Braid (video Game) - Development

Development

Jonathan Blow created Braid as a game that deconstructed current video games trends, "bringing together the abstract parts of a complex puzzle, revealing deep moral and philosophical questions". Blow came up with the concept of Braid in December 2004 while on a trip to Thailand, and started development work on it in April the following year. By December 2005, a version of the game was completed that had the same number of worlds and puzzles as the final version, but lacked the final artwork; this version won the Independent Games Festival game design award at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference. While working on the art direction, Blow tightened the presentation and mechanics of the puzzles to improve their playability. During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring of David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses.

Originally, Blow had envisioned the game to be broken into several different worlds as in the final game, each exploring facets of space, time, and causality, but with each world having very different high-level mechanics. One mechanic that he could not develop further was a world with no "arrow of time" that would have required the player to traverse the level in a manner that could be repeated in reverse. For example, the player would have been forbidden to jump down from a tall height while moving in forward time, as they would not be able to jump that height in reverse time. While this idea was not used, Blow discovered the rewind feature could be developed further for other aspects. Another game mechanic that Blow considered was to show the player the expected result of an action they would take; while this concept was informative, he did not find it to be an entertaining game mechanic. Blow had previously explored this in a prototype game called "Oracle Billiards", the game predicting each billiards shot before it was made. He had found the billiards setting too chaotic for this idea and this led him to try out similar ideas in a simpler "Mario-style" setting. After selecting the game mechanics he wanted, he began adding puzzles that made philosophical points on his views on game design in general. After brainstorming more puzzles and concepts, Blow dropped the least interesting puzzles and worlds from the game. Blow wanted to include significant consequences of rewinding time, not found in games such as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Blinx: the Time Sweeper, and Timeshift in which rewinding time creates few or no changes to the game's world. While these games immerse the player with these time-shifting effects using a first- or third-person perspective, he decided to use a 2D presentation. Blow noted that some of the puzzles in Braid would have been more difficult or impossible to solve in any other perspective.

One of Blow's design goals was to achieve gameplay innovation naturally through the artistic expression of the game. He used Rod Humble's The Marriage as an example, in which Humble set out to make a game that related his feelings of being in a marriage, instead of developing game concepts first and adding the story later. As such, Blow noted that while there were no new gameplay mechanics, the game play felt different from any other game. Another concept that he used for Braid's development related to the game's presentation to the player. Blow recognized that many games present a complex interface to the player that get in the way of understanding the game, but at times are needed to explain the game's rules to draw in players. Blow referenced Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe, pointing out that the game never communicated the purpose of playing the game upfront to the player, citing that as one of the reasons for the game's poor reception. Braid was developed to promote this non-verbal communication to the player, explaining the fundamental rule of each world at its start and allow the player to interact with that rule throughout the world. Commenting during the development of his following game, The Witness, Blow noted that he would run into difficulty in demonstrating the game only through video footage, as it would not show "what happens in the player's mind during the puzzle-solving process", a problem that he has also encountered with The Witness.

Blow recognized that the puzzles in Braid had a range of difficulties, with some puzzles being more difficult for certain players than others, and did not have any set difficulty curve. He designed most of the game's levels to let the player bypass the puzzles, allowing them to experience the rest of the game even if they could not solve a difficult puzzle. Only certain boss fights require the player to defeat the enemy character before continuing on, using a combination of the time mechanics. Blow hoped that players would be able to find solutions to puzzles they had skipped by completing puzzles later in the game. Blow felt that "unearned rewards are false and meaningless", and thus included collectibles earned only after solving a puzzle. He strongly discouraged players from using a walkthrough to work their way through Braid, instead encouraging players to solve them on their own so that they "will feel very good about" completing the puzzles without help; Blow created his own official "walkthrough" that teases that it will guide the player but instead restates his insistence that the player work through the puzzles on their own. Some puzzles pay homage to other video games; one level features a Donkey Kong-inspired puzzle, and the ending of most worlds tells the player that "the princess is in another castle", similar to the end of each world in Super Mario Bros.

The game's story was influenced by such works as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, Robert A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Specifically, while Blow took the unique narrative model of Invisible Cities, he did not like the homage to it in Einstein's Dreams, and thus avoided taking the story in that direction. Blow's goal was that Braid would "be mind-expanding" and that "people get experiences from it that they not gotten from anything else". Blow opted to present his story through on-screen text instead of in-game cutscenes, asserting, against criticism of the lack of such cut-scenes, that Braid was "conceived as a videogame with its story presented in the tradition of a few books that I respect".