David Hellman

Hooray! Braid has launched on Xbox Live Arcade! Reviews are pouring in and the froth is palpable. Jon is keeping track of them on his blog.

He also created a handy walkthrough for busy people looking for answers.

Gamasutra has published the first collection of the Art of Braid columns. This one combines parts 2, 3 and 4 with a new introduction.

Chris Dahlen at Save the Robot blogged yesterday about Jonathan Blow’s recent lecture at the Games:EDU conference. There are other places to get the full content of the lecture (GameSetWatch or Jonathan Blow himself), but basically, Jon is talking about the frequent dissonance in games between story and gameplay. Often, the story will suggest one thing, but the actual rules of play will express a conflicting idea.

Bioshock, one of last year’s commercial and critical smash hits, offers a perfect example. There’s a kind of character called a “little sister” that you meet repeatedly. Each time, you’re offered an explicit choice between freeing her and “harvesting” her for a resource that powers you up and makes the game easier. The audio-visual presentation tugs on your sympathies by vividly depicting the little sister’s vulnerability: she cowers, and covers her face with pale little hands. But it turns out that if you free the little sister, you still can power up from alternative sources. So the choice between power and compassion is not supported by the game system.

Is it a nihilistic message that no matter how you treat defenseless children, your life will proceed unchanged as long as you can banish your guilt? Or material reassurance to those tempted towards violence that they can have everything they want without harming anyone? Bioshock leaves the impression of a fumbled idea, that the story and game system were seen to serve distinct, non-overlapping functions. There was this “moral choice” thing introduced through the graphics and audio, but to ensure that all players had a smooth and not-frustrating experience, the sharp implications of the choice, that should have been born out in the gameplay, were shaved down to nothing.

Surely there’s expressive potential in purposeful contradiction – one element of a work saying one thing while another element says something different – but I think Jon is right that sensitivity to this kind of technique in games remains generally underdeveloped, and conflicts of this sort are usually haphazard.

Anyway, there’s been plenty of discussion about this elsewhere. The reason I’m posting is that Chris opened the article with part of an episode of A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. It was a very appropriate choice, but Chris didn’t comment on why. So I thought I would butt in and explain!

(Click for full size.)

Back when I was doing A Lesson Is Learned…, I’d often try to reflect the core idea of Dale’s script in the layout of the comic itself. I believe this is one of the more successful attempts. The story here is about a sleepless little girl, Caroline’s doppelganger, being comforted by her father. Her anxiety is that she is not loved as much as the disappeared original Caroline – another little girl her parents had before her. She fears her doppelganger status makes her forever a shadow of the real girl. Worse, she believes Caroline is still living in the house, watching her from the window across the courtyard.

The layout of the comic reflects the doppelganger theme, first, by being divided in two. The panels on the left side of the comic are in the shape of a house, with peaked roof and a window – a motif repeated and confirmed in explicit depiction on the right side. Each side has the same peaked roof over a window with someone looking out, towards us. But the differences are as important as the similarities. The left side is warm with inner illumination. The house is a set of panels revealing an intimate moment between father and daughter. The thoughts and feelings of these characters are shared with us. In contrast, the right side shows a chilly facade. We do not know what lies behind that wall, whether Caroline truly lives in the darkness of that window, looking back at us. In fact, it’s deliberately ambiguous whether we are looking out from the doppelganger’s window, sharing her view, or looking back at her from the other side, inhabiting the perspective of the supposed Caroline. The left side reveals as much as possible, while the right side lets on nothing, forcing the reader to remain with the mystery for nearly half a page – a panel that overwhelms and haunts the first half, outlasting the brief and incomplete comfort with the expansiveness of a watchful night.

(I talked about this in a lecture last year.)

Content expressed through form – the overall form of the comic, its layout – was an explicit goal of this design, making it an appropriate compliment to the ideas in Jon’s lecture.

After a couple months of disquieting calm, Action Button .net unleashed yesterday the first three entries of its 25 Best Games of All-Time. One is a Genesis game, another is for PS2 and another for PSP. There is so far no ranking for the Mario Kart series, neither for a particular game nor for the series as an indivisible, canonical entity.

Here’s a choice passage from the Castlevania: Bloodlines (abdmn #25) review:

I like to think of the lead designers of the three Castlevania reboots (Super, Rondo, and Bloodlines) as three young men, let’s say sons of the King of Konami. They worked together on the first Castlevania games for the Famicom, and chose different sides when the console war — MegaDrive versus Super Famicom versus PC-Engine — began. The lead designer of Super Castlevania IV was the loyal son, always blindly looking to impress Father. The designer of Rondo was the scholar, the go-getter, the strategist, seeking to prove himself superior to all humans, not just to his brothers. The designer of Bloodlines was the slacker, the one everyone assumes could get ahead in the world if he’d just stop hanging out at the tavern with the local band of hooligans. (He can otherwise rip out a hell of a guitar solo. I imagine he also looked like Johnny Depp in that one movie where he first had a beard.)

What I like about Tim Rogers’ writing, besides its punk-like reckless momentum, is this kind of knowledgeable and idiosyncratic characterization.

Measure it however you want; Braid is coming to Xbox Live Arcade on August 6.

Microsoft is promoting it as part of the Summer of Arcade, a PR feat underlining an imminent batch of quality games.

