One other aspect that I focused on early on in terms of what the game is about that
I was not completely successful with was the following thing. Not only is this a puzzle game not an action game
But what does that mean?
Let's come up with a strong statement about what that means because the the stronger and clearer the statement the more it can guide
Design decisions whereas this statement. This is a puzzle game not an action game is not necessarily again
Actionable right since that there still needs to be some more steps between that and telling you the answer to decisions, right?
Hello everyone
Welcome to the braid anniversary edition podcast episode 4
This time we have Casey Miratori back as the interviewer and me as the interviewee and we're going to talk about game design and
One of the main topics of discussion is the way that I made design decisions early on when figuring out what game braids should be
I made some decisions that were pretty unintuitive in that I chose not to follow relatively well established
Guidelines about what you should do when you want to design a game and have it be good. I did something else instead
We'll get into details about what those ideas about design were and why I didn't think they were appropriate for braid
And hopefully it'll make a pretty interesting discussion. I'm also in an interesting mood right now
This is the first one of these introductions that we've recorded after braid anniversary editions been published
So it's out you can play it if you like the kind of thing that we talk about here. There's lots
Lots more of this kind of discussion in the game with illustrations and there are new puzzles and all sorts of good stuff
You can get the game on every major console or on Steam
And if you're a Netflix subscriber, you can play on your phone just as part of your subscription fee
It doesn't cost anything extra. So go ahead and give it a try and I hope you enjoy the game now. Let's get into the discussion
I'm not really sure where we should pick back up, but let me
Let me suggest the following
Okay, when you first start designing this game you went on vacation
vacation and you found that like one thing kind of led to another and very quickly it built out to
Something approximating worlds 2 3 & 4 with the sort of exception that you had included a why?
equals time level I think which eventually got removed but otherwise it's sort of similar
It's like 2 is what 2 is in the release game
I mean the obviously they've been refined and all that but the the meaning of the worlds and what happens in them 2 3 & 4 happen
You even have the text in there not the final text but text that's like sort of similar
Well, and the text is we could clarify it's in a different form than you see it in the final game, right?
Why don't you final game?
It's in a somewhat interactive screen where you run by some books on
Podiums and it changes the text between stuff back then
it was
More like the minimal thing you would have to put text into the game
So there would be before each level just a screen that's you know, not in the game
It's just a different mode and it's like press spacebar to start the level right whatever
But there's a bunch of text and in general it was you know all the text for that world on the screen
so it was like a bigger text dump and you couldn't really go back and read it if you skipped it and all these things that
you would expect from a
relatively short
amount of effort on a game
Yeah
now
That doesn't really
Explain then where this the extra worlds came from so there are more worlds than that in braid
And so what I wanted to kind of ask was could we maybe walk through a little bit more of the design process that followed as
to
was there were there other things that were happening that might be interesting to discuss and
You know just kind of right off the bat one thing comes to mind which is that you removed y equals t
Yeah, that's not the only thing I removed
So so maybe if you could talk about sort of how the design progressed from there before we start talking about any specific thing
Well, so a general statement about what I'm doing the whole time
is
having
Ideas which may be high level or vague about
Wouldn't it be interesting if time became this way and I should point out as well
like I said even going into that vacation the idea was more like
It's generally a physics game and rewind is like one element of it
But I think even by the end of that prototype from the initial week
By the time I had two more
Worlds with rewind and the worlds weren't like worlds full of puzzles
But they were worlds with a few things to do each and I could sort of imagine where you would go from there
It didn't feel like I was out of ideas, right?
So then I thought well, okay, maybe we're just focusing on rewind, right? I realized that very early
Okay, so sometime even on the vacation or shortly thereafter were you like I probably don't need to add anything else like just time
Will give me everything I need to keep adding mechanics to this game. I think on the vacation
I was probably mostly cranking on the thing and then afterward there's a little bit of reflection like oh, yeah
Okay, this is what this means. Okay. I mean maybe that's even an overstatement of it because as soon as you decide
Like hey, I'm gonna have another world
With rewind exempt objects and I'm gonna have another world where time is tied to space
You're already starting to take up the structure of the game. That would have been other phenomena, right?
