2. Getting the Game Going (with Casey Muratori)
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- Braid, Anniversary Edition is a massive update to the classic puzzle-platformer Braid, now featuring over 15 hours of developer commentary. This podcast provides another way of digging into the history and development of Braid by presenting the full commentary interviews, complete with details not found in the game.
00:00 - Cold Open
00:25 - Intro
02:35 - Booting Up Cold
11:45 - Programmer Art
21:11 - Rewind as a Cornerstone
23:37 - Leap of Faith
29:05 - A Rough Prototype Test
33:33 - Original World 1
37:03 - Programming Rewind
45:22 - Story vs. Game
51:21 - Defining "Art Game"
01:04:08 - "Trinity" as an Influence
01:12:05 - Fan Fiction
01:14:47 - Things Left Unsaid
01:31:46 - Outro/Credits - Hry
It feels pretty surreal to listen to this in 2024 - Braid came out while I was in college, and listening to the conference presentations and interviews discussing the game was what made me want to be a game programmer. Now, I’m also releasing a game with Netflix this year, and I just found out it’s coming alongside Braid!
grats, and best of luck!
@@dandymcgee 🙏
it was my CHILDHOOD GAME!
Congrats, what's the name of your game?
@@jeremiahkellick2132 thanks! It’s The Dragon Prince: Xadia. If you like our animated show on Netflix, or fantasy RPGs, you might be interested. There’s a gameplay trailer on CZcams
I hope Jonathan sees this:
When I first played Braid, years and years ago, my friend told me to play it but revealed nothing about it. I didn't know about the rewind mechanic at all. I managed to avoid death until the Leap of Faith level where I, obviously, fell into the spikes, and died. I was confused about why I seemed be frozen in time, until the game prompted me to rewind, and then bweeoow wooosh wooosh I flew back up to the top of the cliff.
It was such a magical moment in gaming for me, and based on these interviews, I feel like it might make you happy to know that at least one person had that unspoiled experience of discovering the rewind.
I just had a lesser version of this surprise: as I am listening to this I decided to open up my old version of PC Braid to noodle along whilst I listen.
I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the "rewind" key was. There's no indication in the help that it's possible, so I just kept playing for a bit till I died.
Then I got the "mini-aha" when the game advertised which key to press for rewind. Still good after all these years.
I think the discussion at the end about ways in which art can work and what it takes to make is the most clear expression of the concept I've ever heard. I have long struggled to verbalize some of these opinions and this was just enlightening.
Another classic episode of the future #1 podcast in the world.
I love Casey's idea/description of some games as "fan fiction". I think there's so much fan fiction that most games published in 2024 are fan fictions of fan fiction.
I think "fan fiction" gets the relationship wrong. It's just "content". Endless variations of content, all fitting the same form. Anyway, these sort of discussions tend to get a bit masturbatory and are somewhat pointless unless they bring political economy into it.
@@Bestmann3n I actually think fan fiction is a pretty accurate way to describe some games. Kingdom Hearts comes to mind, all KH games released post KH2 are essentially fan fiction, I've been saying it for years.
@@danielwarren3138 sure but then you could say that the new star wars movies also are fan fiction. That turns into a discussion about artistic legitimacy, which is interesting on its own, but the elephant in the room is still the question of why these things are being made and to understand that we need an analysis of the entertainment "content" industry and the political economy situation it finds itself in.
@@Bestmann3n True - I think something like Star Wars is elastic enough that it can support an expanded universe without relying too much on existing characters. I'm not sure I'd describe the sequel trilogy as fan fiction, I'd just say they're absolutely terrible films. I was so aghast at how dreadful the Last Jedi was that I never saw the last one. I've heard it's worse.
I call the latest KH games fan fiction due to over-reliance on making every single character from previous games appear in new ones (essentially nostalgia baiting) as well as writing that feels like it was taken from tumblr. This is less the case with the sequel trilogy, where the original cast aren't exactly the main focus of the trilogy, but the new characters are so catastrophically written that the films are essentially irredeemable.