Meanwhile, IGN has awarded Braid as “runner up” for Best Artistic Design at E3 2008. Normally I prefer to win awards rather than almost win, but Prince of Persia, which received the top honor in that category, does look pretty cool.

Braid did win IGN’s awards for Best Puzzle Game and Best Xbox Live Arcade Game, and was runner up for a couple other categories, as blogged by Jonathan.

I am pretty excited to have more people playing Braid! It’s a transformative moment when an art work becomes available to a broad public. What begins as an object of personal creative attention suddenly belongs to each individual who encounters it. My relationship to the work, with all its stages (inspiration, uncertainty, resolve, satisfaction, malaise, pride, doubt, and on…) becomes secondary to this brand new moment: someone sits down, starts to play, has a feeling. My intentions and expectations recede as the work starts to live on its own, meaning whatever it will mean to each player, as a game among games. I’m very aware of this because I’ve never worked on something for so long before it reached its audience.

With luck I’ll get another Art of Braid up here in coming days/weeks. Or maybe there’s a fresh way to shed light on and help to promote Braid? Jon and I are working on some modest additions to the official site to provide a better overview. I’ll post here when that’s done. Hopefully before the game comes out!

I haven’t been updating the blog so frequently recently, but you should know that there are other places to get your David Hellman fix. (Think of how much I must trust you to tell you this!!)

David Hellman is Director of Operations at the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, an annual bike-a-thon that raises money for cancer research and treatment. His influence can be felt from the organization’s web presence to the portable toilets made available to ride-a-thon participants. He lives in Chicago.

David Hellman is an attorney specializing in taxes and estate planning based in San Rafael, CA. He graduated from Berkeley in 1972 and he owns www.davidhellman.com!

David Hellmann is a graphic designer from Germany. His specialties include Digitalen Spiegelreflex Kamera, Webseiten and Grafiken. I have sent him a Facebook friend request.

David B. Hellman is maker of fine furniture living in Massachusetts. His firm creates gorgeous custom-made wood furniture. I could not find a picture of him.

The 4Play gaming blog of azcentral.com has published an interview with Jonathan Blow and me about Braid. Highlights include a constant high pitched tone in the background. As a bonus, there is no transcript. Maybe the guy who usually transcribes these things didn’t want to listen to the high pitched tone through the whole thing.

I am being a jerk. It is a cool blog. You should read it and if you want, listen to our interview.

Here it is embedded in this page. You can listen without even going to the 4Play blog! (But you should go to the blog.)

Here’s a blast from the past for you baby boomers: an old interview with Dale Beran and me about our comic, A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.

Here’s a choice quote:

What does the title of your comic mean to you? Are these your prescient last words?

David: The title refers to a persistent desire to understand and cope with life’s hardships, as well as the realization of our limits to enact change upon our ultimately flawed human existence.

Whoa, slow down there, younger-David, you sound like a straining undergrad! Highlights also include Dale getting wasted and trashing other web comics.

The great big whole interview is here.

Edge magazine has published a somewhat snippy preview of Braid, nevertheless pausing to complement the graphical style. Courtesy of Next-Gen.biz:

Braid is certainly a work of considerable aesthetic success – the praise for which largely goes to artist David Hellman, whose visual endeavors subvert the stereotype of the lo-fi 2D platformer. Instead, layered brushwork forms a luscious, moving painting…

You can read the whole thing here.

Less than a week after publishing an interview with me, GameTap’s editorial division is being closed.

Leigh Alexander reported the story on Kotaku yesterday, passing along a corporate memo full of assurances that it’s all about the games.

Here’s the interview with me on GameTap. Maybe the safe thing to do is reproduce it below…

Indie Games: Braid Interview

We speak with Team Braid’s lead artist on art, first impressions, and games.

By Douglass C. Perry
May 23, 2008

First officially revealed for Xbox Live Arcade at the Tokyo Game Show 2007, the indie-developed game Braid has attracted traditional and not-so-traditional media attention due to its unusual gameplay and distinct art direction. As part of GameTap’s desire to expose the work of independent developers, we spoke with Team Braid’s David Hellman, in charge of the game’s art direction.

GameTap: It’s interesting that you started working on the game partway into the Braid project, mostly because starting with someone else’s work can pose interesting challenges. When you took up the responsibility of the game’s art direction, what aspects did you want to keep and what did you want to do away with?

David Hellman: When I joined Team Braid, most of the game still bore [lead designer] Jonathan Blow’s basic and intermittently charming programmer art – just functional shapes with little adornment. Certain areas had been elaborated upon by an artist who’d since moved on, but in general this art looked dreary and very static and strangely not-to-scale. I wanted to get away from all the art that had come before–not because it was all bad per se, but I wanted to take a fresh look at the possibilities.

The best thing about the programmer art was that it was very clear from a gameplay perspective, so we tried to retain as much as that as possible. Also, certain things had a lot of personality. I liked the original yellow versions of the monsters that I assume Jonathan drew. I’m glad I got to play the game when it was still mostly all Jon’s work, because I got to see his sensibility unfiltered.

Some scenes already had a direction when we started. Jonathan had created a sunset for the title screen and a cloudy backdrop for the story screens, where you read excerpts of a story before each world. We stayed with the original impulse in those cases, but much of the game was reimagined from scratch.

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