David Hellman

Great work by Bill Mudron! Check out his portfolio at Excelsior Studios!

Chris Beaumont of Cubeecraft.com has made some wonderous 3D paper art inspired by Braid. Download, print, cut, fold, and carry on imaginary conversations with your new friends.

Click for full size:

And check out the rest of Cubeecraft.com!

The Art of Braid has been picked up by Russian gaming magazine Strana Igr … in Russian. Here’s a pdf of the first installment, offered with permission.

Thanks to Chentsov Ilya!

An0therS0meb0dy has shared this interesting video on YouTube. Great work!

In a sequel of sorts to our previous appearance, Jon and I payed a visit to the 1UP office to chat about Braid on the day of its release. This segment is not just an interview, but a fuller discussion of the game, with various insights and reflections from Matt, Jay and Nick. The guys did a really good job showing what the game is like, which is not so easy. I enjoyed hearing them describe their individual play experiences.

Be prepared: there is a spoiler warning about three-quarters through. If you have not completed the game, I strongly urge you to stop watching at that point. What follows is a really interesting discussion of the end of the game, but it will rob you of its impact forever if you have not already earned it for yourself.

The video is embedded here, but I recommend you view it at full size at 1UP.com.

It’s already old news in internet time, but Penny Arcade has tackled the Braid pricing kerfuffle in a new comic strip. Responding to complaints that Braid costs 1200 Microsoft Points ($15) instead of a more customary 800 ($10), Tycho utters the words, “you give them something like Braid, a game that actually matters, and fifteen bucks becomes some impossible barrier.”

Thanks to a couple of old friends and heroes for the moral support.

Okay guys, I need your help with something. Seriously, it’s not a big thing. Well, to me it is. To you it’s so easy. Never have so many done so little for one guy.

When you are playing Braid on your Xboxes, check the Screen Size. Pause the game by pressing the start button, select Help & Options, select Settings, then select Screen Size.

You’ll see something like this:

There are supposed to be four white dots visible in the corners of the screen. If you can see them, you’re fine! But they don’t show up on my TV. So I need to shrink the whole image, by pressing X.

That took care of it! The white dots are visible. It’s possible to shrink the image further, if it were necessary.

Now I’ll show you why this matters …

Read the rest of this entry »

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.