What do I do to maximize the probability that this time this project
succeeds, right? And there were many things. I was like it's time to get serious and stop playing around on all these little projects.
Hello and welcome to the inaugural episode of the Braid Anniversary Edition podcast.
Braid Anniversary is an updated version of the classic game Braid that came out way back in 2008 and
The remaster has improved graphics and sound and new puzzles
But in addition to that, it's got a bunch of very deep developer commentary
Over 15 hours of commentary survived the editing process, but this came from over 60 hours of initially recorded audio
Thus this podcast as these episodes proceed will have different people doing the interviews and our friends
And our first interviewer is Casey Muratori who many people may know from his computer enhanced sub stack where he teaches programming
And from his popular YouTube series handmade hero
If you don't know Casey, you'll get to know him by listening to what he has to say in the interview. So let's get to it
So I
Guess I don't really know
But I know you've said that the you got the idea for Braid in late
2004
Yeah, and it was your idea actually.
And and I've always been a little confused by that
But I mean, I guess I sort of know what you mean
But so why don't you walk us through exactly what that means?
Because obviously there's the email that I wrote that I think you're referring to yeah
But I think there's a deeper through line there because that part is just one piece of it
There's the whole thing with like invisible cities
Oh, yeah, there's all these other lineages that are like involved there
And and I don't really know in what order these start gelling together. It's obviously not just like oh
There's this one email and everything happened after the email. There was like a bunch of things. I feel like so yes
well
It's a little there are many factors that it's hard to place but
before the email
Sort of the background that was percolating
was
invisible cities was one of my favorite books and
there were other works at the time that were
Obviously influenced by that right and one of these was a book called Einstein streams
By someone who is a physicist in his day job Alan Lightman, right? And so both of these books
take the form of a bunch of little vignettes that are three or four pages each that explore some
different idea that is a little bit absurdist or
somehow
Obviously not the case. Okay, like not literal explorations and not logical exploration
So in invisible cities, you know, there are cities where I
don't I'm not gonna remember any of them well enough to like do do justice, but
You know, there's a city where
Every point above it's like on the water right like Venice and
Every point of the city above the water has a corresponding point
below
Okay, and but it's also conflated with the reflection in the water and like people are spying on each other
And there are no secrets because from every point of the city
You can see every other point by looking in the reflection. I'm completely butchering it but okay. It's things like that
It's things that like don't they don't exactly map to reality a hundred percent, right?
Right the one that my company is named after which of course, I remember the best
Okay
is about
It's a city built by just looking up at the stars and seeing what the structure and the architecture is and like, okay
let's let's copy that down here and
It always seems to be perpetually under
Construction and never completed. Wow. Okay, which is maybe a little bit of a bad omen
That's great. Yeah, but appropriate for a game development
Sadly life cycle. Yeah, sadly and then Einstein's Dreams was like that but different it was you know every
many people know the story that Albert Einstein was a
lowly not
particularly respected patent clerk
before he did all his good stuff and
Einstein's Dreams is about him going home every day after the office and
Doing his physics at home and like just falling asleep thinking about
What is the answer to how it could be that light behaves? Right, right and
You know, so on the one hand, this is like maybe there are different topologies
To the universe if there's a fourth dimension, what is it and how it behaves? Yeah, but it's also used to it's like transposed
onto
Let's say the idea dimension of like what people are and how they behave and like how their relationships go and stuff, right?
And so in a certain kind of universe
Maybe light goes kind of slow and that makes everything cold and people are cold to each other or something again
Okay, okay. Okay. Well like that's the basic idea
And so it's sort of like it's it's like a very ex
It's like a very like microcosmic thing where all the different parts are exhibiting the same sorts of like
of change so
We make one change, but we kind of pretend that change ripples through everything even if it wouldn't necessarily make
Quite logical physical sense that that was true. Yeah, sometimes it varies a little bit
what I would say is that there's a constant use of
laws of physics in an
Analogical way like to make analogies with like ways that behavior could be and and sometimes that's more literal and sometimes
It's less literal, right?
