Indie goes big

by ERIK LEIJON

Last year was a momentous one in terms of the increased popularity of the “indie” game—a video game that eschews stereotypical game subjects and traditionally large budgets and staffs. Both the biggest and smallest indie game of 2008 was the XBox Live Arcade action-platform puzzler Braid, developed by American programmer and well-known gaming maverick Jonathan Blow. Working all by his lonesome, Blow spent nearly $200,000 of his own money on the project over a three year period.

Featuring striking and colourful cartoon graphics provided by illustrator David Hellman, Braid stars a young man named Tim, who must find enough puzzle pieces in each of the game’s five worlds in order to save a young princess. Each world, though, is governed by its own unique time mechanics, such as a world where the player’s movement affects time going forwards or backwards, or worlds where Tim can create a time vortexes or shadow duplicates of himself. Blow was in town this past November at the Montreal International Game Summit, and I had a chance to ask him about the unlikely hit of 2008:

NEW WORLD ORDER: Braid

Mirror: When you started working on Braid (in the fall of 2004), did you have a set idea of what the game would be like?

Jonathan Blow: In my initial prototype done in the first two weeks of development, I had a full idea end-to-end of what Braid would be like and what the story elements and mood would consist of. The puzzle design came directly down from what the time-altering rules were in each world. I would program the content in and see how everything behaved and what arose naturally from these rules, and construct the puzzles to illustrate the natural consequences.

That’s why the puzzles are fairly minimal; there will be some place you’re trying to get to or a couple of places to stand, and that’s really all. It’s not meant to be complicated, as the puzzles are trying to be illustrations of some kind of fundamental truth of “what if the world really was this way,” or “what if time behaved this way, this is what could happen.”

M: Was Braid an attempt to take the medium of gaming in another direction?

JB: It was my idea at the time I was developing it, about how to expand the thematic boundaries of games because Braid took a genre you normally wouldn’t attempt to do anything serious with—a cartoon platformer where you jump on a monster’s head and he flies off the screen—and to approach it in a more serious way.

M: Was it difficult to stay on track developing Braid, considering you were working by yourself?

JB: Absolutely, but I don’t know if it’s a bad thing. Years ago, I had a big problem finishing things, and Braid is really the first big project I ever finished. Schedules are good, but they’re destructive of quality. Either you’ll take more time to get something right, or you’ll rush it and it won’t be good. With Braid I decided to take as much time as it needed, and I originally expected to finish the game in a year. I had a game at the end of one year and had I released that original game, it wouldn’t have been as well received.

The three years are truly felt in the final process. There were puzzles I didn’t understand at the time and sometimes I would sleep on it, even for a month by going off and working on something else. But I would wake up one day and know how to fix the puzzle. It’s not something you could schedule because it just needed time to achieve further understanding of how to make it better.