Tuesday, March 11, 2008
This Blog Is Moving!
Please proceed to www.davidhellman.net/blog/. All content has been duplicated there! This blog is going to go away soon.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Who's Reading My Mind, Part I
NOTE: This blog has moved to www.davidhellman.net/blog/. This post and all other content has been duplicated there! Commenting on this blog has been disabled.
Today I bring you another new feature, Who's Reading My Mind, in which I scramble to take credit for an idea I've recently learned someone else plans to implement. Word just hit the street that Wayforward Technologies, maker of Contra 4 and Shantae, is developing a Wii Ware game called LIT. According to the press release, it's a 3D horror puzzler about maneuvering a scary, dark environment by creating safe paths with light. That's right, you light the way to presumably stave off whatever horrors lurk in the 3D darkness.
Well! Dudes, I had the same idea back in 2003. Here are some hastily-snapped photos from an old sketchbook.
In my version, each stage was a grid-based dungeon, like from the first Zelda game. The starting room was lit, but the surrounding rooms were dark. There was a mechanism for extending the light from one room to another. Rooms had different qualities: some allowed light to travel through them to the next room in a continuous line; other rooms always redirected the light in a particular direction; other rooms had dials that could be turned to send the light in whatever direction you wanted. So, although it was partly an action game where you'd control a man running around through a series of rooms, performing local actions and physically manipulating his surroundings, it was also a puzzle game in which an entire stage was a tile-based puzzle. The local-scale action was about uncovering all the tiles in the puzzle through exploration -- bombing walls or what have you. It was about assembling the big picture from piecemeal observation. On the higher level, it was a puzzle about sending a signal through a series of redirecting nodes, and the chain reactions that would result from changing the flow somewhere early in the sequence.
Atmospherically, it was horror. The dark rooms were frightening; you'd feel vulnerable there. You'd do everything possible not to go there. There were things living in the darkness, and they could move around freely, with much greater perception and agility than you had. You'd hear them coming, getting louder, long before they'd appear on screen in the top-down perspective. But figure out how to turn the lights on, and you'd transform terrifying rooms into places of comfort. The light rooms were as soothing as the dark rooms were unnerving. But you could could play it how you liked, to some extent, braving the darkness if you were quick enough to evade the monsters, or spending more time on the puzzle aspect to get the lights on and avoid danger. I wanted it to have a real feeling of vulnerability, so you'd think hard to avoid going into dark rooms.
At the end of each stage you'd go down a floor, bringing the light deeper underground. The rooms you lit formed a tenuous strand of illumination and safety in a vast, pitch black underground maze.
At this point, Wayforward have only released one sketch of a weird hair-like creature, leaving many questions unanswered. Will they use a room-by-room approach like my concept, or will the light puzzle be more local (e.g. using flashlights and candles to create paths within an otherwise dark room)? Will it be as awesome as my game would have been if it existed, or only a shabby pretender next to the immaculate precision of my idleness?
Today I bring you another new feature, Who's Reading My Mind, in which I scramble to take credit for an idea I've recently learned someone else plans to implement. Word just hit the street that Wayforward Technologies, maker of Contra 4 and Shantae, is developing a Wii Ware game called LIT. According to the press release, it's a 3D horror puzzler about maneuvering a scary, dark environment by creating safe paths with light. That's right, you light the way to presumably stave off whatever horrors lurk in the 3D darkness.
Well! Dudes, I had the same idea back in 2003. Here are some hastily-snapped photos from an old sketchbook.