Now that even it's very clear to me now and maybe it even was then
But that actually owes a lot to another set of calvino stories called the cosmic comics
Okay, which is very explicitly about that too. It's like
There's different so so one of the early cosmic comics stories is like there's a guy who's just like
rotating in space around like he's in a certain part of the galaxy and
His life is just many rotations of the galaxy
He's very alone and once in a while he passes
Maybe a mark that somebody else made and he wonders like
What is this and who made it and where did it come from and all right?
That kind of a thing or another one is it's at many different scales. So another one of the stories is
You could imagine the moon
Being much closer to the earth and with a more eccentric orbit such that sometimes
It comes a lot closer and sometimes it's further and gravity's a little bit different
So that like maybe the ground kind of melts up like cheese a little bit and on
There's like an expedition where it it comes so close at a certain time that like we're gonna cross and we're gonna go to the
Moon by like throwing ropes up there and like climbing up there, right?
It's that kind of story and they're very entertaining and I recommend them to anyone who's interested because
They're all very readable because the stories are often very interesting
because they're all very readable because the stories are often very short and and they have an enjoyable idea that they get to very quickly and
actually, um in the u.s. There's like two different
You know things get published and cut up in different ways in the u.s
Originally as I read them there was a collection called cosmic comics and then a sequel collection called t zero, right?
And then later
I think I also have a volume called the complete cosmic comics that contains both of those and then a couple more
Stories, okay, but all of this
You know, I had read as much calvino as I could get my hands on
and all of that was
influential on what Braid was although don't blame him if you don't like the text
In the game because it's very different from anything. He would have written right? Okay
Part of what I was consciously doing is like not
Copying right? Like let's make this its own thing even though it's heavily influenced
But so so all that was flying around sort of in my mind at some point like I wanted to do a game
A game version of what I liked about these stories, right? And what's the earliest you remember thinking about that?
I mean how far back are we talking?
I don't really know
possibly
A year before I actually did Braid but it would have been a very vague idea
So it wasn't like the first time you read calvino you were just thinking it would be cool to make a game like this sometime
No, it was it was actually much closer to the actual time of making Braid that you first started thinking like hey
Yeah, it would be neat to do something like that those books that I read
Yeah, and and specifically what I was thinking was well, you know in a story
You can just sort of postulate whatever the laws of physics are like, okay
The moon comes really close and it pulls the ground up and stuff, right?
It doesn't exactly work that way in a game
Especially like the more systemic the game is
The more you kind of can't just cheat that sort of thing. You you have to more
Make a system that exhibits those properties and that to me is more magical
Right, right. I was like there's something cool. And if it's hard it seems very hard, but if you can do it
It's a little bit more groundbreaking than just doing a story about the thing right? Yeah in the field of games
It's a thing that very few people had done now. There were other games
that did
Analogies of this sort. All right. So one of the earliest ones was uh,
rod humbles game the marriage
Which I had shown at egw, right?
Like there's two people in this relationship and they're just colored squares on the screen
And you move them around and some stuff happens and right, you know
Um, and then jason roher actually had done these two games passage and gravitation. I think
Both of which predate Braid substantially if I remember correctly
Although maybe hmm
I might have to look that up. I'm not sure how much they predate it by but let's just say
They they also engage in this kind of analogy where there's a system of rules
And those rules are expressive
expressive
about
The situation that the game's about right?
