Okay, so once you get some of that stuff up, what is the first thing you start trying?
Because now you're like, okay, like I could start in theory investigating some thing about
this arrow of time concept.
What do you actually first try to investigate?
Hello and welcome to episode two of the Braid Anniversary Edition podcast.
Our interviewer is once again Casey Muratori and we're going to start by talking about
programming.
But if you're not a programmer, don't worry too much, because before too long we start
adding design into the discussion mix and then eventually we start talking about this
special kind of project management that you have to do when you're doing a weird project
that has no pre-existing roadmap and the team is just yourself.
You know, usually people think of project management as managing a team of multiple
people, but if it's just you, you still have to make smart decisions that will get the
game from its starting point, which is basically nothing, to someplace where there's actually
a game and it's playable and it's good and it fulfills your hopes that you had in the
beginning of the project.
Toward the end we talk about art games and maybe surprisingly, maybe not, we talk about
art games in the context of an old text adventure game from home computer days.
I'm recording this intro while we're still working on finishing up the game and just yesterday
we delivered our first release candidate of the game to Netflix who's releasing it on
iOS and Android.
A release candidate is a version of a game that you hope is done, but it's going into
the testing process and you may still find problems, you may need to revise some things,
but that's where we're at now, it's pretty exciting.
And this just reminds me to tell people that hey, if you're a Netflix subscriber, you're
going to be able to play the game on your phone when it comes out.
May 14, 2024 at no additional cost is just part of your subscription and I want to encourage
people to try it because you know, I want Netflix to be happy that they signed our game
and gave us some money to do these ports.
So yeah, even if you prefer to play the game on PC or console, just go ahead and try it
on your phone too.
We did some fun stuff with the controls and you might be surprised how smoothly the game
runs.
Anyway, that's enough of an intro.
Let's get to the main event.
Where we left off was you are ready to like actually try this thing.
You've been thinking about it, but you haven't actually typed anything in.
You've got the stripped down version of your code base so that you know, it opens a window
and can do stuff.
But you go on vacation not knowing if you're actually going to touch that, I guess.
So what happens?
How does this vacation go?
You get on a plane for Thailand, I guess.
Well, I was meeting my friend from college who had also traveled to Africa with and whatever
and we were hanging out in Thailand and we were there for probably two, three weeks,
something like that.
There was a part where, so the first week or so we were all hanging out.
He then went off to Cambodia, I think, because he wanted to go see Angkor Wat.
And for some reason I was just like, I just want to chill in Thailand or something.
So there was a time when I was just hanging out by myself and that became a natural time
to work on this game.
And then after he got back, I still worked on it.
Yeah.
What did that, like for people who aren't familiar with your work process, I mean, what
does that actually look like?
You've got a laptop in a backpack, I guess.
You're in Thailand and you just...
I'm just going to Thailand coffee shops and restaurants and working on the game with whatever
laptop I had at the time.
So you're literally walking into like, you know, the Thai equivalent of a Starbucks or
something and you open up the laptop, you see that directory, what's the first thing
you do?
Well, like I said, I believe I had prepped by at least making a game template, right?
Like I had code that would open a window and do nothing.
And so then it's like, well, I want to make a platformer.
I would probably was still thinking about that at the beginning of the vacation.
Like what's the genre of the game or something?
And then I probably concluded platform.
I mean, I'm sure that idea was already swirling around, but it was like, Oh, what about this?
What about that?
So then how do you make a platformer?
Well, you can get bogged down in all kinds of things like making the character look good
or doing the animation system or doing the collision system.
And I was like, Nope, I'm not going to do any of that.
It's going to be very simple to start with because I want to get to the point where I'm
trying out the actual idea, which is the rewind thing.
And again, I wasn't sure that rewind was going to be the only thing.
I was just like, well, I have a very concrete thing to aim for.
And I was thinking probably one of the things that helped push me over the edge to doing
it was, you know, I was thinking about these things, what genre is the game?
What does that look like?
If it's a Mario game, what is that?
What is the minimum set of stuff?
If I'm going to do rewind, how would I do it?
Right?
Obviously before you sit down and type code, you probably should know at the very least
how you're going to do it.
And the thing is I had already by this time had a lot of experience with games that had
entities in them.
Right?
Even going back to the Wolfram stuff.
I mean, even going back to the MUDs almost, right?
Probably the MUDs.
I don't remember those that well.
But the Wolfram stuff, for example, you have entities in a 3D world and over the network,
you want to talk about subsets of the data per entity.
Because if you even send all the data for the tank every time the tank updates, then
that's a lot of bandwidth for a modem.
Right?
So what I've already was a thing like I've maybe got some bit field of what the members
are and the first thing I send you is either, you could make an implementation decision
already.
Like, do I think there's generally few enough members that I just send you a bit field of
one means that member is set in the following data and zero means it isn't.
Right?
Or is it like I tell you how many things are about to be set and then the indices of them,
which is a little bit more of a portable thing or whatever.
Right?
I don't remember which one the Wolfram code was.
But the thing is, when that's your first game, right?
That game didn't really have to ever save game state.
Right?
It's multiplayer.
It just would start up the server.
Right?
So if you ever killed the server, it's like the game's over and we would start it over.
However, by the time you've got that level of networking, saving is kind of easy.
Right?
So if you wanted to send it over a network, you can send it to the disk.
Right.
That's actually an easier problem.
So when it came to like golf staff or something, which had a world with objects in it, I already
had a way of like saving entities.
And that was just in this code base that I had copied over.
And it's like, well, if you already have a way of saving entities and you already have
a way of like diffing them over the network, if I wanted to do rewind, what do I do?
Well, it's just like sending network updates of this thing changed, except you put that
in a buffer.
Right.
There's a little bit extra because you need to be able to maybe go scrub back and forth.
But even in the initial proof of concept, you probably don't ever have to go forward
in time.
You just have to go backward.
Right.
Which what that could look like is just for every member, like you know the old state
somehow, like that saved somewhere.
Right?
Every frame, super dumb, look at every entity, look at the old state, diff it to find the
new state, where diffing it can again be written very slowly, go from zero to max item number,
look at the byte offset and the size and mem comp it.
Right.
Or maybe you have, you know, maybe you have a per type function.
There's only a limited number of data types that you're going to have.
Right.
And so it was very clear to me how I would implement that is basically what I'm saying.
And then there are questions like, well, how much rewind data can you fit and is it enough
and all that.
But there are obvious answers to a lot of it too, like, okay, but a lot of the level
is going to be static level objects, most things about which don't change.
And so factoring those apart so that you don't even diff them ever because you know they're
constant lets you be dumber about the ones you do diff because you're not spending that
much CPU and it means you won't be saving data somehow or whatever.
Right.
And so if you have enough game making experience, which I did at that point, it's very clear
that like, if there's any kind of problem with this idea, it'll happen way down the
road.
Right.
Once we have like a pretty specific system put together, but no real problem needs to
be solved to make a proof of concept.
It's just like the road is clear.
I could make a game obviously with dudes that rewind and I can do it.
You know, you mentioned that the Prince of Persia rewind was like not a very high fidelity
rewind.
It was like barely there.
Yeah.
Doing it this way obviously gives you perfect rewind.
Right.
And so why wouldn't I do it that way?
Like that's cool.
It's a cool technical thing to have a high quality bar for the rewind that nobody had
done before.
Right.
And then there was the question, you know, what about sound?
Well, I already do the sound mixing.
I mean, I'm sure I can just do it backwards.
Right.
Like that's not that big of a deal if you wrote the mixer forward.
On the other hand, if you didn't write the sound mixer and you're using someone else's
engine, it probably isn't going to go backwards very well.
And then you have to start doing other weird things like I have a data file for every single
sound effect that's like backwards.
Yeah, right.
You know, the flipped version.
And that's going to be nasty.
So there was a benefit to having historically written all my own code.
Right.
And that was all great.
And when things come together like that as a programmer and you just see, oh, there's
something cool to do here.
There's hardly any friction.
It's just easy to be hyped about it and to make progress.
And that was the scenario there.
So it was, let me get the minimum amount of stuff that I need to do rewind, which was
probably I could go search.
I don't even know if I used source control in the middle of the vacation.
So I don't know if I have a record of what was first, but it was probably just the player
character, right?
Because you can move around and then hit rewind and then go backwards.
And either that works or that doesn't work.
There's nothing to do yet.
But you know.
But you must have had to have, I mean, you need a level as well.
So like, are you, do you have some kind of a thing you make for placing platforms or
what's like, how does that?
