Zelda Games Petty, Domineering
September 10th, 2008
Remember the first Zelda? Yeah! That was a cool game.
These old guys would give you clues. You’d walk into a room and he’d be there, and just spit out two lines. Never with any further explanation. It was cryptic, sure, but we liked it that way! More to think about. More mystery!
Like I said, brevity. Dropping the article, here.
Well, the Zelda series has come a long way since the mid-eighties. Last year The Phantom Hourglass was released for the Nintendo DS. It got good reviews. I’m only just getting around to it. I used to be a big Zelda fan, but the Gamecube installments forced me to confront certain grim truths. I’d grown, yes, but Zelda had changed as well. A series that started out rugged, minimal, nonlinear and downright mystical had become crowded, cloying, authoritarian and formulaic.
As Tim Russert liked to say, “Let’s watch!”
The Art of Braid, Part VIII: Tim’s House
May 8th, 2008
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.
Kyle Gabler Draws!
May 5th, 2008
More and more indie game artists are sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses. The most recent comes from Kyle Gabler of 2D Boy, creator of the Wii killer app World of Goo.
The Art of Braid, Part VII: The Title Screen
April 20th, 2008
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.
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.
The Art of Braid, Part VI: Castles and Flags
April 10th, 2008
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?
Dan Paladin Draws!
April 8th, 2008
I just discovered via TIGSource that The Behemoth have their own development blog for their upcoming medieval cartoon hack-and-slash, Castle Crashers. It’s quite interesting! Of course my favorite entries are the videos showing Dan Paladin creating the play environments.
Dan draws the way non-artists expect all artists to draw: coming up with cool stuff, making it real, making it look fun. Zippity doo dah zippity ay.
Two more videos after the break. And of course don’t miss the Castle Crashers Development Blog of Love.
Marsh Land Construction from The Behemoth on Vimeo.
The Art of Braid, Part V: The Emotional Experience
April 1st, 2008
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.
The Art of Braid, Part IV: Developer Mode
March 24th, 2008
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.)
The Art of Braid, Part III: World 2 Comes First
March 17th, 2008
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.
The 1UP Show Interviews Jon Blow and Me
March 14th, 2008
The latest episode of The 1UP Show features J.B. and me yammering on about Braid. You can watch that segment below. For the full show, including segments on Dark Sector and Smash Bros. Brawl, click here.
Chatting with Matt Chandronait and Jay Frechette was a real pleasure! They were genuinely into the game and very thoughtful about the indie scene and stuff in general.