It's almost like
You kind of stumbled into that as just hey
I need to add these things and then I'm gonna do this and then when you stop and look back you're like, oh well
That's kind of what the game is now
Like like that's just what had to happen for what I was doing and it's like that's just pretty much the same thing
That's just better. Well, you could imagine sticking to the original idea and like okay
There's also gonna be like quantum superposition or something. Yeah, and
Then if if the structure of the game is that rewind now has some number of worlds
Then maybe there's a two-tiered structure. Yeah, we're now there's quantum superposition
That also has to have some number of worlds and whatever and that's a little bit more like what the structure of the witness was
like is less
regular of a structure than that. Yes, but you
Know I did have this mindset that I wanted the game to be scopable
To something that I would complete in a relatively short time
In fact, the original idea was to do the game in something like a year
Which design wise it sort of design wise it did right and we could maybe talk about that in a little bit
but I remember also just
You know, I had done this prototype in December January
and I was working on a happy cake and stuff after that and it was GDC time and whatever and
So it was by April that I really started working on it full-time and I had this idea like okay by December 31st
I'll finish the game which of course it actually went much longer than that, right?
But I believe I was also kind of racing with you if I remember correctly
racing with me because you had
Sushi bar samurai or something. Yes, or your current idea was that you were going to finish it by the end of the year
Yes, so I was like I'm gonna also have a game by the it wasn't exactly a race
But like I'm gonna get my game done by the end of the year also
it's like, you know when you have this thing where you're
You've had a bunch of projects that don't really go where you want right you it's useful to employ
motivators wherever you can get them and so I think that was
One of them. Okay, I think it was the first version of sushi bar samurai
I don't actually remember now. So maybe maybe it was something else. Well sushi bar samurai basically shipped one a month
from
2005 January. Yeah every month
Yeah, the game sucked but like the that's what I was thinking
That's what happened with a couple of those versions
I think I think there were one or two in the middle that would have been good
But um, well if you had designed them they would have been so, you know, but but I think the point that you were
iterating these versions of the game I think with some I remember hearing some plan from you about like
I'll get to the end of it by like the end of the year. Yeah. Yeah
I mean, I would have liked to have done that for sure. I mean and you know, yeah
But so that that was the expected
Cadence and I don't think I had firmed up on that
Schedule during the original prototype, but something like that was what I had in mind like a year is a long time to make a game
Yeah, you know so
Quake was one of the more notorious
Games that took a lot of research and development prior to this and that I believe was a year and three quarters or something
It was yes, I'm like 18 months including all the initial research
And stuff leading into it and they had documented all that and stuff and they gave a speech at GDC. I actually remember
A brush gave this speech about how they did quake, right? Yeah
This was earlier than braid time, but it sticks in the memory. Yeah
And there is a question first question from the audience right someone raises their hand
He says calls on them and they say if I want to follow in these footsteps and do it
What you have figured out?
How long is that going to take and he said?
You know, I think it would be about the same 18 months and
There was just a hush went over the wrong. Awesome. Like this was such a terrible prospect and unheard of you know
This was like 1998 or whatever, right?
Which is weird because there were notorious games like mech warrior 2 that had taken like five years or whatever
But in general nobody wanted to spend 18 months on a game at that time now
Fast forwarding to like eight years later or whatever it was
um
Seven six years later
I think that was more normalized but myself as an indie on like a limited budget and and again wanting
I had all these friends who started projects that just sort of trailed off and never got done
And I had done that at smaller scale and yeah, one way to prevent that from happening is
To make sure the schedule isn't that long, right?
So that was the plan and it sort of went that way, but maybe getting ahead of myself a little bit
By the end of the year. I had a playable game. Yes. Yes from end to end
Before we talk in detail about that. I can go back and finish answering the other question
but at that point
That I had a playable game. I also looked at it and said oh
Well, this can be better now than what it is. I see how to improve it
and
And I kept seeing very good ways to improve it
You know for a while and when you say very good ways to improve it just for folks who don't know
What exactly are you talking about because are you talking about the art? Are you talking about the design?
Are you talking about everything? You know, what do you really everything? So the art is an obvious one, right?