@@Bestmann3n I don't think it does. It does seem like so many things are watered down derivatives of pop culture that came before it.
Can't overstate how much I enjoy and get validation and ideas from these. Thank you Jonathan
Jon, if you and John Carmack had a conversation together I think the universe would implode. I say you do it.
I've been really liking these conversations. Very comfy and good for thinking.
Braid truly is a historical artifact of its time. That early indie era of Braid, Fez, Super Meat Boy, all the legacy it all carried from Newgrounds, etc isn't coming back. The challenges it faced and the new territory it was exploring just aren't the same as the ones from today. Braid shaped those times and those times shaped Braid. Same for Trinity, a text adventure.
This truly was a braid anniversary edition
Looking forward to the next episode!
I have genuinely enjoyed this episode, thank you for making it.
Thank you for making these, your insights are always inspiring! I’m a composer that writes operas and a lot of the questions you raise and your ways of tackling creative problems resonate for me (and I’m sure every other creative domain as well). Looking forward to the anniversary edition!!!
Interesting hearing you say the writing suffered due to some of the constraints imposed. I remember being enthralled by it. I'll have to pay closer attention to this when the Anniversary Edition releases.
Looking forward to listening to this! Thanks for taking the time to do this both of you. :)
Love the podcasts! 👍
Edit: Also t=x is wild hahahahaha. What a concise idea
I really like this description of "weird reality," where you have a "system with well-defined rules," they're just weird rules (Like: time-rewinding, or, SOME objects being affected by the rewind while others aren't).
To me it sort of coincides with another cool point you made at the start of the video, about your prototyping process- I like how much focus you guys spent talking about that, because it's a very relatable, brass-tacks sort of moment of like "well, ok. I have like... a window opening. I've got some input code or whatever and a gameloop going. What now?" And your answer was... pretty much go for the time rewind mechanic FIRST, and see how that works. You already know you're gonna be able to spruce up the platforming and the art and all that stuff - what you need to discover, first, is if this system is going to be fun (/ possible / inspiring or whatever). And that makes me think I should apply a similar approach if I have a cool game idea I want to prototype- narrow down that mechanic that I'm actually excited by, the thing that will be the basis of the game, and gun right for that (rather than procrastinating by sort of fleshing out a generic "engine" for the game, which I tend to do).
For example, I've been thinking for a long time about a sort of robot-building game. And obviously in my mind are imaginations of, ok... either a 2D or 3D world, potentially physics simulations (the mind is ALREADY on optimizations, because of course it is - that ends up being sort of an obligatory, bottle-necking end-step (also it's kind of fun and creative in itself)). Maybe some cool spatial partitioning system. Maybe some unique networking protocol that's gonna ensure reeeeally predictable, scalable behavior for a ton of concurrent players. And the whole swarm of other things that are going to need to happen to make a truly fantasy-scale idea come to life. It's so overwhelming that of course I haven't even remotely begun to develop such a thing.
And of course, nowhere in there is like... ANY description of what the game "is." Or what makes it fun. Or that specific character I'm going for. I get why I'd want to start somewhere miles "before" getting to my "real" idea - why that kind of preamble seems necessary. But I find too often that I'm riding a bike without pedaling by doing that. It occurred to me recently that my primary fascination with this robot-building game idea is all in the interaction model, specifically in in-game coding. And that was eye-opening because I suddenly realized that the "meat" of my prototype idea could be encapsulated in like... a file loading / editing system. Like. Forget graphics lol. Building some protocol for turning a .txt file into a robot. And being able to modify those .txt files in-game. That's inspiring to me. And it's so actionable. And that seems close to my weird reality.
This reminded me of an old post I wrote on Discord a few years ago:
I think part of the reason people are like this [overly focused on the game engine instead of the game itself] is because of the industry's choice of word "engine" for the not-game-logic part of the game.
