David Hellman

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.

GameTap: You’ve said that the levels are entirely different and more or less avoid the clichéd snow-lava-cart mine levels so readily apparent in other games. Why do you think those kinds of levels were used so often in games? And what do these types of levels offer gamers that’s different in the context of your game?

David Hellman: Probably when visual artists were stuck with very restricted resolutions and palettes, not to mention ROM sizes, changing the colors from level to level was an efficient way to evoke dramatically different settings. Make a level all white and blue and draw some icicles, and the player is already going to feel that this is a cold place. It already has an atmosphere, a temperature, a bunch of enriching associations.

I think a lot of clichés get perpetuated in part because the people making games have genuine affection for what they’ve played before, and they want to re-create those things. What really matters is subtext. Familiar or not, are the settings purposeful? Do they harmonize with other attributes of the game? In Braid, the visual design of each world reflects its special gameplay mechanic and its framing story excerpt (which are thematically linked).

As an example, world 4 starts with a story about a guy visiting his parents’ house and old college campus, and encountering all the sensations and emotions he associates with earlier periods of his life. We chose to depict world 4 as ruins from an ancient civilization. When you visit ancient buildings that haven’t been renovated or repurposed, they can seem to exist out of time. They “hold” their time, and you can feel that as you walk through. Also, ruins convey stillness, which is very germane to the special time behavior of world 4.

We also have a world that’s made of nice furniture and books piled up in a marsh, which I don’t think has been done before.

GameTap: You mentioned in your latest blog entry your thoughts about the title screen. It’s quite beautiful, emotive. I remember when Nintendo showed Super Mario 64 in 1996; it was at the same time everyone was going nuts for PlayStation games, all of which had these enormous load times. When we saw Super Mario 64, a cartridge-based game, it loaded instantly. It made an impression. What do you think that the first set of images does for gamers, and what is the value of the instant start?

David Hellman: First impressions matter. We gather lots of information in those first few moments. It’s always an important place to represent a work’s aesthetic priorities. For Braid, one of those priorities is giving the player unmediated, uninterrupted contact with the world. The game is about coming to understand the rules of the world, and thereby solving puzzles, through direct experience and experimentation. The puzzles are totally logical and always derive from the inherent implications of the rules. There’s no intermediary, no narrator or guide shuttling you around or telling you what to look at. The instances where the player doesn’t have complete control are very limited, and deliberately placed. I think players will notice that.

Another thing about the beginning of the game: for two whole screens, the only thing the player must do is walk to the right. This is the most basic action, upon which other activities are gradually layered, like opening doors, climbing ladders, jumping, climbing, rewinding, etc. It’s like a song that starts with just a simple 4/4 beat, or just a bass line, before the other instruments join in one by one.

GameTap: There is a lot of good, healthy discussion about whether video games are art. What is your stance on the evolving form of video games? Are they art, entertainment, pure amusement? Or some new combination that’s yet to be fully grasped?

David Hellman: Video games are a great medium for making art. They embody human ideas, values, and emotions in all kinds of interesting and unique ways. They’re remarkably diverse and rapidly evolving. It’s really a frontier medium. As an artist, I look at them the same as movies or music or novels, to the extent that they can hold an expressive imprint, communicate, and be aesthetically enriching.

It’s easy to be cynical about this topic, because it’s been so thoroughly run into the ground on so many occasions. Never shout “art” in a crowded room. It does the job in casual conversation, but when push comes to shove, the word is more divisive and distracting than useful. It’s like conversations about whether or not there’s a god. The amount of personal baggage these words dredge up is unbelievable. You’ll have two people agreeing there is a god, then realize that to one person that means a man on a cloud and to another it means a sense of communion with nature. You’ll spend forever just sorting through preconceptions. The other problem with the word “art” is that to a lot of people it represents a cultural power play. Once something becomes legitimized as art, you have people shoving it into galleries; you have art types re-contextualizing it in their idiosyncratic way… It becomes a distinction between high/low culture. And while it’s far from monolithic, gamer culture on the whole is deeply suspicious of anybody that wants to dictate taste.