Well, I had a whole editor from Happy Cake.
Okay.
Right.
Which was really a little bit like the editor we're still using to this day.
Like there's a very clear straight through line of it where it had this little immediate
mode rendered buttons and stuff and really quite poor UI experience of laying things
out.
But if you're willing to do it, like it's fine.
And so here's what's interesting is I must have decided it was 2D before Thailand because
that would have been one of the things I prepped was just like, okay, let me get the editor
running in 2D.
You know, okay, because it was 3D only.
I mean, maybe I did that on vacation, but I kind of feel like I didn't.
So you maybe before leaving for Thailand did something where instead of like picking points
in 3D with like a manipulator or whatever was the thing you had, you would just do like,
okay, it's just the 2D plane now and cut out the part where it's like moving things.
Yeah.
Well, I mean the whole-
Flying around in 3D or whatever.
The whole engine had to be 2D, but not just the editor, right?
But that's mostly just deleting stuff.
It's not that hard.
So, you know, the way the game was structured back then, I still for some reason thought
it was important to try to like compartmentalize pieces that were the engine to use.
So there was like the game folder, but in there, there was like the game lib core and
the game lib render folders, which had sort of the things you could imagine in them in
retrospect waste of time caused a lot of annoying problems with like Visual Studio and whatever,
right?
As you would imagine.
And so like a lot of the 3D code was even still in there, right?
Like quaternion stuff was still in there, like covariance matrix stuff that was using
game developer or whatever was still in there, right?
So when you get something where you're like, okay, I can place some platforms down because
I have like the 2D version of the editor and I can move a little like character around.
And I think if I remember correctly from early builds I played, you would kind of open up
like Photoshop or something and draw like a little crappy guy or something, right?
Usually like what was that process like, I guess just so I'm sure.
It was very, very programmer art.
It was so aggressively programmer art that like my goal was I literally don't care at
all.
I want this to be recognizable as what it is, but it's going to be ugly and I'm not
going to spend any time at all making it not ugly because if I'm on vacation for a week
and I want to make progress into this question of is this an interesting game?
How does it work?
You know, spending time making the character look better in Photoshop does not answer that
question at all.
It may lead to a better play experience for somebody, but like we know how to do that.
We can do that later, right?
So I very explicitly remember one time I was hanging out with Eric after he got back from
Cambodia like at a bar and I was drawing.
So there already was the concept that there's a castle at the end of each level and the
dinosaur comes out and stuff.
I remember drawing like a little, there was a gate that was like a golden arch, not quite
a McDonald's art, but it had a little like star on it or something.
And you walked through that gate and that was the object that ended the level.
And it was just literally like, okay, pick kind of a yellow color from the default Photoshop
little rectangle gradient photo picker.
Pick a brush size.
I think I knew already that brackets go brush size down and up.
So get approximately the right one and like, whoop, draw the arch.
Oh, it's got, it's kind of ugly and it has a wrinkle in it.
It's fine.
Save.
Sort of make the brush three caps smaller, draw a little star on top of it by hand.
Save, right?
And like, I think all the bitmaps had to be power of two at that time and stuff.
So like all of that was in play, right?
Also there was a texture pack that somebody had given out for free.
And like, you know, as a programmer, I was like, Hey, awesome.
I just had previously downloaded it and maybe used it in stuff.
And I believe I might have the game wrong, but I believe it was from this game, Severance
Blade of Darkness, which was like an indie game.
Not quite attacking the darkness, but it was an indie game that was like before the doom
three shadows stuff, but it did some kind of like, we're doing planar shadows onto the
ground.
It wasn't like full environment shadows, I don't think, but it was like your characters
doing shadow.
All right.
Maybe it was full environment shadows.
I don't know.
You could look that one up, but.
So they released some kind of a textures set from the game.
Yeah, they were like, they were like, here's all the tiling environment textures that we
used and like tiling textures, dude, that's like some high effort stuff.
Right?
So I use those for the, just the walls and stuff.
And a lot of them were like really low contrast.
Like I remember I used this tile texture and every time I whip out this old version of
the game to show it, like the tile is just, it's hard to see on like a projector or something,
but that tile texture, by the way, stayed in the game.
It just never was visible to people, but like in the editor, when you may.
So in the final game, of course, there's lots of geometry that isn't a rectangle, right?
It's like we're making nice grass or whatever, right?
But often there'll be like a rectangular slab under that.
That's what you're actually standing on.
And that texture in the editor was still this severance blade of darkness, like tile texture
from the first days.
But so it's like, let's get some walls with textures on them.
Let's have a character that can move and jump.
And then after that, like a little monster that you could jump over and you die if you
hit it.
Like that's all very easy, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So you, I guess during that initial phase are just like implementing some code like,
okay, I need to detect whether the guy is standing on one of these slabs.
I need to be able to detect like whether the guy hits the enemies.
Yeah.
Get that basic stuff going.
And all the collision detection at that time.
So you came along a little later and said, like, I was asking you, how should I do higher
quality collision detection?
And you were like, Hey, there's this rounded rectangle thing that I did end up using.
Although it does cause artifacts in a couple of places still to this day, but they're not,
they're artifacts that would have been there even with non rounded rectangles in some way.
And so maybe for the anniversary edition, I'll go frick and fix it.
So this is like something that you need something better than rounded rectangles to solve kind
of a thing.
What it is, is the following.
All right.
We've definitely, I have an important question I want to ask.
So I'm going to remember that.
But yes.
So what, well, so before I say what the problem is with the rounded rectangles, the initial
version that you guys played was probably just using point queries like, am I able to
walk to the right?
Well, take the center of the character and offset by some distance, is that in a wall?
Right.
Yes or no.
Right.
And so that has this common kind of video game problem where if there's a very thin
wall, you could like tunnel through it and stuff, but you can solve that for a low to
medium quality level experience by limiting the frame rate and whatever.
And so again, proof of concept, none of that stuff matters.
And so to prove your concept actually, it helps just to constantly vigilantly have a
very, very clear idea of what you need to do now and what you could do later.
Because anytime in a game, as soon as you start typing anything, there's just a lot
you can do to make it better.
All these making the character look better would have made it look better.
Adding animations like the character, I didn't quite explicitly say this, but the character
was just a static bitmap that I flipped.
I flipped the U coordinate of the UVs when you go left.
Awesome.
Right.
And in fact, that flag stayed, I think it's still in the game.
There's like the H flip flag on things.
Yeah.
But that's enough to like play something, right?
It'll feel better if you make him walk.
In fact, the, I remember when I first put in animations, it felt a lot better, but
like I already knew it was a good game before I made it better.
And that's very important.
And I, I do think at least in those days, a lot of people were lacking that kind of
a self disciplined self direction.
Like these days on bigger projects, you have to like bigger projects have a different version
of it, which is like, of course there's no way to make the actual game we wanted to make.
And so we have to judiciously cut to get like the thing that we will actually be able to
ship, right?
Which is a more, you know, that's more of an emergency ward version of the same thing.
Right.
But you should have some version of that.
Otherwise you're just kind of winging it constantly forever.
Right.
Yeah.
So the thing that I was interested in is, okay, so once you get some of that stuff up,
so you've got like just the bare minimum passable version of like, I can walk left to right.
I know I didn't walk into a wall.
Obviously I can jump and come back into contact with the surface and that sort of works or
whatever.
And there's a little guy.
What is the first thing you start trying?
Because now you're like, okay, like I could start in theory, investigating some thing
about this era of time concept.
What do you actually first try to investigate?
Well, like I said, their rewind was the way that I mapped bi-directional arrow of time
into a concrete feature that I could type.
Right.
So let's type the feature in, let's make it work.
And it wasn't that hard, you know, given what I had, right?
I don't remember exactly how long it took, but way less than the week.
Right.
So then I had that and I was playing around with it.
And you know, they're like, isn't that much you can do with that aside from, isn't it
cool?
That's why I was interested in how do you get over this initial hump, right?
Like, well, there's a simple answer to that.
But before that, I'll say I was, you know, right away I was thinking about this problem
of like, okay, it's interesting in the way that had been discussed on the mailing list,
but you could, you know, the initial implementation of just rewind, like you can imagine what
that would be.
You know, you said Mario with rewind, it's like, all right, cool.
Now there's a fundamental shift though, that already was in place before I even decided
the rewind, which is that it's not that it's a game with technical features.
It's that it's a game about how those features change the gameplay.
Like that was part of the Calvino lightman ethic that I had going in.
And so the initial problem is like, okay, I have this technical feature.
I have implemented it.
It is rewind.