It was still programmer art. Yeah at that time
I had made animations and stuff, but they were programmer animations. You know
Nobody was going to give this game of the year award
In the art category, right? Right design wise
I believe
I
Actually should go back and look but i'm pretty sure I had
Most of the worlds or possibly even all of them
represented to some degree
Like there's just some puzzles in each one and then there's a you know
You kind of want to flash it out and figure out the structure of the game and if these are
you know
Puzzles made out of puzzle pieces like they were at the time
You need to have enough to make a puzzle in each world
Right and even even if that weren't the constraint it's still awkward maybe at a game of that size to have some
Areas with a lot of puzzles and some with a few although again, um
With the witness I made the opposite decision
But that works better because of the structure of that game being bigger and like there was a decision early on the opposite decision
opposite decision
Well in great it's very regular right there are 12 puzzle pieces in each world
Okay, right. Okay. And so if a world doesn't have 12 puzzle pieces, maybe i'm not done designing it. I see
And in the witness it was more like
Going into it. I see that the design space is going to be more irregular than that. So i'm simply going to avoid
any structure of that kind
Because basically you'd have to cut too many puzzles or add too many puzzles to some of the sections
If you tried to pick like the the median number or something and have everything hit that it just wasn't going to work
Right even in braid
There's probably a little bit of that like there are probably if I thought harder on some worlds
There are really good puzzles that could be there
But I was done thinking about it because there were 12
12 gotcha, okay, uh, and then the worst thing than that actually is I don't have 12 and so I need to start to make
Filler right right and that's sort of why the number is 12. It's because that was
the degree to which
I found that I didn't really need
filler
to
Okay to have enough so maybe some world in braid would really have liked to have been 13 or 14
But it was just better to go. Okay the the world where I have the least ideas for puzzles
They hit about 12. So we're just going to call it 12 and
Because I want it to be regular. Yeah, and you know, I probably made the decision for 12 provisionally before I had that verification
I see but
It was a guess that turned out to be okay. Gotcha. Yeah
anyway, so
With regard to how did I come up with the different worlds? I just had ideas
And of course, I would have an initial guess about whether this was a good idea, right and some ideas
are interesting
but
Seem like they're going to hit a brick wall really fast some ideas are
Sound cool as a high level idea
But I couldn't even find a way to make it actionable like a mechanic again, right?
Can you give any examples?
Do you remember any of these ideas that basically got tabled because they didn't work out?
Well, I could start by talking about ones that I actually implemented. Okay. Well, there's two
So you already mentioned that t equals y right?
which is
uh
Mildly different from t equals x right? It's the same implementation detail technically
It's like you just decide that the other axis. Yes is controlling the thing and
And interactively it's a little bit different because it's cute that you know, you jump and so
Jumping has an up part and a down part. So a jump
Automatically has a forward in time and a backward in time piece. Yes, right now
The thing is the jumps are pretty short in the game. They're like much shorter than mario jumps for reasons. Okay
what reasons
We could put a bullet point on that and come back. It's a pretty big discussion. All right
um that
with the other objects in the game so the primary other object i'm looking at so that the
Level that was in the early version of the game was a little monster guys being shot out of cannons, right? And
If because if they're walking very slowly in the amount of time that a jump takes
they don't go very far and so they'll go forward and back but
There's just not much of a state change that happens there, right? On the other hand if I shot them out of cannons
If they if the velocity is really fast that they get shot at yeah
Then they'll change appreciably over a time frame like that, right?
But then it becomes kind of hostile to play and so this one level that I made was you're climbing up a trellis and
There's cannons shooting across it and you're sort of trying to navigate
around
Find the path up that will not result in you being beamed right which is a
in some sense a static a static solution for that exists because at any
Y coordinate there will be monsters at any xy coordinate, right? Right? Um, but to make that work
Like I said, I had to shoot the monsters out pretty fast and it was it was a relatively unfriendly level. Okay?
And I didn't have a lot of other ideas for it and also the general
tenor of the rest of the game is
The levels are horizontal and they're a little bit vertical enough to make interesting situations and suddenly
When t equals y it's like well
You end up with levels that are probably really tall
Okay, probably I mean maybe I could have thought more about it and avoided that or at least
Levels where you go up to the top and all the way back down and up to the top and all the way back down
Right, and you know, I was just thinking about what are the possibilities there?