In my version, each stage was a grid-based dungeon, like from the first Zelda game. The starting room was lit, but the surrounding rooms were dark. There was a mechanism for extending the light from one room to another. Rooms had different qualities: some allowed light to travel through them to the next room in a continuous line; other rooms always redirected the light in a particular direction; other rooms had dials that could be turned to send the light in whatever direction you wanted. So, although it was partly an action game where you'd control a man running around through a series of rooms, performing local actions and physically manipulating his surroundings, it was also a puzzle game in which an entire stage was a tile-based puzzle. The local-scale action was about uncovering all the tiles in the puzzle through exploration -- bombing walls or what have you. It was about assembling the big picture from piecemeal observation. On the higher level, it was a puzzle about sending a signal through a series of redirecting nodes, and the chain reactions that would result from changing the flow somewhere early in the sequence.
Atmospherically, it was horror. The dark rooms were frightening; you'd feel vulnerable there. You'd do everything possible not to go there. There were things living in the darkness, and they could move around freely, with much greater perception and agility than you had. You'd hear them coming, getting louder, long before they'd appear on screen in the top-down perspective. But figure out how to turn the lights on, and you'd transform terrifying rooms into places of comfort. The light rooms were as soothing as the dark rooms were unnerving. But you could could play it how you liked, to some extent, braving the darkness if you were quick enough to evade the monsters, or spending more time on the puzzle aspect to get the lights on and avoid danger. I wanted it to have a real feeling of vulnerability, so you'd think hard to avoid going into dark rooms.
At the end of each stage you'd go down a floor, bringing the light deeper underground. The rooms you lit formed a tenuous strand of illumination and safety in a vast, pitch black underground maze.
At this point, Wayforward have only released one sketch of a weird hair-like creature, leaving many questions unanswered. Will they use a room-by-room approach like my concept, or will the light puzzle be more local (e.g. using flashlights and candles to create paths within an otherwise dark room)? Will it be as awesome as my game would have been if it existed, or only a shabby pretender next to the immaculate precision of my idleness?
Braid Gameplay Videos
NOTE: This blog has moved to www.davidhellman.net/blog/. This post and all other content has been duplicated there! Commenting on this blog has been disabled.
Those great guys at Game Videos have uploaded a couple clips of Braid! Special thanks to Matt Chandronait!
Those great guys at Game Videos have uploaded a couple clips of Braid! Special thanks to Matt Chandronait!
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Art of Braid, Part I: Early Abstracts
NOTE: This blog has moved to www.davidhellman.net/blog/. This post and all other content has been duplicated there! Commenting on this blog has been disabled.
Over the next month or so I'll be wrapping up work on Braid, a video game by Jonathan Blow, coming to XBOX LIVE Arcade. (For an overview from my perspective, here's the relevant page from my portfolio, and for general Braid-related news, here's the official blog.) It seemed like a good time to "start talkin'," as they say in interrogations. This is the first of a series of blog posts highlighting different aspects of Braid's art, and explaining some of my thoughts behind them. Some posts may be fairly concrete-minded, but others (this one, at least) verge a little into my own associations and difficult-to-pin-down feelings. But hey, it's art! Behind-the-scenes info and creator commentary are always interesting to me, so hopefully these will address someone's curiosity at least.
(Certainly I welcome comments! Let me know what you'd like to hear about, and how I can make these features more interesting.)
Let's start with these vague yet vivid digital paintings. They're from the very beginning of my involvement in the project, in the summer of 2006. Even then it was known that Braid contained various worlds, and that each world had a different theme, and that each theme would call for a different graphic solution. These exercises were just an initial foray into mood and color, to see what range of sensations might be appropriate.
Looking at these now, I don't remember what thoughts were guiding me. But I'm struck by the sense of nature in each one. They're dewy and bright and cold, like a morning when you're out in some wilderness without a jacket because you forgot how chilly it would be. They're also brooding and mutable, unresolved. There's that one with the grey-purple clouds cruising by huddled orange trees. The clouds are like gangbangers scoping out a joint. In all of these, nature is powerful, uncontained, and transient. Looking at these, you don't expect them to stay the same.