It's not just the plot and the fiction that the game is about but the rules of the universe that are being set up
are
Expressive of what the game is about and so I wanted to do something like that
And I wanted to do it about physics because you know quantum mechanics for example is pretty weird
As is relativity
right, and I thought it would be fun to take that weirdness and instead of
You know conflating it with human scale things in a fiction kind of way like those stories do
Let's conflate it with human level things by just making the phenomena happen on a human scale
right and then just like seeing what happens and seeing how to make a game out of that and
That'll be fun and interesting like
You know if there's quantum superposition or something and something's at multiple places until the waveform gets localized
That's one idea right or one thing that comes up in physics a lot is time being bidirectional, right? So
which is even true back in Newtonian physics, but also
in relativity and stuff and so
What does that mean? How do you make a game where time is bidirectional? It's challenging because it seems like
Almost you can't make anything happen
Right, right because it would have to be a completely pre-recorded sequence for you to go forward and backward
And so what does that mean? And so those questions were just in the air. I see and kicking around in your head
growing over time
Somewhere in the 2003 2004 kind of yeah, it may not have even been that they may have been just a few months before
I don't know. So like 2004ish times then. But you can see like how these are very
They're both difficult questions to answer. Yes
And also not very actionable until you have a good answer
Right. Yeah, you're not really going to be able to do much until you get some thing to hold on to yeah
But then so there's this mailing list conversation that happens and I don't know if that's on
Game tech or game rants or it was one of the lists that chris ran. It was it was the game design one
So it would have been game rants. Is that what that was called? Yeah. Yeah, and so my
recollection of this was there was some discussion that probably started with
Prince of persia sands of time had come out or something. Yes
And so you guys were talking about rewind in games and I to my recollection
Maybe I contributed to this conversation a little bit, but I was not really
I was not really one of the people with the strongest opinions in it
But there was there was a lot of conversation about like did this game do a good job?
And then what is rewind?
Ability mean for games going forward right and what I remember you saying was
Well, this should just be this is obviously a technological feature like rewind was for vcrs
Yeah, so it should just be in most or all games. Yeah as something that you can just do right?
And then other people objected to that. I think I remember some of who they were but I won't dox them in case it's wrong
But it's like other people were like well, you can't do that
Because you're removing consequence from games, right and consequences important and like the all this and
The conversation kind of went back and forth on that for a bit, but I was like
You know, nobody really implemented anything right? Right? And so there then I was on vacation and I was thinking about this physics thing
Or maybe I think a little bit before the vacation
I was like, you know what being able to rewind maps onto this bi-directional
Time thing that I was thinking about it's sort of the same idea from a different perspective, right?
And so I kind of been wanting to make this calvino lightman inspired game. So I started to have an idea like
Okay, this is actionable if I actually program rewind, right then it's both
Contributing to that discussion, right with an implementation, but also
Answering this question of like what can I do about this physics game? That's actionable now even at that time
I didn't think the whole game would be rewind
It was just like here's some manifestation of one of the lines of the game
And I did because invisible cities as many different cities and whatnot. I was thinking it would be a lot of different worlds
And one of them would be the rewind world, but like another one was like the quantum superposition world or something. Right? Yes
And then there's one more thing playing into all of this, which is you know, another another way to phrase
The thing that you were saying is like look
This is really fundamental. It should just be there
It shouldn't be like a weird game design gimmick like for people who don't know
Prince of Persia sands of time, which i'm sure most people these days don't it was not really even that popular at the time
It was all right. It was it was a medium level popular game
it
It had sand that you would use to rewind time and you had a certain number of charges
And when you ran out of rewind charges, which you could pick up on the map
Then you start losing lives when you die, right and also
For people whose main like touch point for this is playing Braid when we say rewind
We don't really mean Braid rewind. It was like a really crappy like
10 seconds of rewind tops or something
It was it was not a technically good like the sound didn't go backwards and the animations were all screwed up
And it was very limited
So you could not like rewind all the way back to a lot to the beginning of the game
And then you could just go back and rewind and then you could just go back and rewind
So you could not like rewind all the way back to a to the beginning of a long level or anything like that
No, it was like they had some ring buffer with character positions in it
And then they made the rest up or something
Yeah, it was it was and it was not really the kind of gameplay thing that it is in Braid where it's
expected to always work and always go all the way back and all that stuff.
