David Hellman

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

Tim, the protagonist of Braid, visits various imaginative worlds during his journey, but in between excursions, he always returns home. Home serves several functions, and as a result was a complex and interesting area to design. It is the “hub” which links the different worlds, a place of repose and reflection, a “status screen” representing progress within the game, and a reflection of Tim’s character.

Here’s what it looked like when I joined the project. Each door leads towards a different world; within those worlds, Tim grapples with the laws of time and earns jigsaw pieces as tokens of understanding; he brings those jigsaw pieces back home and assembles them on the puzzle boards you see paired with each door.

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry is nominally about the title screen, but Braid doesn’t have one in the traditional sense. Most video game title screens are just like DVD menus: they show the title, usually some kind of collage or splash image, and present a list of choices: play, select chapter, configure this or that, etc. Braid starts immediately into the game, with no preamble. The game launches, and you are Tim.

(Actually, some changes have been made to make it work in the Xbox Live environment and meet the certification requirements. Maybe future versions on other platforms will conform more to the original vision.)

This is what the title screen looked like when I joined the project. The protagonist, Tim, appears in silhouette on the left. The sky flickers gently with subtle particle effects. The music sets a calm, contemplative mood. (There’s also a ladder to the right of the sun, leading down to an unseen place. That’s a super-secret thing that’s been removed.) A billboard briefs the player on the controls.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rest assured, this installment of The Art of Braid contains much less Bloopi-ness.

Each of Braid’s six worlds ends with a castle. They’re backdrops, visual treats to acknowledge the player’s progress. They’re also throwbacks to the famous/iconic/beloved castles of Super Mario Bros. (To my shock and dismay, five minutes of Google image searching did not yield a clean, straightforward screen capture of a SMB castle. So tap your collective consciousness for that one.)

You guys have said you like seeing rough drafts leading up to a finished version, so let’s take a look at how the World 2 castle developed.

A far away castle with a big wall.

Maybe it should look like a house?

Read the rest of this entry »

Braid would have been released a while ago, but it was delayed to improve the end product. The fact is, not everyone wants to solve puzzles; some people just want an experience. We’ve made a number of changes in recent months to ensure Braid can be enjoyed by the widest possible group.

Meet Bloopi! He will repeatedly jump into your path. If you touch him, he becomes your inseparable companion.

Read the rest of this entry »

This installment shows the developer tools created by Jonathan Blow, which I used to build Braid’s landscapes. It’s a backstage tour cluttered with scaffolding and pulleys. It’s not pretty, but it’s True. (Disclaimer: The text on the buttons is too big because we changed the font at one point and just never fixed it.)

Read the rest of this entry »

After doing those concept drawings and abstracts, it was time to bang out some useable assets and see how they’d work in the game. Jonathan had already written an engine for building level maps from irregular chunks of any size. He asked me to take a concept like the ones I’d already done, and break it down into pieces that could be copied and pasted to create the first world. (The first world the player encounters, for reasons initially unexplained, is World 2.)

Behind-the-scenes features sometimes create a false impression of ease and inevitability, like those glib “evolution” pictures showing a fish stepping out of the ocean, becoming a chimp, homo erectus, and then Groucho Marx. Of course it only looks easy if you ignore all the species that died out over millennia of natural selection. For every image you see here, assume a half dozen variations that would have diluted this article but were nonetheless important.

And certainly some stages of a process go more smoothly than others. Looking at this overwhelmingly green concept, it’s safe to assume I was not happy during its creation. The rock walls struggle from one approach to the next, looking like amphibious skin in one place and shattered glass in another. It was time to settle on something, but was what I’d come up with good enough? I kept searching.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week this series kicked off with some abstract color experiments. As much as I enjoy the idea of Braid emerging from a Genesis-like pre-existence chromatic maelstrom, my first job was actually something else. Jonathan sent me a screenshot and asked me to draw over it.

Here it is, in its programmer art glory. Though visually crude, the game was actually pretty advanced, from a functional perspective. Keys, switches, ladders, spikes, monsters, and a guy in a suit – it was all there. If you read the whole post, for dessert I’ll show you how little (or much!) this screen changed in the final game.

Here’s my first try. I deliberately got away from the materials and palette in the screenshot. This looks kind of like some areas in Yoshi’s Island, on SNES. The background was meant to radiate gently. In an e-mail I described the atmosphere as “ethereal!”
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next month or so I’ll be wrapping up work on Braid, a video game by Jonathan Blow, coming to XBOX LIVE Arcade. (For an overview from my perspective, here’s the relevant page from my portfolio, and for general Braid-related news, here’s the official blog.) It seemed like a good time to “start talkin’,” as they say in interrogations. This is the first of a series of blog posts highlighting different aspects of Braid’s art, and explaining some of my thoughts behind them. Some posts may be fairly concrete-minded, but others (this one, at least) verge a little into my own associations and difficult-to-pin-down feelings. But hey, it’s art! Behind-the-scenes info and creator commentary are always interesting to me, so hopefully these will address someone’s curiosity at least.

(Certainly I welcome comments! Let me know what you’d like to hear about, and how I can make these features more interesting.)

Let’s start with these vague yet vivid digital paintings. They’re from the very beginning of my involvement in the project, in the summer of 2006. Even then it was known that Braid contained various worlds, and that each world had a different theme, and that each theme would call for a different graphic solution. These exercises were just an initial foray into mood and color, to see what range of sensations might be appropriate.

Read the rest of this entry »