How can the game be about rewind?
Right.
And right away I started asking questions and you can come up with some stuff like,
well, it could be a lot harder than it could be without rewind and right.
You know, could just make it so that you're basically doing a tool assisted speed run
as we would call it.
Yes.
It might not be very fun, but it is evident that things that are unfair without rewind
become more fair with rewind, right?
What else can you do?
You could go forward into somewhere very dangerous that you would could regret going and get
information that you wouldn't have earlier in the game.
Right.
And then I was like, oh yeah, well, there is this game design wisdom that people have
about how to design games, especially around platformers.
And there's this term called leap of faith, which is taught to game designers, at least
around the GDC.
When I was hanging out, I don't know what kids learn in school these days, but like
it was a note.
I didn't even ever make a platformer, but I knew leap of faith is bad because you're
expecting the character to jump into somewhere that they don't know.
And if they die, if there's somewhere that they die down there and somewhere that they
don't, you can't expect them to know in advance.
It's completely unfair.
So don't make your level that way.
And, well, there are extremes of that.
It's like, maybe you die at a hundred percent of the places and it's like, well, how would
they know that either?
Maybe it's safe at a hundred percent of the places.
It's like, well, that's probably better, but like, it's still not good because you're forcing
them to do something that they don't know is a good move.
And if there's any other pits that go off screen anywhere else in the game, you're now
still creating an unfair and uncertain situation.
And so, well, that's not true if you have rewind, like free rewind.
And that was one of the theses in the beginning, like I said, in the Moriarty talk or about
the Moriarty talk, he was like, it should be totally free.
And you were like, it should just be a feature of the system.
And it's like, okay, so I'm not, I had the high level mission statement.
I am not going to cop out by making sand a resource or whatever.
Right?
I absolutely will not do that.
What I am rather instead going to do is implement the thing and then change the game.
However is necessary.
Okay.
So a Mario game by itself is proven to be, it can be a good fun game if you do the right
things.
Okay.
So you can picture it as I start with a good fun game that's just got lives and whatever.
Okay.
We know what that is.
Now I mess it up by putting rewind in.
It's maybe not fun.
It's maybe tedious.
It's maybe too easy.
Right.
The knee jerk reaction that a designer would have is like, okay, limit rewind, or you only
get it during special times.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm instead the only way out is through.
I'm going to see rewind stays constant.
And then what else about the game needs to change to make it something different.
And I had to just have the faith that I would be able to find that.
Right.
And that was again, a very experimental game play mindset.
So it's sort of like flipping, it's just flipping the like arrow of action.
It's like saying, look, normally what you would do in game design is you would say,
we have to modify the feature to fit the existing game design.
And you're doing the opposite.
You're saying let's modify the existing game design to fit the feature.
Yes.
And off you go.
Yes.
And if you think about this in terms of exploring the space of game design, then obviously you
don't want to retreat back into what is known, but that's almost what everybody does all
the time.
And if you're modifying the feature, you're sort of by definition saying that's what you're
going to do because you're keeping the other side, which is the game play constant.
And I believe, I don't remember a lot of what that conversation on the mailing list was,
but I bet some of it was like that.
Like, well, you ruin consequence and you make the game too easy and all that stuff.
But you could mitigate that in the following ways.
I mean, absolutely nobody said design a whole new game around rewind.
Right.
Just like make consequence not the important part or whatever.
Yeah.
Okay.
So.
So yeah.
So what do you start to try then to figure out how to make this game be interesting with
the rewrite?
Well, you know, the leap of faith thing immediately, once I thought that idea that immediately
translated into a level in the game where there's like a big pit, it's on world two
and there's a big pit and you actually have to like dodge some spikes and then land down
on the bottom.
And it was even more unfair originally.
And it's sort of tuned to be about as unfair as it is now.
And that was just like very few people kind of get what that is, I'm sure.
But you know, it's fine.
And then the inverse.
So I believe what's it what's like the Yoshi is the dinosaur in the Mario games, right?
I just remember some Yoshi's Island kind of level.
Yeah, there is a Yoshi.
Yoshi is a dinosaur, but I don't think it was the dinosaur that comes out at the end
of the castle.
I don't know.
I don't mean that.
I mean, there's some other games Yoshi in that genre.
Yes.
Where so on two, three, after you go down the pit, you go straight back up the other
side and there's like guys falling down and there's compartments on the side.
And I remember there being a level in like Yoshi's Island or something like that.
That was exactly that.
And this one's more unfair.
It's like the guy comes down way faster and you don't get as good of an audio cue and
stuff.
And so it's actually it's a little bit like frustrating, right?
But it's designed to illustrate this idea.
The illustration may be very subtle and not gotten by a lot of people who don't think
about game design.
Right.
So that was one way in which this manifested itself.
Another way that got detuned later was, you know, much harder difficulty.
So at the very first level of World 2, there's a few tutorialish things that are just like,
here's some puzzle pieces that are kind of easy that you do various things to get just
to show you the kind of things you do in this game.
Right.
One of the very first ones was there's one of these platforms that goes, I don't know
if this was in the version that you guys play.
It might have been.
You mean the first like alpha build?
Yeah.
Okay.
There was like a platform, you know, at the very end of what I'm about to say, there's
a puzzle piece that you can see and you're like, I need to get that.
Okay.
So there's a platform with a gap.
You have to jump across to a narrower platform with another gap to a narrower platform with
another gap to a narrower platform with another gap.
And there's like nine platforms increasingly narrow.
And like the last ones are absurdly thin compared to your character, which is kind of bad because
like even at that point, it's like you would stand on a platform or not based on whether
the center point of your character was located on the span of the platform.
Right?
So it's like, are you supposed to read the game's mind there?
But that was like funny because there's no way you would do that in a, in another game.
Right.
And I ended up getting taken out in part, like Microsoft complained about it, but I
was also like, yeah, that's been in the game since really early on.
And it's no longer quite the quality of experience that I want to have.
Microsoft complained about it.
They did a thing.
So in early 2008, when the game was getting close to kind of being done, they did a whole
fricking playtest lab thing about it.
Right.
Oh, okay.
And they decided to tell me here is how you should change your game based on the results
of the playtest lab.
And I said, well, this would make more sense if I could see the raw data.
And they were like, no, we're not going to send you any data.
I, I, as the producer, I'm just going to give you my opinion about what you should do.
And I was like, no, but I did change that one thing because it was like, you know, sometimes
you already kind of know something's not that good and it's like, all right.
Yeah.
Was that the only thing you changed?
I mean, I changed a bunch of stuff over the course of the game, but that's the only thing
I changed.
I meant because of the playtest.
Well, because of that playtest.
That, oh, sorry, Microsoft lab.
One other thing, which I often think of as my worst mistake in the game, that was the
result of playtesting, but it was a result of my own playtesting and not Microsoft.
Okay.
Yeah.
I guess we should talk about that.
We should talk about that, but that comes later, like, cause I think we're still talking
about the original prototype.
Okay.
So, all right.
So what do you get, you get the early on as you're just playing with this, starting to
play with the rewind that's working, you do a pit like a, I jump into a pit to find out
what's there and then can rewind back.
Well, not yet.
Oh, not yet.
Because what we've described so far is just rewind, right?
So, oh, do you mean, you mean a different pit?
Well, it sounded like you said the leap of faith was one of the first things you did.
Right.
The leap of faith is faith.
I thought it was confused and I thought you were talking about something else.
Yeah.
So the leap of faith was like, there's a pit that several screens high and you need to
go down it to proceed in the level.
Yeah.
There's some spikes and stuff in various places and you kind of need to know approximately
where to aim for and how to dodge them and stuff.
The first time you dive into it, you have no information and you probably die.
Right.
And then you're like, Oh, I, but I see where the things are that'll kill me.
And so you can attempt it again and attempt it again, which you would do in a normal video
game, but with a much longer sort of, uh, experiment loop.
Cause you probably respond somewhere earlier in the level and at cost to you, which is
why it's unfair, right?
Cause you lose lives or whatever.
And here it's like, that doesn't happen.
Right.
Um, and then the rest of it, I don't think I had the idea of there being a fixed number
of puzzles per level yet.
So I was just kind of doing whatever makes sense and we'll see how much that is.
And in fact, so at this time in the version I sent to you guys, the idea was that the
rewind was a surprise, right?
And so before world two, there was actually world one.
Yes, there was.
And world one was you play this platformer and it's got the monsters and stuff on it
and there's no rewind.
Right.
And so that you can do even less with that.
Right.