Now there was one other ingredient that your position on that argument reminded me of,
which was
I had been in person earlier at Brian Moriarty's lecture at the GDC "the secret of psalm 46,"
which is one of his more famous lectures, and if you're curious about that, it
exists in its entirety in "The Witness," which you can (although it's hard to get to)
But if you get to it you get to listen to the whole thing. Yes, you can also read the transcript online
I don't know if the audio is online
um anyway
If you're serious about it, you will beat the entire witness and find the yes, i'm gonna watch it there. Yes, if you just
If you're a gamer, you can go read it online. Yeah, so
one of the things that he was saying
in that speech
is that
like things that are
Powerful like things that are fundamental are generous, right?
Like the i'm gonna paraphrase really badly because it's been a while since I listened to it
But like the world is just generous in a certain there's like a lot of air for you to breathe and there's like a lot of
there's a lot of surprise and a lot of situate like and
part of what he was expressing in that talk was
Frustration with sort of the limited thinking of game developers, right?
The way that I make you care about stuff is artificial scarcity, right?
Which is weird though because he's also talking a lot about this masquerade thing, which sort of is artificial scarcity
There's something in that talk that I never fully resolved for myself about exactly what side he was on, right?
but the point being like like he has some line where where he's like and this isn't the exact phrase, but he says something like
Profound things are generous. The magic is right there
Yes, if what people want is invincibility just give it to them
right
And he said that a couple years at least before this conversation happened, right? Yes
I really liked that speech and that had been floating around in my head also like as a
again, I didn't know how to action that I mean, obviously you could make a platform or where the character is invincible, but like
Okay, how why is that good? Right, right, right, right. And so um
Those were all the seeds of this thing and they came together at this time
um and I was
I
I think that before the vacation
I had enough of the idea that I might want to do this that I
You know
I had all this code laying around from previous projects and I think I did the thing where you strip it down to like the
Minimal running executable that still has all my usual game code
So it's got like the vectors and whatever it opens windows
It opens windows and it does some sound but like and it loads bitmaps, but like there's no game there, right?
I think I prepped that before the vacation
And I was like, maybe i'll work on it. Maybe not. I don't know and then during the vacation
I ended up working on it for like a whole week. And where was this vacation to I uh, it was in thailand, uh,
Mostly around chengli which is like capital but then uh some other places nearby
So you go on this vacation
Thinking maybe i'll work on this but one of the interesting things I didn't hear that was actually a very
Coherent series of like ideas coming together. So it's like very understandable sort of how that worked out
Yeah, what I did in here is why is it?
Like a 2d platformer
From like because you know, there are many things you could have done
You could have done something more like a top-down sort of thing or you could have decided it should have been in 3d
Or you could have so there is something that made you pick that was that just hey
Random first guess and then it's stuck or were you like there's a reason there are two reasons two lines of reasoning that came together
One was hey when I first went into games industry
Didn't even feel like the industry at the time but doing this bolt action stuff
Yeah, we did some really hard challenging thing and we only had two programmers like
Imagine anyone by the way again to bring this up again
Imagine anyone in the year 2022 saying i've got a two-person programming team
We're going to build our own game engine
That doesn't even use the graphics api and it's going to be drop in drop out client server
Narrow bandwidth action game and we're going to make it in like a year or two years. It's like
Nobody these days would even try that and like we somehow did it without even being in games
right right without I would like to make the point and this is off what we're talking about a little bit, but
It's important. I think um the culture back then was even importantly different than it is today
Okay, um in the way that information was shared right right so we mentioned our korea talk that we went and did and
Uh, even before that like when mike abrash would go give a speech
I think even karmak gave a speech one year at gdc. He didn't do that very often
I do think he did do it one year. Yes
It was extremely rare and that's one of the things mike abrash did while he was at it is actually like
Share the information. Yeah, not because karmak didn't want it shared but because he just never took the time
Yeah, but we said this a little bit about how he published the secrets of the six cycle texture mapper
That was an incredible piece of technology, right? Yeah
But there was a conscientious decision back then I think that we all decided to cooperate and just share
everything we figured out and not really have trade secrets and
That is very different from how some other cultures decided to approach it. So for example in japan, which was also had its own
Relatively separate video game culture very separate at the time. They were much more about trade secrets and competing with each other, right? Really?