And I never came up with anything like
There's always this thing where you start with an idea and it's not working out that well
But maybe if you get over some hump and find a few things, it'll click better, right?
It's like two atoms forming a molecule. It's like maybe they repel each other
Yeah, but then you get them into the correct energy well and they'll like snap into an equilibrium, right?
Sometimes design is like that and for that thing
I just didn't ever find it and so then there was still the idea
I could keep it in the t equals x world just as an ending thing to make it a little bit different and that just
Like a like a little punctuation on the end like a surprise, but the other worlds don't have something like that
And it just wasn't that good in the end, right?
So yeah, I didn't and also like some of the other monsters. There's almost no interaction with it all
Like in the very beginning of the game. I don't think there were the plant monsters that go up and down
But those were added not too long after I don't write and
Unless I made horizontal ones
Right, right. There's almost no interaction you can have right right between
Climbing upward and yeah avoiding those monster guys. I mean it could be that they would kill or don't kill like other monsters
But that's also kind of statically determined and uninteresting right? Yeah, so
Yeah, it just wasn't good
You know, right, right and I saw that relatively quickly. Although that said it's possible that I missed something right and there was a
Cool there, but I guess another thing is that you didn't really seem to have trouble coming up with 12
Yes, yes equals access. So maybe it was just like well, I see how to do the t equals x thing
I don't see how to do the t equals y thing
So do I really need to do the t equals y thing right? Yeah, maybe the answer was just no
That is how it turned out and if it didn't turn out that way
I probably would have found a way to do it
That is how it turned out and if it didn't turn out that way, I probably would have looked harder at it
Right. Yep. Okay. So another thing that I implemented
and
Was in one of the versions of the game, although probably not in the very first one
You know again
thinking about the physics
Basis of the game originally. What are some things about?
Physics at a small scale. Well things are quantized, right?
Yeah, and so there's a lot of stuff about that with like the speed of light
We've moving like in increments or something like blackbody radiation
Yeah, for example being only solvable like that's how quantum mechanics was discovered was like if you try to solve the equations for
like
You know
You know what when things get hot what wavelengths should they emit and how much it was like nonsensical and didn't match measurements
Okay, and then to match measurements it turns out like oh
If you can only give off photons at certain discrete energy levels
Then this all works out and that's that's actually how they
Started looking at quantum mechanics, which is mildly terrifying
Because you don't normally think of things in the real world as being quantized
Yeah, but they are
So
God ran out of bits. I guess and I don't think that's what happened but um
Anyway, so so there's a mechanic based on this quantization. What what if since the game is about time now?
Yeah, then the quantization would affect time
and so what I implemented was
Again time the whole game is paused. Okay, and then instead of you know
How you use the arrow keys and you have the jump button, right? Yes instead of those being
Continuous inputs
You get this little like control HUD that pops up over your guy that has like the four arrows in the jump button
Well, I remember this and then you hold them down because you might want to go diagonal or something
Yes, so you or if you just want to go forward you tap forward and release it and your guy goes a certain amount
Running the continuous simulation for a fixed amount. I see
if you wanted to go diagonal and jump you hit all three of those and then release them and
He does that. I see so you kind of it's like a turn based braid turn based
but with the same simulation underneath because right I
Mean you could invent in a whole entire turn based version of the game and some people might do that, right?
It didn't seem along the lines of what I wanted to do. Okay, like this wasn't a game where you go into totally different
Simulators in every world. It was a game where right?
It's the same one, but it's modified right, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I
did that and
Again, I had trouble coming up with puzzles and controlling such situations
To make them interesting
and it was just this mode of
Having a discrete time step that then played out in a simulation
It was pretty sloppy and it was hard to even think about what was gonna happen
Like what's a typical thing that happens in this game? Well, there's a monster
maybe he's walking away from you toward a wall and he's gonna bounce off and then
You want to jump on him, right and can in continuous mode
In the beginning that might be hard to learn like when to jump and how if you want to bounce off him, right?
Right in this mode. It was way even more awkward
right learn right and
The end result just wasn't good like okay. I'm doing this interaction and that's cool, but
I'm not getting more out of the interaction than I put in that's part of the magic of design, right?