Again, I don't remember too well what I was thinking at the time. Maybe they were just reflective of my mood that day, but let's credit my professionalism and suppose I was making an effort to answer the needs of my client! Looking at these in light of the final product, I can see how they relate. ... Backing up a bit, Braid is a series of thought-experiments about how reality might be. Each world the player visits presents a different theory of nature, and time. As the philosophically-inclined Tim, it's the player's role to engage the new theory, test it, and discover its implications. Each new theory brings mystery and discovery, but also destabilizes Tim by deepening his uncertainty, cutting him loose from the grounding of a consistent world view. In Braid, like these paintings, reality is malleable. The forces of nature are powerful and sometimes daunting, but they transform with Tim's evolving perspective. So, I see those things in these images: reinvention, power, and instability.
If you see a pony and a bunny rabbit, please let me know.
Returning to the title screen at the top of this post, that expressionistic element has clearly found its place in Braid. There's more I could say on these themes in relation to the title screen, but maybe I will save that for a future post...
Over the next month or so I'll be wrapping up work on Braid, a video game by Jonathan Blow, coming to XBOX LIVE Arcade. (For an overview from my perspective, here's the relevant page from my portfolio, and for general Braid-related news, here's the official blog.) It seemed like a good time to "start talkin'," as they say in interrogations. This is the first of a series of blog posts highlighting different aspects of Braid's art, and explaining some of my thoughts behind them. Some posts may be fairly concrete-minded, but others (this one, at least) verge a little into my own associations and difficult-to-pin-down feelings. But hey, it's art! Behind-the-scenes info and creator commentary are always interesting to me, so hopefully these will address someone's curiosity at least.
(Certainly I welcome comments! Let me know what you'd like to hear about, and how I can make these features more interesting.)
Let's start with these vague yet vivid digital paintings. They're from the very beginning of my involvement in the project, in the summer of 2006. Even then it was known that Braid contained various worlds, and that each world had a different theme, and that each theme would call for a different graphic solution. These exercises were just an initial foray into mood and color, to see what range of sensations might be appropriate.
Looking at these now, I don't remember what thoughts were guiding me. But I'm struck by the sense of nature in each one. They're dewy and bright and cold, like a morning when you're out in some wilderness without a jacket because you forgot how chilly it would be. They're also brooding and mutable, unresolved. There's that one with the grey-purple clouds cruising by huddled orange trees. The clouds are like gangbangers scoping out a joint. In all of these, nature is powerful, uncontained, and transient. Looking at these, you don't expect them to stay the same.
Again, I don't remember too well what I was thinking at the time. Maybe they were just reflective of my mood that day, but let's credit my professionalism and suppose I was making an effort to answer the needs of my client! Looking at these in light of the final product, I can see how they relate. ... Backing up a bit, Braid is a series of thought-experiments about how reality might be. Each world the player visits presents a different theory of nature, and time. As the philosophically-inclined Tim, it's the player's role to engage the new theory, test it, and discover its implications. Each new theory brings mystery and discovery, but also destabilizes Tim by deepening his uncertainty, cutting him loose from the grounding of a consistent world view. In Braid, like these paintings, reality is malleable. The forces of nature are powerful and sometimes daunting, but they transform with Tim's evolving perspective. So, I see those things in these images: reinvention, power, and instability.
If you see a pony and a bunny rabbit, please let me know.
Returning to the title screen at the top of this post, that expressionistic element has clearly found its place in Braid. There's more I could say on these themes in relation to the title screen, but maybe I will save that for a future post...
First Post of the Future
At 2:17am, with the first traces of tendonitis teasing my wrists, triumphantly I post. At last my portfolio site is updated. At last it includes Braid, my nearly-complete project of the last 18 months. With Braid winding down, and GDC last month getting me back in touch with certain people, and thoughts generally turning towards the future, it seems like a great time to get my act together with respect to blogging. So that's it, that's all I've got this time – a businesslike acknowledgement before rushing out the door again. But I'll be back, most likely with some behind-the-scenes on Braid's art (as I claw towards blogging Relevance).
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