Every
Encounter that I had it seemed that way. I don't know
And I do think there was a time like, you know, if you think about the nintendo days or whatever
Japan was dominating games
Yeah, and then I think as things went 3d and got complicated. I think america won for a while. Yeah
And I think it was mainly because we were sharing information openly with each other and solving these problems at a very fast clip
We don't really do that anymore
And again, I mean well not in the same way like there are definitely people who are trying to do that
Same way like there are definitely people on the internet who are very open. Yeah, but like
In doom back in the day was like the biggest game
Yes, everybody wanted to know how doom works and then they just told you yes
And then later they released the source because why not right?
What are some of the biggest games today? I don't know grand theft auto online, right?
Those guys ain't telling you nothing about how that works, right?
Now that said there's nothing that's that technically challenging about it relative to other games
I don't think but if there were they would not tell you right? Okay, like apex legends, right?
Whatever like most of these games
You don't hear much about them
right
and
Is that really true? I mean, I guess I don't know but like i'm just thinking, you know, they're at least
Maybe it stopped at some point, but at least at some point there was just you know
Hey, here's the frostbite team published 10 pd
There is some of that here's how we do the things but it's just like
There's not much to say because these things are so huge that what the secret of how you ship battlefield
You know one. Yeah is just that somehow
We freaking shipped battlefield one. There's no there wasn't like oh, here's how the texture matters. No one cares
Yeah, well, I think that is a second part of it. Yeah, which is very true, which is like
Like not everybody has the same problem anymore or the problem is not even that definable
But yeah, but it's true as you say, I don't mean to say that nobody does this
But there are some people who do a lot of it and other people
The majority of the industry who really does none of it
And then the third thing that happened is you're very correct about rockstar separately
By the way rockstar in particular is notorious for never talking about anything they do. Yeah
Yeah
and then the third thing that happened is of course the internet's gotten much bigger and more occupied and
and game
Development is more democratized and all these things
And so there sure are a lot of people who want to tell you how to make games on the internet
But most of them have not really made games themselves of any note or at all, right?
and so there's a there's like a noise floor that's been coming up right the whole time and
It just all makes for a very different environment than we had in those days. Yes
anyway, so
Why was I on that topic? I'm not sure because my question was why is the game 2d?
It sounds like that was part of the answer part of the answer why a little bit why it was just
Why it was trying to be simple?
So I get getting 3d out of the mix but now there are many different types of 2d games. There's top down
There's isometric. There's yeah, let me go back to that for a second, right?
So like I said, i'd had a hard time firstly with bolt action
But we made a game we made several iterations of it. It shipped to people
It was grueling, but we did it and we were poor all the time and all that
After that, like I said, I was kind of burned out
I worked on other projects like gallstaff and there was probably other 3d stuff before gallstaff and like everything I did was trying to be
3d in some way
You know the air guitar game was trying to parse 3d space. Right? Yes, like that's even harder
Yeah, I definitely noticed the pattern and and you know, so happy cake for example as we discussed was completed and 3d
3d
It was a lot of work
We got it done
But also the delta between that and a game that I would have liked was like still pretty big
right, and so I had a good taste for
how
Hard 3d was I knew that I could do it
But I also knew that it it was going to take a lot of time and energy to do it both technically firstly
But also in terms of design just getting things to feel good in 3d is harder
Solving issues like oh, there's just visibility problems here or collision doesn't feel good or whatever it is
Those are all easier just from a design standpoint in 2d than 3d. I see right and so
What I was saying to myself was you know, I would have envisioned that I would have done a big
Um, uh groundbreaking meaningful game. I was about to say important, but I don't know what important means
And I don't think I would have said said it that way but like I wanted to really make my contribution to games
and
I hadn't
Made a game that was like that yet
Okay, right even the so happy cake didn't ship to anybody
The bolt action game was played by a three or four digit number of people, right?
You know and then didn't continue after that, right? So
It's like what when am I going to do this thing? And what do I?
What do I do to maximize the probability that this time this project?