In order to have a working car, you need a working engine, because the core of a car - the only way to produce car behavior - is to harness the engine's torque to spin the wheels. If you told an aspiring DIY mechanic who wanted to build a car from scratch "just build a car, don't worry about the engine" they won't produce good results. They would put together a really nice hull, and have good seats and windows, and have a fancy dashboard and a solid steering wheel, but they wouldn't be able to make the car go anywhere because the engine is required for the car to be a car. They'd essentially build a cargo cult car.
But a game engine is not the core of a game. The core of a game - the only way to produce gameplay behavior - is letting a player interact with game mechanics. This doesn't require a "game engine" at all, just I/O and some method of transforming player input and gamestate into output (the game logic). The things normally associated with a game engine - the entity component system, the cross-platform APIs, the debugging tools - are all the previous window dressing like the seats and dashboard and hull!
So by telling everyone about "game engines" we're setting people up for failure. They're going to believe, because of what "engine" means, that the game engine is the core of the experience, and they're going to make sure they have the best multithreaded entity component system, the most robust cross-platform APIs, the fastest physics, but they won't have a game. They'll only have a cargo cult game, because they haven't put together the game mechanics and player interaction, which is the actual core of a game. And when you tell them "just build a game, don't worry about the engine" they'll think of the car example and think you're crazy. But in reality, the real "game engine" was the game logic made along the way.
Suffice it to say you are far from the first person to run head-first into this category of errors. Many people don't even figure out they're making an error here; that you've already figured that out yourself puts you ahead of the pack.
@@james-s-smith I agree, and that is an AWESOME metaphor!
It really is exciting to think of the player interaction model in a data manipulation sense, because it seems like... such a skinny sort of nervous system compared to the sort of work required to actually build out the rest of the game. It feels like a cool place to start.
20 years later:
"Thekla taught me what a deep game was."
- future game developer
--
But honestly, hearing about how things took form and tracing back through the roots, influences, discoveries, and turning points like this is so eyeopening. The way we can 'follow along' captures inklings of wisdom on creative processes that otherwise could not be adequately conveyed via instructional advice.
In a way, it feels like walking through a tutorial on deep thought in game dev. Many intuitive aspects of it become more relatable and easier to imagine.
This podcast is such a treasure trove of insight. Once again, thank you both. 🙏✨
Jon you're my Moriarty
episode twooo hypeee
Thank you so much ❤
Both of you are heroes
loved the intro music❤
22:47 meow
Amazing
42:14 real meow
Awesome!
Congrats on finishing the release candidate! BTW, I actually enjoyed the writing in Braid quite a bit. I know it got a mixed reception but I'm not sure why and I actually like it better than the quotes in The Witness.
Podcast without face, is real podcast.
08:00 Jon explains how to implement the travel-back-in-time Braid mechanic in a minute.
Pretty cool that Braid has version control built in. Also similar to how emulators with rewind and save states do it.
What's the EGW manifesto? Does anyone know? "Like with the EGW manifesto, realize what you are in a tactical position to do that the greater amount of money prevents those players from doing"
Not sure, but I believe he's referring to Experimental Game Workshop, first of all. Reading from EGW's own definition, they talk about being criticized for having criteria for only letting "experimental" refer to gameplay. So I'm assuming the "manifesto" is referring to the kind of ideas that generally are praised or encouraged in EGW's space. I might be wrong of course.
The story about the Finnish game really wiggled my joystick
I'm curious if Casey ever played Obra Dinn because that's the only other game I can think of off the top of my head where it is more in your head than on the screen. On some level you can just call it Murder Sudoku, but the graphics/engine/etc are just a way of putting information into your brain pan for you to think about.
What is this Trinity game that keeps getting mentioned and where can I get it?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(video_game)
Guess I’ll have to play it, the way the Jon and Casey described it is quite enticing.
G O A T E D
Jon is cool :O
If the game is as good as the podcast than I am excited!
As per this discussion. I dont think I understand what an art game is, or for that matter what art is unless we are using the typical definition which from what I have ascertained over my life seems to be "something considered to be of higher quality and is at least somewhat challenging to appreciate". I am also wondering if Casey's description of a game where your thought was more important than the gameplay is supposed to by synonymous with art game or if that is separate? Because that would seem to fit something like KSP which IMHO was most "fun" when I was reading Wikipedia articles are orbital mechanics and planning missions, but I dont really think KSP is "arty" whatever that means.
