in awe of his passion for the art.

A wave of original XBLA content

Looks like the XBLA team has been queuing up a wave of original titles for a burst of July/August goodness. Given some of the flak XBLA has taken over the past year (over everything from changes in royalty structure to mediocre content), it's nice to see all this original content coming out, and I hope and expect some of it will fare really well both in terms of sales and critical review.

A few of the recent and upcoming titles:

Go Go Break Steady

OK, it's not faring so well sales-wise, and suffers from meta-critic averaging of what seems like polarization of it's reception. Still, I bought it and am rather enjoying it. I'm generally not a fan of beat-match games on a controller, but this one's ok. Plus, the mix of genre with match-3 is unique, and the theming and music are sweet.

Geowars: Retro Evolved 2

XBLA's monster hit, second in sales only to Uno (an aptly named game), it'll be interesting if the game (debuting at $10) can be the must-have that it's predecesor was.

When I worked at MS, there was a photoshop job someone had done (or downloaded?) that was hanging up in the hallway, entitled "missing GeoWars features" and it showed the player ship in a mucho-crowded scene, with a speech bubble captioned "Where the F*** is Co-op?!?" or something along those lines. See above screenshot. That is all.

Braid

Finally! Braid's slated to release the week after Geowars 2, and it's been a long time coming. I first played it at the IGF (when? 3 years ago?) where it *hurt my brain*. So when I joined MS's XBLA bizdev team, Jon was the first person I approached about getting his title on XBLA. I'm glad to have played a part, and I really hope the Xbox customers have a thirst for such an original brain-bending platformer.

Also coming:

Castle Crashers (go go The Behemoth!), and Galaga Legions (which promises to be a complete remake of the original in the same way Pac Man CE was; a game I play almost every day). Also looks like N+'s add-on pack of 200 levels boosted sales of the game. Go Indies!

Good interview on Braid

Jon did a good interview with IGN on Braid:

Braid for XBLA Announced - YAY!

I've had to keep tight-lipped about this for a while, but Braid got announced for XBLA.

The post about it on GameSetWatch has a good comment thread by Jon (the developer) and Simon (of GameDev mag and IGF) on some of the issues around indie games and the IGF.

I'm really excited to play the final version. Braid is one of the few games that I've played in a long time that has REALLY made my brain hurt!

Jon Blow interview

If you haven't read it, it's great.

I am so looking forward to Braid.