Succeeds right and there were many things I was like it's time to get serious and stop playing around on all these little projects
Now we've talked through a lot of the consulting that I did
We talked through a few of the projects that I did but like there were a lot of little projects and when we skimmed over like
Game developer magazine, right? I did that for like three or four years. Yeah. It's like 20 to 30 little projects
Yeah, that whole thing. Yeah, it was nuts. Yeah, so I was like, okay. Let's stop messing around and make
a game that's really good so
Firstly eliminate technical challenge and design challenge by being 2d
2d okay, what kind of 2d there's lots of 2d games. This is this is sort of the
The bullseye of the question, which is I wasn't quite sure how you ended up with
Well, I already knew like okay, we're gonna screw around with time
Okay, right at least and maybe we're gonna do this other quantum stuff. It's unclear but
What what is the form of it? Well, we know from the calvino influence. It's about going between different worlds
and
The rules change in every world right and that's what's cool about it. Like maybe in this world there's superposition
Right, maybe in this world there's time goes backwards. Whatever right?
But it's interesting that you part of the entertainment value or the knowledge you take from the game is seeing
and understanding those
Changes, right?
How do you do that? Well
somehow you're
Comparing them with the baseline
If you don't have the ability to compare them like hey, we've got this cool superposition thing
How do you understand why the superposition is interesting and how it's cool and how it affects things?
Well, you know how the things would have been without the superposition
And then you add the superposition, right?
And so I was thinking hey
The value in this game is supposed to come from the cool reality bendy stuff if
If the rules of the game are really complicated and then you apply some reality bendy stuff
You might not even know
like
How some interaction would have resulted in the vanilla one if it's complicated and and then you're going to be
Uncertain and unclear and then especially if it's a puzzle game, which I was pretty sure it was going to be okay if it's
If it's unclear, what is the local?
Reality weirdness effect and what is the base rule set?
That's a level of uncertainty that you don't want on the ground level when like trying to solve puzzles, right?
That's going to mess up the puzzle solving and so I knew all this without having designed the game at all
Which just I think tells you that i'd been thinking about this kind of thing for years in the egw and elsewhere, right?
Right. Okay. So
What are the simple kinds of games? I just thought through them and
The mario game came to mind very quickly, right?
Whereas some games in that genre have like a lot of creatures and a lot of characters with different abilities and all this stuff
very clearly the
prototypical mario game is
There's one monster that just goes in a straight line and you could jump on his head
like that's the minimum for the
Right that genre right and then you could dial that up like you could add more monsters if you want them if you need more
Complexity and so I could figure out later
What is the weird stuff and then gauge based on?
That how much more?
Can the game sustain and I knew all this before literally typing any code?
Okay. Yeah, so basically the the selection of mario was largely driven by
wanting the simplest possible
Visually understandable mechanic that people would just go
Okay, the the baseline one is obvious to me
So that when it starts getting modified, they're not like what the heck happened. They could clearly see like oh, right. It's this
Yeah, okay. Now you can think about some other games that are simple like asteroids is simple, right?
Robotron is simple and yeah, it's just thinking through those
It's like well like I could so so the mario game has this element of like it's a guy
Right. Yeah, and that brings it to a human scale like the mario games mario is a character
And that's a little bit like the humanity in in the stories that I wanted to like
I wanted to bridge to that if you have like a little arrow-sized spaceship, you're not
Getting that right, right. So was that a concrete thought you had when evaluating these? Yeah
I mean, I'm sure I thought through a bunch of them
And in fact, this was probably the genesis of the idea that there were going to be a bunch of retro games in Braid as well
Of other genres. Right, which we'll have to talk about since that did not actually happen. It did not actually happen. We should talk about those.
Yeah.
That concludes the first episode of the Braid Anniversary Edition podcast.
Thank you for listening and if you want another episode come on back next week.
Braid, Anniversary Edition comes out on may 14th 2024
You can pre-order it now on Steam, and you can buy it on game consoles pretty soon. In this episode, Casey Muratori asked questions.
Jonathan Blow answered questions. Jason Brisson produced, and Will Torbett edited. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next time.