Going to give playing Trinity a go, so maybe what art is supposed to be will finally click.
You can also play The Witness. The beautiful thing about The Witness is that the experience can’t be explained, it can only be experienced by actually playing. It is truly a game like no other.
@@MrFedX Played it many times. Other than Jon's games being better than his peers' and putting tangentially related text/audio logs in all of them, I cannot put my finger on any standout differences with every other game in existence bar trinity. Would Braid and the The Witness still be art games if you removed these logs? They are rather unique in their philosophical abstractness? Other games if they included anything similar would of just been an episodic novella about the back story of the game. The only thing similar I can think of is that books sometimes include seemingly practically unrelated quotations and ramblings in chapter headers.
You're a beautiful person Jon
Wait... Netflix has games???
what was he braiding doe
Timelines... in a sense.
right
Fantastic podcast, you should upload all the episodes for channel members, and keep one a week for normal users (I would pay for that)
This is a great talk but don't let that distract you from how good LSP is
Ten years from now, the only thing that will beat that joke is how good LSP is
The Last of the Mohicans.
I'm really enjoying listening and so I mean this in jest, but it's laughable that Jon says "don't worry if you're not a programmer" given the absolutely full throttle game dev programming discussion afterwards
Lolol : )
1:01:25
Is there a reason why it’s not available for mac? Was it a development issue or just because mac is annoying with games for some reason
next to no market share and Apple's insistence of making it hard to build anything that isn't exclusively for their locked in ecosystem
Wtf ? I have zero recollection about an atomic bomb in Braid .
Excuse me while go play Braid again !
I think you have to get absolutely everything in the game… all puzzles and some ‘hidden’ stars I believe it was?
When I played I don’t recall ever collecting even one, even then it still floored me into keeping to try making video games.
But same, this anniversary edition shall be completed.
@@alejmc Definitely ! I already bought the Anniversary Edition on Steam , but haven't had the chance to dig in yet :)
Skip the voice intro in favor of an index in the description (or pinned comment). Add chapter makers.
ok
task failed successfully
Great content but the amount of backchanneling is insane. It's made worse by counterpointing a mellow tone with the high pitch, volume and energy of the interviewer. Either would be fine in separate videos but it's jarring to listen to the constantly interwoven, impedance-mismatched audio levels.
Challenge: Count the "like"s.
(Hint: Be sure to detect integer overflow.)
Its really annoying hearing Casey say "yes", "right", "ok", "mmh" and things like that constantly without actually adding anything else to the discussions. It would probably have been much easier to listen to this if those words were edited out
Jon also goes into something that seems important, then abruptly peddles back because it was scrapped
I wanted to disagree with this on the suggestion that it's a conversation between people more so than a curated talk with the listener in mind, however near the end it did get in the way of the listening experience for me as well, and I love listening to Casey talk. I don't think it's because it is inherently interruptive, but because the timing was off, likely due to this being a record of a call over the internet, those extra 100 ms make the context of what it is the mhms are responding to more difficult to parse and therefore much more noticable.
Or maybe your comment primed me to pay extra attention to them...
@@DemonixTB I was definitely not complaining for the sake of complaining.
I had to pause and take a break from listening a couple of times only because it got too much in the way for a pleasant listening experience.
Just to be clear I don't mind Casey saying something when he actually says something other than these noises.
I think it has its pros and cons. It sort of feels to me like a "I'm still listening so don't go on a rant so long that you forget what you were talking about and that I'm here" thing
the opening theme is literally Pirates of the Caribbean?
Shira Kammen - Downstream, all Braid tracks are existing licensed music
@@Turellio Yeah I think it just sounds like the Jack Sparrow's track from Pirates of the Caribbean.
LUDOLOGY. Please STUDY LODOLOGY
22:47 meow