I find the thing where
You do a certain amount of contrivance or a certain amount of setup for the situation and then you get out of it
all these cool things
as
As fuel as like payload for your game, right?
It's like it's like splitting a molecule or something
I was just gonna say that so that's a really interesting way to put it
I don't think I've ever thought of about it that way. That's
That's very useful to people who don't know much about game design such as myself
So so basically what you're saying is you have to think about the design process
In in almost like you were thinking about a power plant if it's costing you more
to get design things out as
What you're actually implementing to put in you're probably doing something wrong
And you should try to look at a different thing or yes or move to a different space because
All you're gonna end up doing is making a very procrustian thing
With not a lot of richness. Is that a kind of fair?
Absolutely, and I've played lots and lots of games. Yeah people who didn't get that because if you follow, you know
There have been presentations at conferences about how do you design games?
How do you design puzzle games? It's like come up with different mechanics that do things and it's like, okay
But but all these ideas that you put into your game and implement have cost right firstly your implementation cost
your maintenance cost of making sure that
when they interact forget even the interactions being interesting, but like
Your game has to survive the interaction
Right, right. It has to do something that makes sense and is playable and there has to you have to have a plan for can the art
Represent it and all these other represent it at all and then in a way that
Feels like the player can get what's going on. Yeah, right. Like there's a rule that I have that I think some some people understand
which is
You know if you have a lot of invisible game state, especially in a single-player game
Yeah, it's very hard to play and it's very inscrutable. Yeah, and so the role of like
graphics and sound effects and
Vibration and whatever else is in part to help communicate that hidden state
So that you can learn it better and and yeah stand better what's going on
Yeah, so if you make a bunch of rules with a bunch of weird hidden state
you're making that job very difficult to do and
You know, maybe impossible you see that I think a lot in in like RPGs
Especially like tabletop inspired RPGs were like they've implemented this big rule set that like a dungeon master would have been reading from
Yeah, but it's almost impossible to surface that to a player who isn't familiar with that
Tabletop game. I've definitely had that experience. I don't know
How it's determining how much damage this spell is cat? I have no idea right?
There's numbers everywhere and all this stuff and it's just like I believe you that you've got something in there
That's doing it. It also kind of reminds me of something from UI design
I've noticed separately which is like the harder it is to program a UI's logic control flow in your code
Usually the less good the UI is yeah, because there's just
It's there's just too much stuff that might be happening for the user to really understand and you know
Oh, we have a lot of bad UI these days. Okay
The other thing to say about that right it's not just these other internal things that I said but like
The other costs are what does the player have to learn to play your game?
And then what do they have to think about to solve puzzles?
Yeah, and what do you have to think about to design puzzles? And these are very insidious costs
Okay, because you can be paying them and not realize it and right and that is a thing to avoid
So I've played a bunch of puzzle games
I'm thinking of specific ones that I'm not gonna mention right
where
There's just a lot of setup of different objects that they quote teach you about right?
And then it's like here's a level with these things and what do you do in the level? It's like
You just kind of untangle
what
They set up in the level and there's no
Deeper more enlightening principle to it. There's no surprise. There's no revelation. Yep, there's no
you getting better at anything aside from
untangling messy
Situations in your head, which after you've done that a couple times. It's just the same thing over and over again
Yeah, right. And so that is a failure mode that a lot of puzzle games fall into
and the designers of those games
Do not even see after they've done it that they fell into that they're just what it's a puzzle game
Look, I made the puzzle game
If you understand I did the thing where you put the McCann's
You have the things with different mechanics that are combined to solve the puzzle and here they are in some rooms
And obviously players can sit down and solve this puzzle. So I made a good puzzle game and it's like well, no the good part
Yes is very presumptuous, right?
Yes, good is difficult and it is something that we have not done a very good job
Talking about I really ever
because I
Often look for resources that are good for this sort of thing and don't find them. Yeah
I think it's very weird because I think valve did a lot of damage here
Really? Yeah, because a lot of people really liked games like portal and whatever right and they were vocal about
how design for those games
went
and
I mean really so portal one
I think is a better game design wise than portal to portal two is kind of just like a mess
Okay, that happens when you throw a big team at something and it's not really a coherent vision. Okay
I think the reason both games do well primarily is because they're really funny
Yeah, I think portal one is funnier than portal two. Yeah portal two is a lot bigger
So it's like we make up for it in volume, right?