And it's a little bit like, well, jump on the guy's heads and practice jumping over
pits and stuff.
And the thing is there, because in the rules of the world, there are death conditions.
They're just were.
And in that one you would respond at the beginning.
And then later in world two, you would get the ability to rewind.
Right.
And that seemed good to me, except I already kind of knew, you know, like when a movie
comes out where like the reason you're supposed to watch it is because like, I don't know,
2012 or some ridiculous movie like that.
We're like, oh, it's because the world's getting destroyed in this movie.
Right.
You can't have that be like a surprise that you devote sufficient dramatic time to in
the movie because everybody knows this thing.
OK.
And like, so you figured when this game came out, people would talk about it or see trailers
and it's like they would already know that there's rewind.
So it's just kind of it seemed like a danger thing.
That was one of the elements I was thinking about.
But there were some other ones like, well, respawning with infinite lives is almost a
superpower of its own.
That's not as good as rewind.
But like, it's diminishing rewind to have like, oh, you just respond at the start of
the level or whatever.
OK.
And I could put lives in and whatever and then have it be, hey, isn't it cool that the
lives don't matter anymore?
But that seemed like a big conceit.
Yeah.
And also it just seemed like the gameplay before rewind just wasn't going to be that
good.
And so I had this worry.
So again, I have no reason to believe anyone's going to play this game.
Right.
Like Sean had released chromatron and like a hundred people played it or something.
Right.
So I was like, it's bad to have people play through a whole world.
That's maybe even a little bit hard or something.
Right.
And not even know why the game's supposed to be good.
Right.
So like, why not let them know right away?
And again, I mean, this goes to the Psalm 46 speech again, like let them know right
away why the game's good.
Yeah.
You know, why, why do this thing?
And so the idea of rewind being a surprise was a little bit fun, but I was like, in reality,
it's probably not going to work.
And so I'm not going to worry about it.
But for quite a while, the game had a world one where you just don't die and you've just
got to get to the end of it.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the other thing.
Like it was in sort of inherently hard because there's nothing else.
There's no other challenge.
Maybe apart from getting to the end of the world.
I mean, maybe you could have had the puzzle pieces all off to the side.
I don't know.
It just seems like a nothing burger, right?
To be able to walk through that world and like, there's nothing going on.
So I actually, I don't think I had the idea that early on that the main line through the
game would be easy to walk through.
I think it was still like, I do remember there was a quite wide pit that, you know, you kind
of had to jump over on that level and there was like a secret door in the side of the
pit that if you were falling down at, you could like get out.
Yeah.
There was weird stuff like that.
However, on this same initial one week thing, I'm just, I have plenty of free head space
cause I'm chilling.
I'm on vacation.
Everything's good.
And I'm excited about this idea.
And I've typed in the rewind code and it works by telling you what fields of entities have
changed.
Right.
And so there's an outer loop that's for all entities in the world.
Right.
And there's an inner loop that's for all fields in this entity and transmit that information
to the rewind buffer or whatever.
You don't exactly know where this idea comes from, but it's a very simple idea that I just
have.
Maybe I woke up with it or maybe I was just chilling, but I was like, you know, like if
there was a bug or something, or maybe I could just do it intentionally.
Just some of those objects are not visited by that loop.
Right.
And then that gives me two classes of things.
It gives me things that always go forward in time and things that rewind in time.
And right away, like even as soon as I have that idea, like I don't know what to do with
it yet, but it's like, Oh, that is the kind of cool and weird and expanding the rewind
idea that I'm looking for.
It feels just as you say it to be very in line with like the Calvino invisible cities
kind of thing where it's like, Oh, there's these kind of like different permutations
of things happening as I go through.
Yes.
And I don't know the Einstein and dream one, but I assume that was kind of similar.
Like there would be, it's the kind of thing you would see in that kind of work, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's weird reality basically, but it still has all the character or all
the, like, it's still a system with well-defined rules in fact.
Right.
So as soon as I had that idea, that was pretty easy to put in.
And then as soon as I had that idea, I was like, what else can I do with the rewind?
And I believe, I know that I did three worlds in that initial beta.
And I think it was literally what's now world two, three, four, right?
So world two is rewind.
World three is rewind with objects that are exempt to rewind.
And world four is time is tied to space.
And I think there was just like one level of that or two at the end.
Right.
In fact, I think it was T equals X and then T equals Y, which there's no T equals Y in
the final game.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah.
But how did you have that idea or it was, you know, again, it was this physics initial
idea.
And so once I realized, okay, there's rewind in this game, it's working well.
How do I tie in the other physics ideas?
Because there's maybe supposed to be quantum mechanics and relativity and whatever.
And well, what is there about relativity?
Like there's four dimensions, right?
And like time is a dimension.
Can I put that in this game somehow?
And does that involve rewind in some way?
I see.
And you know, regular space time for us is like three plus one before you start talking
about string theory or whatever.
Right.
This game is two dimensions.
So like, how do I, is it two plus one?
And just somehow it just maps onto the idea of like, what if I just control time by your
position?
Right.
Also, you know, in, in relativity, for example, you know, like if you're a photon and you're
always traveling at the speed of light, right?
Like time does not pass for you in your, in your frame, but it does pass like maybe orthogonally.
And I don't know.
It's been a long time since I thought about these things, but it's just the idea popped
up.
You know, what can I say?
Like, like those were the inputs.
And in this concrete case, it was not very hard to have the idea.
Let's just map it to space because that'll be cool.
Because again, I start thinking about what that is before I implement it.
And it's like, Oh, it'll be kind of neat that things you're kind of in control of the motion
of the world.
And if you stop, everything stops.
Like before I try to make puzzles with that, it's got an interesting feel and an interesting
kind of interactivity.
Right.
And then I think how would I implement it?
And it's like, well, it's pretty easy to look at like, where is, where is the player spawn
in the, in the very initial implementation, maybe even in the final thing, your spawn
point is just like the leftmost part of the level.
So there's no question about, could I go earlier in time than when I spawned in?
So you just literally load the level and then you simulate it forward.
And then instead of just the rewind key, you have an alternate input.
That's if you walk left, rewind the rewind buffer by that amount.
Right.
So it's very easy to think of implementation wise and you could kind of hack it in and
like, well, if there's some robustness issues with this or whatever, we'll think about it
later.
Right.
It can't quite rewind the rewind buffer.
Can it?
Because isn't the way that that works in braid that you can also rewind?
Yes.
So it can't quite rewind the rewind buffer in the way that the rewind buffer normally
gets rewound because it needs to be putting that action also onto the rewind.
Yes.
So it's a little bit different.
It's like, look at the rewind buffer and apply it or something.
Yes.
It's seek to the time indicated by the leftward travel, round to the nearest frame, right?
Take that state and then forward diff the current state to that.
Right.
And, and that's the new rewind frame.
So it's, it is not trivial, but if your code is not a flaming nightmare, it doesn't take
that long.
Yeah.
So it's not where I'm sure the rewind buffer was just a flat array at that time or whatever
of each frame is a thing.
And then there's probably a data structure for each frame.
Like it wasn't that sophisticated, but I don't care.
Right.
There's not that many objects in this game.
It's a proof of concept.
It's all good.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
So in a sense, like, I guess there isn't, it sounds like there isn't a lot of like,
you know, banging your head against anything during this time.
It's really just kind of fluid.
Like it's like, I had this idea that I had this idea.
And like, it almost sounds like by the time you finished typing in the previous idea,
you've got another idea kind of a thing.
Yes.
It was very rapid progress and really no real blockers.
Like there's always little bugs.
Like I did this and it didn't work, but there was never any like, Oh, I'm underpowered systemically
in a way that I can't achieve the thing that I want, which does happen often in games development.
Yeah, certainly.
Yeah.
But I had the instinct going in that that wouldn't happen here.
And indeed it did not.
And so by the end of this week, I had implemented these three different mechanics of time plus
the null one, right?
The right, the world one, the myth, the now non-existent world.
Yeah.
And I had little maps with little puzzles for all of them.
Like I had at least a couple of puzzles for each one.
I had the one, you know, walk linearly in the world monster where you stomp on his head.
I had a key and a gate because you know, and that's very simple.
It's like the gate acts as an obstacle until the key touches it.
Then the Boolean that says open and we swap out the bitmap.
We don't worry about animations or anything.
And then you can walk through it very easy, right?
Like less than an hour should be 10 minutes or less if like everything is good.
I mean, you have to make the entity type and instantiate it in the editor and say what
the default bitmap is.
And that stuff adds up, but it's like not hard at all.
Right.
