David Hellman

TIG Jam has run its course and I’m back in San Francisco. (The weather is blessedly gray and cool.) The jam was terrific, such a great creative shot in the arm. The indie community is truly talented and supportive.

On the last night, some of us gave 5-minute talks about whatever happened to be on our minds, indie-wise. Matthew Wegner, CEO of Flashbang (who hosts the jam) encouraged us to eschew the angry ranting format and talk about constructive things. A video of the talks has just been posted, presumably by Matthew. Keep in mind these are highly informal and somewhat off-the-cuff, coming at the end of 3 days of 30 people hanging out together in a medium-sized room.

I come in at 21:00. Other speakers include Danny Baranowsky, Derek Yu, Chris DeLeon, Adam Saltzman, Alec Holowka, and Tommy Refenes.

Update: Here’s the video of everyone showing their projects, later in the evening. Unfortunately, for much of the running time there’s no view of the screen where the work is actually displayed…

Alice in Bomberland is an upcoming game for iPhone and iPod Touch, developed by Chris DeLeon. Chris designed and programmed Topple, and worked prominently on Boom Blox. He’s also a teacher of game design and all-around profond penseur. One time, he made a game a day for 219 days!

We met at a bar and before you know it I was drawing the main character sprite for his new game. We turned her into a simplified, Mario-like game hero, designed to read well at a small scale. Other prominent art is by Mark Meyers. The game itself is an old school survival challenge where you jump around frantically avoiding deadly explosives. In keeping with the source material, it diverges frequently into the surreal, here taking the form of fantastic, disorienting special effects.

Now that Alice is done, Chris and I are in preproduction on another game on which I’m the design lead. At this point, it could take virtually any form, although we’re targeting the iPhone/iPod Touch platforms. I’m excited about sharing more information about that at the right time!

Just a few days after my first appearance on At 1UP, I got to return alongside two intellectual giants of the indie games scene. Jason Rohrer is a pioneer of the so-called “art games” category — games which deliberately carry personal or philosophical statements in their logic and behavior — and Eskil Steenberg is a man creating a Massively Multiplayer Online game entirely by himself, using his own tools.

I had just seen both of their talks in the Indie Games Summit (where I snapped these photos), and leapt at the chance to share a table with them for an hour. In particular, I was very keen to pick Eskil’s brain, but it turns out it’s very good at picking itself, as one should deduce from his work.

Directly download the mp3 here.

Or subscribe to At 1UP on iTunes.

EDIT: I just listened to it … You might wonder, especially towards the end, if a producer sped up the tape to fit into a time constraint. But no, everyone was really talking that fast.

On Monday, the first day of GDC, I joined Scott Sharkey at 1UP and a dark cloud of indie developers for a roaming thunderstorm. Topics include respectful vs. jerky design, challenge/difficulty, inspiration, and more. There is also a lot of giggling. It’s more Judd Apatow than Charlie Rose.

There are two parts:

Starting at 5:30 Scott Sharkey, Derek Yu (Aquaria, Spelunky), Brandon McCartin (TIGSource, Balding’s Quest), Cactus (Psychosomnium, inappropriate hugging), and me

Starting at 38:30 Scott Sharkey, Tommy Refenes (Goo, Super Meat Boy), Mark Johns (Space Barnacle, Shit Game), Mark Essin (Flywrench), and me

Go to this page to download it.

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!”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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