5. Experimental Gameplay (with Marc ten Bosch)
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2024
- This week's guest interviewer is Marc ten Bosch, an independent developer known for Miegakure, a 4D puzzle-platforming game. Jon and Marc have presented together at IndieCade and NYU Game Center and are working together on Thekla's next puzzle game. Here, the two discuss the puzzle design philosophy of Braid: minimalism, pattern breaks, literary influences, and more. Next: the ramifications of the game's rewind mechanic-both as a way to correct difficulty in execution but also providing advanced puzzle-solving techniques.
Braid, Anniversary Edition is out now! Buy it on platforms of your choice: Steam, PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series, iOS (for Netflix subscribers), Android (for Netflix subscribers).
00:00 - Open
00:35 - Intro
02:02 - Project management
03:31 - Braid's indirect storytelling
07:41 - Bidirectional time
16:24 - Experimental gameplay
20:40 - Breadth vs. depth
29:51 - Exploration process
39:41 - Minimalism
43:43 - Original "The Pit" design
50:19 - Combining mechanics
58:32 - Awkwardness of designing World 2
01:02:23 - Why puzzle pieces?
01:09:26 - Phase as a mathematical concept
01:13:38 - Pausing time completely - Hry
A recurring theme that resurfaces at multiple points in this podcast is the delineating threshold between the conception of an idea vs. the refinement of the idea. And after that how it fits or alters the directional core of the game.
It would be great if this could be explored more deliberately in future segments.
Great to hear more discussion between Jon & Marc again, especially on topics related to the aesthetics of game design. The IndieCade talk from years ago was an eyeopener, and here we get to see how it was applied to various details in Braid.
Thanks for another great episode. 🙏
Johnathan's thinking is so interesting, and Game Dev is such an interesting perspective for building software, even if I don't write games. Like, "how would this change impact our life mechanic?" ;)
Thanks for these video Jonathan! Keep it up. Pretty excited to listen to it!
In response to what we do with world one if we can't rewind time for death.
You could have death the instigator of the time powers, then it immediately boots you to world 2 and removes world 1 as an option and also make death the final event of the story and the catalyst of rewinding time that you only realize after you finish the last level.
That gives thematic meaning and gameplay significance.
But maybe too metaphysical or on the nose or not the meaning you wanted to convey with time powers.
Thanks again for these, I have been enjoying the remaster on my switch in between making my own game.
I like Marc ten Bosch, I like Casey Muratori, I like Jonathan Blow. I click
Miegakure vs. Jonathan Blow's Sokoban, which one will take longer to come out? Battle of the century.
Miegakure got like a 5 year head start
I bet on sokoban, it feels close to finish on streams, maybe 2 years.
Miegakure in development for like 15 years already, without much progress seen (if any)
I really doubt it will ever be released
Call me crazy but I think Miegakure will come out before Sokoban.
Marc would get so much gratis press coverage if he had it ready to ship right now when this commentary is released. 😂
Thank you Jonathan and Marc. Always interesting to listen to these. Game design has remained one the most fascinating and stimulating topics for me and I think that's in large part thanks to Jonathan.
There's so much to think about here, it feels like a very dense and high-bandwidth conversation, if that even makes sense.
There's might be a part of me that feels a bit skeptical sometimes, which might come from my relativist/nihilist inclinations, that all of this is really just a lot of big words and eloquent rhetorics to talk about things that don't really have any objective meaning or whatever.
But I recognise this as a very cynical view that doesn't really get you anywhere.
Anyway I'll stop rambling.
For me, it's the opposite. Books don't require any kind of an attention span, but video games do.
Let me explain: you can quickly pick up the book, read for a few minutes while on a bus or something, then quickly put them down. You're free and start or stop at any time.
Meanwhile, to play video games, you have to actually sit down, launch it, wait through loading screen, etc. To exit, you have to find next checkpoint, and only then you can exit. You _have to_ invest a minimum amount of time, or you'll have no progress.
Which Zach is Jon talking about in the section on iterations/variations on an idea?
Developer of Enigmash. He worked on the new Sokoban. But sadly, he passed away not long ago
@@LosManexStudio666 Probably Zach Barth, no? Enigmash was made by Jack Lance.
@Decateron his real name was Zackary Polansky. But yea, you may be right about Zach Barth
I'm surprised he didn't just swap a puzzle piece from the level with the painting with the one from Hunt! as you can solve the puzzle using just that.
18:37 did Chris Hecker retire?
1:04:00 It’s so weird to me hearing him talk about how that puzzle can’t easily be fixed when in my mind it could be fixed in literally five minutes by just swapping the puzzle piece you need to complete it from the Hunt! level with one of the pieces from Three Easy Pieces.
That way the puzzle would be solvable for 99.9999% of people when they first encounter it. Instead of completely impossible for everyone. Am I missing something? Why didn’t he do that? All he had to do was swap the positions of 2 assets and his problems go away.
That world two puzzle was the only one I had to look up when the game first came out. I still think it's pretty obnoxious
“Why am I an ice cream shop owner-ok, why is one an ice cream shop owner, broadly speaking?
And some people will have an answer like ‘Cus I want to make things that let people have fun’ or whatever, and OK. That’s not really why I’m an ice cream shop owner, cus, like, you could design a video game; people would really like the video game. But I’m doing something different. I’m really interested in something about the universe and how it works (through ice cream).”
-A pretentious Ice Cream Shop owner named Jonathan Blow somewhere in the multiverse
No no no no - Jonathan SNOW. Or maybe its Jonathan Cone? 😂
i hate gamers
The most funny thing would be to put both required puzzle pieces with platforms in exact places to which you can't get without them. This would be an ultimate troll.