And that was the plan.
Like, look, it's 2D with sprites.
Like how hard could it be?
Right.
So I had that.
I had the little dinosaur coming out when you're at the end of the level.
I had the story screens with text that I wrote, although it was different.
So let's talk about that for a second, because I guess you haven't mentioned that this entire
time.
When did you even know that that was going to be in there?
Because although you...
Before I programmed anything, I knew it was going to be in there.
So how did that happen?
Because the central idea sort of like that it's going to be like something like Einstein's
dream.
Yeah.
It could be like that in the sense that it's this collection of worlds with different mechanics.
It doesn't imply that there's necessarily like a story with it or anything like that.
Yeah, no, totally.
So when did you sort of, or how did that idea develop that there was going to be sort of
a like distinct two things, text and the game?
It was baked into the idea at the start for reasons, right?
I mean, obviously there's a lot of choice about what you make.
Yes, yes.
One, I kind of wanted to write something again.
I had written things way in the past and I was like, I could do something here.
It was going to be much more of a constrained writing exercise.
So part of all of this stuff, so the O'Lippo, which we mentioned, is all about constrained
writing according to rules or heuristics or algorithms, right?
And then like these specific books that I was taking inspiration from were like that.
And so I kind of liked the idea of there's gameplay in the different worlds and that
puts constraints on what the writing is, but then also there's constraints like that's
one direction of constraints.
And then there's an orthogonal direction that's just from writing to writing.
Like the intros to these different worlds can have structural parallelism in some way.
In the end, there was probably at least one too many constraints on it.
And it like the writing quality suffered from it probably, but you know, it's fine.
Also for me trying too hard, I think.
But like I was just interested in that idea.
And then also, even before I know it's rewind, there's like, there's this idea that doing
something in gameplay is more difficult than in fiction, because in fiction you can just
fiction just depends on how good you are at rhetoric in some sense.
Like once there was a world where everybody walked around on their hands and that's just
how it is.
And in games, you have to deal with what that means.
Walking on their hands is not that good of an idea, but like you open a door and it goes
to another universe or whatever.
Like that's, that's an idea where in fiction you can say whatever, but you're describing
some rules all of a sudden.
And in games, you have to make those work consistently for it to be a certain class
of game, a system oriented game.
Now of course, whenever I say this, there's always like, well, it could be like the old
adventure games where there's just if statements, right?
Right.
So you don't really implement the system.
You just implement the like particular beats you cared about and everything else is just
not there.
But even those are better when they feel systemy and the way that people figure out.
So like planet fall, for example, or a star cross actually is even more star cross has
some objects that are pretty systemy.
And the way that you solve the puzzles is you know how they behave and you use that
to engineer the solution.
And then the if statements happen to correctly implement the behavior that you want it.
Right.
Um, and so it's like, you're pretending the system is there both as the player and the
author, right?
But as you go more forward in time and games are more capable, it's like, Hey, there's
more of an actual system and the system is more complex and nuanced.
And I was very interested in that.
So I didn't want it to be like a story based game in the way lots of games are where it's
about the narrative or something.
Those people drove me nuts.
Right.
Even back then.
Right.
But I like the idea.
Okay.
So it's some kind of hybrid.
I want to have some writing and I want to have some gameplay.
What does that look like?
Well, you know, there are illustrated storybooks, right?
Some of which are for kids, but even for like young adults and adults, the further back
in time you go, the more you see like things that are illustrated.
Right.
And then even old religious texts were often just like illustrated, right?
Here's, here's Jesus dragging the cross or whatever.
That's a thing.
And so I was like, okay, what if, what if it's like that and illustrated storybook,
but it's kind of flipped around where the text takes the place of the illustration in
that there's like less of it and it's there more for color and flavor.
And then the gameplay is like the text in the storybook is the main part, right?
Is most of what you're experiencing and playing most of the time.
Right.
And I liked that.
And that, that also, it just led to this format where I don't know also ergonomically though,
if there's going to be text as an introduction, like I liked it better as an introduction
in the beginning of each world to help set it up, then like coming in the middle or whatever.
Now if I were text phobic, some like sometimes people do things that are inherently contradictory,
right?
They do that all the time.
If I wanted text in the game, but was scared of text in the game, I would put it as little
blurbs in the middle, right?
Or have little characters who would tell you backstory.
Like before I even started braid, I think a very popular indie game was like cave story,
right?
So that was one of these like linear story-based adventures where you meet characters and they
have dialogue that gives you information about the world.
So that was very clearly a model that I could have done, but I liked, so I wanted this to
be an art game, right?
That was another one of the high, there were a lot of high level parameters of what I was
trying to do, right?
I wanted it to be an art game, but unapologetically an art game, right?
Cause I'd been thinking about art games and experimental games and all this stuff.
And I was seeing that certain classes of things were not being made, right?
Like,
But what does that mean?
What does art game mean?
What made you think that that was a thing that there was like, because it's one thing,
you know, kind of if I could bring it back to the game rants mailing list, where the
aforementioned rewind mail came from, another post that I made on that mailing list, I remember
very clearly was somehow in some discussion or something, someone may have used the word
pretentious to describe something.
And I literally wrote an email saying, I would love it if we were already at the point where
I ever played anything that I would describe as pretentious, because at that time there
was nothing that was trying, that was even trying and failing to be an art game, let
alone being an art game.
And so I feel like that you using that terminology is a little confusing for me knowing what
it was like at that time, because how are you, what was, what did that even mean?
Yes, I can definitely get more specific about it.
Yeah.
So I felt like if you look at another genre, like film or novels or whatever, the best
art had a few, obviously everything varies by genre, right?
Every genre is a different thing.
But there's some commonalities that I could observe.
Like the best art was not designed by committee primarily for making money, which is what
the majority of the games industry was even at that time and what it was clearly heading
toward.
Right?
It had some stamp of the individual on it.
Here is something that somebody cares about and maybe wishes to communicate or express.
And even the word communicate is like kind of a red flag because it's very easy for people
to misinterpret that.
Right?
I don't remember, we've done enough hours of recording now that I don't remember if
I said this here.
I think I did in the very beginning, but like back in grade school, in English class, you
get taught or we got taught in California and maybe it's true across the US, this very
formulaic thing about how stories are, right?
You read the story and there's basically a secret message in the story that it's your
job to understand and then write the five paragraph essay about like what that is.
Right.
Yes.
That always felt too trivial to me.
And as I had graduated to like college and beyond and found what do I really enjoy reading,
right?
It's just never that simple.
Like there's stuff that people care about, but it's bigger than like hiding the marble
in the oatmeal, right?
Right, right.
It's like, what is the green light at the end of the dock is not the whole point of
the thing.
No, no.
And then in fact, all these things are complex and multi-dimensional.
And I also saw that people were not really trying to even do that in games.
Like where is the complex multi-dimensional meaning in games?
And even for people who were making independent games, there was a struggle to be polished,
right?
Like you're, you're in India, you're doing some stuff.
It looks crappy.
You want people to play it and not think it sucks.
So you're spending all this time trying to make the bit maps look nice.
Like Nintendo makes them or whatever.
And that's a certain honing.
If you were that, imagine you're that as a person and you go to like dinner parties
or something and you're always like, I am exerting effort in everything I say and every
move I make at this dinner party to present the most refined picture of myself so that
I look as good as possible and so that everybody likes me as much as possible.
I mean, on the one hand, everybody does a little of that, but on the other hand, that's
kind of a psychopath or somebody who's never, that person is never going to become really
good friends with anyone at the dinner party and like establish valuable relationships
because they're not letting you see them.
Right?
And so there was some idea that all of this polish.
So first of all, you're never going to compete with the triple a budgets.
Even back then, the budgets were merely 20 or $30 million or whatever.
So you're not going to compete with that on polish.
So what are you doing?
And why, as an indie, you should be trying to, a realize what you can't really do.
So don't try and do that.
But B again, 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.
Right?
I see.
And that involves having a personal viewpoint.
I see.
It involves having things be imperfect.
It involves like, okay, this looks a little sloppy, but it's expressive in a way that
you won't see out of things that are polished all the heck.
Right?
That's very interesting.
So in some sense, you are saying two things that are, that are almost, it's the same.
It's the same conclusion, but from two totally different perspectives.
One is that you would like there to be this kind of game because there is this kind of
thing in other medium and there should be in this one.
Yes.
And the other is that actually this makes business sense.
Like if you think of yourself as who's, you're going to survive as an indie and make a bunch
of games.
