Ben's Busy Blog

And now I'm writing about Braid, the game that's better than yours, you plebian. Of course I kid. Jonathan Blow's opinionated presentations have drawn great interest to his game, and a little antipathy to himself. But regardless of whether one's sensitivities have been inflamed by the denunciations of the auteur, the game's worth discussing. In this instance, I'm referring to David Hellman's Art of Braid article now available at Gamasutra. Hellman's display of iteration during the collaborative creative process offers useful insight into the refinement of thoughts from the idea bucket into a finished product.

The part that I enjoyed the most was the final page of the article, where Hellman broke down an individual scene by its layers. I really enjoyed seeing not only their development tool, but also seeing how they had composed the different layers. Subtle lighting effects in one layer enhanced the shadows on the grass. I want to discuss this more, but what I'd really love is to take the images and set up some rollover effects in order to better reveal the subtle differences between layers. Unfortunately, not enough time today. Too bad Gamasutra's online articles reflect their print-based roots and don't allow for advanced media.

Furthermore, I'd like to note that Hellman made several references to how during the development process, he had wanted to get parallax scrolling of multiple background layers set up in Braid. Boosted by no small amount of nostalgia, I would have greatly liked to see this effect on display, but sadly, I can't think of a single Braid video that had scrolling un-obscured. Ah well...