If your whole thing is just like, try to be as close to AAA as possible, you're kind of
always probably going to fail to a certain extent because it's just going to keep getting
worse for you.
Why not stake out a place they can't go?
Well, it definitely makes business sense.
And I would tell that to people all the time, but it also just makes creative sense.
Like if, if you want to contribute to the form, you can't do it by competing with AAA.
Like that doesn't make sense, right?
But you can do it by going in a different direction that, that you are set up to succeed
in.
And so that's a case where creative incentives and financial incentives overlap, which is
actually a very valuable territory because that's the space in which artists can survive
while having integrity, which is something that our culture doesn't understand to this
day.
Like you'll see all these people who say they're artists, but then they, they compromise what
they're doing to make money like constantly.
And the idea here was like, I see, I think I see a space where I can do something that
some people will want to buy and play.
If they don't great, I still made something cool.
But that I don't have to be compromising to try and do that.
I can, it's complicated, you know?
And also, as you know, the whole time since I got into the game industry, there was this
ongoing discussion in the background, like our games in art form.
And there are lots of people who would say, oh, they, yeah, they totally are because X,
Y, and Z, but I would look at it and be like, you're telling me because of story or whatever,
but the stories suck compared to movies and books.
At least the ones that I know.
So like, really?
And so there's this question for me is like, what, how are games a good art form?
What can you do in them that is special to games?
Right?
You look at film, films have cinematography.
You don't have that in a stage play, right?
Which is how film started is just setting up a camera and filming a stage play, right?
You don't really have cinematography in a book, although you, you maybe have something
a little bit analogous to it, but it, it works and feels very differently.
Right?
And so, well, what about games?
And people had their pat answer even back then.
It's like, oh, it's the interactivity.
Okay.
But what about it?
Right?
Like if you start talking about cinematography, you can break that down into a ton of different
techniques.
Right?
Like, you know, when you're talking about film basic, they go in the script, right?
Establishing shot is in the script.
Yes.
What's the establishing shot of interactivity, right?
What's the, you know, list out the 37 different things and tell me what they are.
Nobody really had an answer for that.
And so I was interested like what, okay, what is that?
Can I make a contribution to that?
Can I figure out what some of these things are?
And I'm not sure to what degree braid specifically did that.
It probably did a little bit, but it's also like, that's the territory I was trying to
mine for EGW and all this stuff.
And so I was, I was very deliberate though about this is an art game.
That means it's expressive.
That means the art style, whatever it is in the end is not going to be very cookie cutter.
It's not going to be a bunch of tiles that look the same.
It's going to be like analog.
It's going to be brush strokes from a paint brush or something because that in the medium
of painting, what makes a painting a painting, it's not just that like paint came out of
a brush, right?
It's that was used in ways that took a good deal of skill and refinement to figure out
here are the things we can do with a paint coming out of a brush.
And you can look at that example created by painters and see what they did.
And there's a challenge again in games.
Maybe we want to start using that.
We're at a time when graphics are better.
We can afford to do this.
It doesn't have to be a bunch of little tiles yet.
You see people may be still doing a bunch of tiles.
Okay, let's get some more expressivity in there.
I don't want to copy painting, but I want to try and use that channel better, right?
With audio, platformers typically had one minute, two minute long little repeating themes
because that's what would fit in memory on a Nintendo.
And then people just copied that.
And like, why don't I have a song that's more analog?
It's just like it's sampled.
I like cellos.
Let's put some cellos in this game, right?
Let's have them be longer and more complex because we can and because that's helps me
build a feeling that is not the generic mascot platformer feeling, right?
That's a thing that everybody was familiar with at the time, right?
It's like, oh, this is ratchet over here.
And then this game, what's the insomniac or that is Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot,
whatever.
Blinks the time sweeper is a mascot platformer with rewind that I think came out after I
had started braid or maybe slightly before.
I think it may have came out during, during braid production.
Certainly well before braid was done.
And all of these games are kind of trying to do the same thing.
They're polished.
They're designed by committee to make money by living in this aesthetic zone of the mascot
platformer that is well understood appeals to kids.
Adults can still play it.
You can sell toys based on the mascot and you can make a franchise out of it.
You walk away from all of those bullet points and where do you end up?
You can actually use those as points in space and instead of an attractor field, put a repeller
field on it, right?
Right.
Just don't go anywhere near where that would be.
Now the problem is without an attractor point somewhere, what that ends up being is repelling
you arbitrarily out into space in all directions.
So you have to have attractor points.
Because if those are my repeller points and I have other attractor points, personal uses
this idea of weird physics as an analog to human scale paradoxes of existence based around
the mechanic has this inverse illustrated storybook.
Like all these ideas were things that I wanted to do.
And so I had the things I wanted to do and the things I didn't want to do.
And that together was enough.
That still isn't a concrete game idea, but it was enough to create some field that I
could navigate very easily.
So I think I want to take a quick detour then from talking about things chronologically
because you brought up a lot of things there.
And while we're on that subject, they kind of bring up some things I wanted to ask you.
Okay.
So since we talked about art game and that aspect, I'll just ask the quick question.
Is Trinity at all a touch point here?
Because when I said I wouldn't even know what art game was, and I said I wrote that game
rants thing, that's I had never played Trinity.
And I'm pretty sure that if I thought pretty hard about it, I really wouldn't find anything
else but that game does kind of stand out.
And you have referenced it.
So I'll quickly ask, is that at all in your mind on this one?
Or is that more a witness thing later on?
Are you thinking of like, oh wait, no, I do know there was an art game once a long, long
time ago or something.
Or did you kind of have forgotten about it at this point and it comes back up later?
Well, no, I feel like there were several art games in the 80s.
Well Trinity was the one that meant the most to me.
It was my exemplar of an art game.
This is something like what I would like to do.
Yes.
There was other, there were just really weird games.
Like the, the Frankie goes to Hollywood game is this weird ass game.
We can watch it after the session is to be entertained.
It's you know, by modern standards, it's not that good of a game, you know.
But there was other stuff too.
And there were games that were funny.
Okay.
I don't know if we're going to like, keep this on the record, but like in BBS land on
the Commodore 64, you would like down, Oh, what is this?
What is that?
And there were some games that are kind of notorious and you're like, let me check this
out.
And okay.
So you remember electronic arts is summer games franchise, right?
The Olympic sport things where you like wiggle the joystick at the right time.
And they had winter games and all of this.
Yeah.
There's a whole series.
Yeah.
There's a whole series and those were kind of fun to play.
Those really were some of the best games of the time, even though they were kind of simple
for commerce 64, you could do a lot worse than any of those.
They were, they were a good idea.
Yeah.
So on BBS is of the time, uh, somebody had made a parody of those called sex games.
And it was from some dude in Finland.
Okay.
That's all I remember.
And you would start out, you're like a dude with a girl or whatever.
And then it's, it's all on one screen, but it's like games in that day were kind of simple.
So you almost could have sold this if it wasn't like a joke game.
And the series would progress and progress until there's like a seven person scene at
the end that you're like controlling.
Right.
Okay.
And it's like this summer games timing kind of a thing.
Right.
And, uh, like that's an art game in a certain way.
It's like, I'm making this game for the joy of it and it's funny.
And I have a, like a, a certain funny personal picture of what I'm trying to do.
Now it's not an art game in certain other dimensions.
Like is this trying to be deeply meaningful to give you an answer to your plight that
you're experiencing right now as a human being?
Not necessarily, but I mean, comedy is, is an art, right?
Is it not?
And certainly.
Yeah.
And so this was comedy in the form of a game.
And um, yeah.
So okay.
But, but relevant to what you're specifically asking, which is did Trinity inform braid?
And the answer is yes at the beginning broadly.
And then toward the middle of end of end, end of development more specifically, because
I did decide to end up going in this, uh, you know, nuclear test kind of direction that
was on my list of things to ask about.
And when I did that, I was very aware of the Trinity stuff.
In fact, the, one of the quotes, um, that's in the game is like on the box of Trinity
or in the manual.
And that's how I knew the quote.
Right.
And I even put Brian Moriarty in the credits of braid for being an inspiration on this.
Right.
So, um, what I told him later was that Trinity taught me what an art game was.
Right.
And then I, you know, percolated on that understanding for like 20 years or whatever.
Right.
Yeah.
And started doing my own version of it, you know, um, which probably would have happened
a lot sooner, but like I said, I went kind of sluggishly through personal computer stuff.
And then it's like the inflation of the universe is going faster than you can thrust.
Like I'm learning how to do games, but games are getting bigger and more complicated.
Right.
If I had gone through high school, like four years earlier, I probably would have been
able to do like Richard Garriott style RPGs at the time that he was doing that.
Right.
But it was just, or if I had somehow been much more fervent, quicker learner who, who
was more proactive in terms of figuring out how to find external material, like for all
I know at the UCSD library, they had books about how to program the Commodore 64.
I don't know.
I don't remember ever looking.
Maybe I did actually.
I don't know.
But like it's fine, but you know what I'm talking about, right?
Like games got nuts and they're still getting more nuts.
Absolutely.
I mean, I know exactly what you mean because I feel the exact same way.
It's like, I always was a little bit behind where I would have liked to have been like
the era of the one or two person game development studio was always a few years before I was
good enough to ever do it.
And it just kept sliding upwards.
And it's like, you know, maybe you can be really amazing and you're just that good that
you can do it.
But it's like, I mean, it just gets harder and harder.
Yeah.
id software was like eight to 14 people when they were making doom.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, and they were the best.
So what are you going to do?
So well, well, there's one more thing about that, which is there is an element of personal
choice in what we just said as well.
Yes.
I'm allowed to say, dude, if all I had to do was make a Trinity like thing to make an
art game, it'd be a lot easier.
And I could have done a bunch of them.
But as we've discussed off the record, like, yeah, I could, I could have done that.
And I could still do that.
And there is some part of me that wants to do the more ambitious thing that takes a lot
longer.
Yeah.
Maybe to my detriment at this point.
And maybe we're going to have to reassess after this.
But yeah, in those days, like making a game a year was a really long time to spend on
a game in those days.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, and and I think Trinity was considered very long development in that time in that
it took about a year to make.
Yeah.
And that was very long.
Most of those were six month games, those Infocom games, six to nine.
Right.
So yeah.
Okay.
So I have another kind of question on something that came up there.
I just want to ask the Trinity question, because we should maybe get that in there now.
I did want to ask about the atomic bomb part as well, because I know most people kind of
fix it on that for some reason.
But of course, because I was interested in Trinity, I was sort of looking at it from
the other angle.
I was like, was this intended to be something that was related to Trinity at all or not
really?
Not from the beginning.
And then later on, later on, it was like a little bit of an homage to Trinity.
But also, it kind of makes sense with the with the whole time exploration.
So I couldn't tell where it was coming from.
I was being really careful in a certain way.
And what this was.
So back when I was writing stories, right?
Like I said, I got two published and one accepted to be published.
But I wrote a bunch of them, right?
Right.
I didn't submit all of them.
I knew some were better than others.
Right.
But when you start creating, maybe it's a relatively universal thing.
People who make indie games do this as well.
Or I'll say what it is and then we'll transpose it to games.
It's just like you have something that you already like or think is funny or whatever.
Right.
Like one of the stories that I wrote that actually got published started as a riff on
a song that I liked by a band called Negative Land.
OK.
It's a ridiculous song about a guy wanted to drink his Nesbit's lime soda and then a
bee flew into it and it just ruined the soda, even though he shooed the bee away.
OK.
All right.
That's literally about all there is to the song, by the way.
That sounds like a great song.
Yeah.
And I just like, yeah, that's funny.
I'm going to write a story about that or whatever.
And then there ended up being more to the story.
But like this was kind of the principal element of the story.
And like, that's fine.
You got to start somewhere.
But at some point, if if the primary value being offered by the thing that you are creating
is something that was made by somebody else, then you're making secondary things that are
not that good.
And so you hope that at some point you transit beyond that.
And so relatively quickly, as I was writing stories, you sort of exhaust the short list
of like things that other people did that you're really excited about.
Right.
Where this happens in games is like you get fan mail from someone and they're like, I
want to make a Zelda game with Link running around.
And how do I do that or whatever?
And it's like, OK, you could do that.
Yes.
Or even, you know, in terms of game mechanics, like I want to make my game.
It's just like twisted metal, but it's got a character who's like a mime instead of a
clown.
Right.
In some sense, we don't really use this term, but fan fiction is kind of something you would
call it if you were doing that to too great of a degree in literature.
Yeah.
And I suppose there's no real reason we couldn't say that in games.
Like this game is kind of fan fiction of this other thing because it doesn't really do enough
else to actually stand on its own or something.
Unfortunately, most games now are fan fiction.
That's a good point.
But yeah.
So by the, you know, early on, I was like, this is its own thing.
It's inspired like in spirit by games like Trinity.
Right.
And then later, as I develop the themes around science and decided I like, it turned out
that where I ended up thematically, and I'm going to be vague about this because what
I don't like being on the record on is like, this should be your interpretation of the
game or how you should calibrate to it.
Yeah, I would like to say when it comes to this stuff, I'm not going to be too specific,
but there's very clearly there's a theme of science in the game.
Yes.
And there's a theme of science being a serious matter.
Yes.
And what is an example of science being a serious matter?
Like the atomic bomb kind of is one of the biggies.
It's sort of the quintessential example of modern how modern science affects things.
Right.
Yes.
And so it was natural for me to end up there given that these were the themes of the game.
Yes.
And so I was able to bring this Trinity influence in.
But at that point, the game was already its own game.
Right.
You could take that part out and it's still braid.
Exactly.
And so at that point, it's not fan fiction.
It's like, okay, we're going to work in a connection here to this other thing that I
really admire.
Yes.
But we're not lesser for it now.
Right.
I get it.
And that's very different from, I'm going to make a game.
Like I'm going to make a graphical point and click adventure in a land that is a mushroom
land inspired by Trinity.
But like it starts to make less sense because it's not about atomic bombs.
So they're just mushrooms now or whatever.
Right.
Spoilers.
By the way, yes, for anybody listening to this, I have no idea how many people are going
to listen to this, but Trinity is a really good game.
It's of its time.
Right.
And so we mean Trinity, the info com game by Brian Moriarty, not any other game called
Trinity that currently exists or may exist in the future, which unfortunately does.
So it may be confusing.
Yes.
It may be confusing.
This is a text adventure.
It does not have graphics.
That's an easy way to tell.
Yes.
And being a text adventure from the eighties, it is somewhat limited, limited interactively.
Like you have to work with it.
You have to sort of know how those games go and how to type commands into them.
But if you are willing to do that, it is still to this day, probably the best such game that
I can think of.
Yes.
Definitely.
You know, some of the puzzles I think are a little bit, you know, they're a little bit
eighties and all that.
But you know, if you want to play the best text adventure and if you want to play one
of the earliest, best, in my opinion, art games.
Yeah.
I recommend playing it.
It is worth your time.
It is.
It is pretty cool.
I do too.
I played it for the first time this year.
So now what?
So you played that because you knew you played that before you wanted to interview Moriarty.
You decided to interview him because you had played that.
Yeah.
I mean, so what brought that off your list into like current relevance?
Because I know you've been interested in story stuff.
Hey, I'm asking the question here, buddy.
All right.
You had recommended it.
A long time ago, though.
I don't know that you recommended it, quote unquote, but you've often spoke of it as an
important game, right?
Like you were like, hey, this is one that I think was relevant from this time period.
And you don't tend to mention many other games from that time period.
You certainly, I've never heard you really mention even another text adventure where
you were like, hey, this is like a game that I think was really important.
And I've heard you in multiple lectures, you refer at one point in a lecture, you actually
read some of Brian Moriarty's lecture in one of your lectures, and you introduce it as
being by Brian Moriarty, a game designer who I greatly respect.
I've never heard you say it about any other game designer.
So it's like, so in my head, like I get it.
I'm like, I know this must be something.
There must be something here.
I don't know how much is there, but something that John remembers being important about
this time period.
And so what happened was I, for some reason, refinely remembered that Jeff Roberts, the
person who runs Rad Game Tools for anyone listening to this, who they got acquired by,
Epic is now a guy at Epic on Unreal and all that sort of stuff.
He had told me to watch this lecture that Brian Moriarty did recently called I Saw What
I Did There, which was actually about the witness.
It's about him playing the witness.
It's also about him playing, playing braid, but it's mostly about him, things about the
witness.
And I was like, oh, I should go listen to that.
I just kept forgetting to, and maybe the witness had come up for some reason.
And I was like, I should go do it.
And I went and I watched this lecture and I was kind of like, huh, all right, this is
a little weird.
And I wasn't quite sure how to take it.
And he referenced another lecture called Pile of Dirt with Trees.
And the way that he referenced that lecture was like very, and now that I've interviewed
him, I can actually probably use the correct term for how he was feeling because I know
more now, but I didn't know at the time.
Melancholic would be the way I would describe it.
He would probably use that same word.
He would probably use that term now.
I wouldn't have known he was from now, but now that I've interviewed him for 10 hours
or whatever, I now know how he'd probably think about it.
He says he is of Irish descent and they understand melancholy.
That's what he would say.
I went and watched that lecture and it just struck me as like an incredibly like emotional
lecture.
Like I read it and I was like really kind of moved by it in a way that I've always liked
Brian's lecture.
I saw them in person like you did at GDC sometimes.
So New Year's a great lecturer, but I never quite had that reaction to it as I did when
reading it.
And I was like, God, that's really weird.
And now I'm just like, I'm in this weird headspace.
Like the whole affair has gotten me in a weird headspace.
I'm like, I'm going to go play this game.
I'm just going to see what the heck this is about.
I don't understand how Brian and John are linked.
I don't understand Brian's mental state.
I don't know this game that now because of Brian's lecture, I know the map is in the
map from Trinity that comes in the Trinity box is in the witness in a video.
And I didn't really even know that because I mean, I didn't know what Trinity, I'd never
played it.
I knew very well it was.
So I went to play it because of this weird, I was just in a weird mindset.
I don't understand what's going on.
John, you've been a friend of mine for a long time.
And I'm like, I want to understand what the hell is going on here.
So I played the game and it was like just totally blew me away to be completely honest.
Like I've played many text adventures.
I played most of the text adventures of that era at the time.
Like I played them as a little kid.
And I've played many since then.
And when I played it, I just realized that like, okay, actually, it was actually a very
nice experience for me in some way, even though it was kind of, I felt kind of depressed after
listening to some of that lecture stuff.
It was actually a very nice experience in a way because this is probably something that
sounds overly laudatory.
So I apologize, but I wasn't really sure that there were like, I wasn't sure what the probability
was of anybody really doing an art game for real and pulling it off.
My level is like probably higher than yours for being willing to call it something.
I'm guessing if I went and played Frank, he goes to Hollywood, I wouldn't call it an art
game, right?
So it was like a Shingi kind of art game.
Yeah.
So in my head, I'm not, and I'm not trying to apply a taxonomy to these either.
It's just in my head, I have this reaction that I have sometimes to games and it's like
braid to a certain extent, but the witness, like very much so one of the only games I
can point to, right?
Where I feel like it does a certain thing that I've previously described as the important
part of the game.
Before I'd even heard you say this, actually, I described it this way to show how much this,
I guess, is in line with your intention.
A game in which the important part of the game to me takes place in my head, not on
the screen.
Almost no games do this.
And I wasn't really sure.
I was like, so is John like the only person who can ever pull this off?
Because it's possible that that's just been the case so far.
Maybe there'll be other people later or whatever, but it's like, I can't really think of it.
And so playing Trinity was actually kind of nice because it was like, he actually pulled
it off.
Somebody somewhere else a long time ago pulled it off.
And to me, that was really cool because I was like, okay, it did kind of connect the
dots a little.
And I'm like, okay, so it's very rare, but it can happen more than once.
Totally.
And that's special if you're a player because you don't really know.
You don't know whether the thing you love that you've only played once is ever going
to happen again or ever happened before.
And maybe if you just like whatever and you don't really care that much about these specific
things, then it doesn't matter to you, you're just playing games, you're playing games,
it's whatever.
But if you're somebody who was like, oh, I really had this rare experience, like is
that ever going to happen again?
Right.
It was pretty good.
So I'm sorry to go off on that long tangent, but that's the actual complete answer to the
question.
Yeah.
And I do, I think there are several layers of things that connect his games to what I
do now.
Right.
And one of the most basic ones is just this idea that, well, this is not the idea that
the player sees, right?
But when making it that we have a strong aesthetic picture of what we were trying to make and
all the decisions around what is in the game aim at constructing that idea.
Right?
It's like maybe there's a tent and there's all these poles and we need poles in a certain
shape to make the tent.
Right?
And we just mentioned the mushrooms, right?
Like I'm in this land, right?
Even if I have the idea about there being doors in the land, which is not spoiler, right?
But there's some doors in places.
What else is in the land?
Right.
What there's natural things, I guess, like there might be forests or something.
What, what is it and what is it like and why and what?
Well, there are better answers to that and there are worse answers to that.
Right?
Yeah.
And the challenge as a creative person is to come up with the best answers to that and
not just in one direction, but in all directions at once, counterbalancing each other.
And that is what I felt playing Trinity.
Yes.
Firstly, as like a coherent whole.
Yeah.
Right.
And then secondly, I mean, there's a bunch of things I've said before about, you know,
like being about something that's important to you or important to the audience, really.
It can be important to you and you expect the audience to sort of share that in a way.
There is some subset of people out in the world who will be enough like me that it's
important to them, for example.
Right.
But yeah, Trinity was, oh, the other thing I can say about it is just not to take anything
away from Trinity.
Right.
It was 20 years before Braid.
Right.
Because the form of it is fictional.
It can use fiction as a model for how to do this thing that you're talking about of having
things, realizations take place in your mind and not on the screen.
Right.
So we've discussed off the record and I don't want to say any of them here because it'll
spoil the game for people or tell them an interpretation or something.
But there are very well chosen things in that game.
Just these elements around the game, like what's in the world and what do you deal with
and under what circumstances.
Right.
And that's along the lines, like some of the meaning that is evident there is along the
lines of the kind of thing that you would learn badly in English class or whatever.
But it's like the better version of it.
Right.
And the game never says, hey, did you get it?
Right.
By the way, this thing means that yes.
Firstly, yes.
I mean, I don't want to speak for him, but at least for two reasons.
Right.
One reason is because that removes agency from you and it removes, even if you don't
get it the first time, part of replayability is that you can go back to something and get
something new out of it.
And if I just like told you the thing, firstly, it prevents you from having that experience
of getting the new thing, but secondly, you get an inferior realization of it because
these things are complex and subtle and multi-dimensional.
And when I, when there are just elements and it's your job to build the connective tissue
between them in your mind, that connective tissue can be quite delicate and you may not
even know how to put it into words.
And in fact, the author may not know how to put it into words without messing it up or
making it more coarse or destroying it.
And that is really, there's this idea of fine art, right?
And I feel like that's part of fine art is it's not just skill, but there's something
there that you can say that it's not just that you're choosing to say it in this medium.
It's that you couldn't say it not in the medium.
Yes.
And Trinity has that and very few games have that.
Yes.
Yeah, and maybe all that's left to say about that is that I've had some picture the whole
time and I don't know if I realized this was directly from Trinity.
I think I just knew that Trinity was this really good art game that I enjoyed, but I've
for way longer than I've been in games, like back when I wrote fiction and stuff, I definitely
had this aesthetic of there are things I'm trying to get at.
They're hard to express.
And so you maybe express them by demarcating the space around them to sort of make the
negative space image or the silhouette of them or something.
And then people can pattern match on that and get something out of it that they wouldn't
be able to get if you just clumsily scribbled it in crayon.
Right, right, right.
I am not a practitioner of Zen, but there's a Zen parable about pointing at the moon.
And it's I don't remember the story.
It's one of these stories.
But the point is pretty short.
It's like someone's going to the master and asking for enlightenment and he keeps pointing
at the moon.
Okay.
Right.
And the guy's like, so what?
What's so special about your finger?
Right.
Because he keeps looking at the finger, right?
Where the job of the finger is to indicate something far away.
I see.
Right.
So the less of a finger you put, the less likely somebody is going to like fixate on
the finger.
Now that said, the atomic bomb stuff in braid is a very strong signal that many people fixate
on.
And had I realized how strong that fixation would be, I might've tuned it differently.
But nevertheless, for my first big like trying to be an art game, right?
All these previous projects we talked about were not trying to be this kind of art.
Right.
And it's interesting that it took me a while to get there.
But when I get there, I already knew what I was doing.
So obviously this had been percolating for a long time.
But like Wolfram was not an art game in this way.
It was just like, I'm going to try and have smart game design and do a challenging technical
thing.
But that example of Trinity rode with me the whole time and came out later, 20 years later
or whatever.
That's the end of this episode.
Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time when we change things up with a new interviewer.
If you like the kind of thing you're hearing here, Braid Anniversary Edition comes out
on the 14th of May, 2024.
You could pre-order right now on Steam and on consoles.
You'll be able to buy it pretty soon.
In this episode, Casey Miratori asked the questions, Jonathan Blow answered the questions,
Jason Brisson produced, and Will Torbett edited.
Thanks very much and we'll see you next time.