It's harder to be it's harder to have as much good like story in here
It's harder to have as much good like story and humor as in in in a larger game
I think so a lot because valve has a good reputation or had a good reputation and
A lot of developers are like if only I could be valve, right? Right? I think they don't
They don't receive the information. I
Don't want to say critically but like, you know anytime
Well, okay
If there's someone who's an expert in a topic and you're like a rank beginner and you don't know that much
Well firstly, it's probably a waste of time to get advice from the expert because he's thinking about stuff that you don't even know what it is
Right, right. Yeah, but let's say you're a little bit more
Let's say you have base competence then if you listen to someone who's like a super expert and has way more experience than you
Probably you should just believe whatever they say because again, they're just like way better than you
Okay, but again like different experts will tell you different things, right?
And so you're already like forming taste by choosing right who to listen to and what sounds better
but it's very precarious because as a
Beginner you don't really know better. Yeah
This happens in programming a lot. Oh, yeah. Yeah and
Then you know
Once you're intermediate
You really should have enough of an opinion that when somebody tells you something
Like you shouldn't exactly be doubting them
But you should be expecting that by the time I become as good as this person is at the thing that they do
I would naturally have a different viewpoint and a different
I'm not trying to be an exact clone of this person
In fact, if I want to contribute to this field, I had better be different from them
Right in an interesting way, right and I should be trying to surpass them and to surpass them eventually
Like I don't want to be you know
Egotistical to think that I'm better than them now, but if I want to surpass them eventually I
Should be able to see things that they missed or something, right?
That's always been my mental model somewhere, right?
Right. And so what I perceive though is like somebody famous and successful like valve
I'm personifying valve now, right one thing which they tend to like yeah
They don't seem to want to be individualistic about it
No
but they give talks and then like everybody just assumes the talk is amazing and nobody writes critically about it like
hardly at all, right and
and again, I don't mean think critically in terms of like deliberately try to shoot it down, but just like
Run the ideas like do more than just accept the ideas as being true
Like right live in them a little bit and see if you come to the same conclusions like ideas
should quote-unquote
form
together some kind of structure that's
internally consistent and
Doesn't lead to bad outcomes. Okay and leads
productively to something that you want
And you know if you're an artist maybe what you want is a little different from what valve wants, right?
Right, or I mean maybe not maybe but that means you don't have any ideas, right? Right. So
Anyway, they had a certain way of talking about puzzles where I
Remember this they would talk about the aha moment and like that was the goal of a puzzle and the thing is that's
It's true to an extent
They also had another thing if you care to comment on it during this
Which is they were like right right the set of objects
vertically and horizontally
That fill in the squares. Yeah, those are the two things. I remember them saying explicitly like things you could explicitly say they were
Well when I talked about some of these other games, yeah that had bad designs
I was thinking explicitly of that kind of matrix where you fill in the squares
Okay, because that's a very mechanical thing to do it is and you can do that and you can show that you have a
It is and you can do that and you can show that you have done it and then you're done designing
Yeah, which is not how you make something good at all. I see
I
Don't know if we want to go. I'm sure most people listening have no idea what we're talking about there
We could go into that
Maybe in a minute but to go back to this aha moment thing. Yes
like it's it is true that
puzzles where you just grind away and
And then you come to some solution and the solution
Does not feel special in any way. Yeah, and you don't know anything new. Yeah
Those are relatively thankless puzzles that feel like work and after you do a bunch of those you'll like nope out of a game
Or whatever right on the other hand if you solve a puzzle and you're like, oh my god, I get it right
That is
by definition a more
enjoyable experience like a more
Punchy experience and it will lead you to liking a game more right now valve
The problem is they're very focused on they think of their game as a product, right and
They're iterating on product design. And so from that standpoint. Yeah, this whole aha moment thing
Makes sense because it's just it's the way to get your customer to like your game
Yes, right and that is all true, right?
but I think
My standpoint has always been
It's missing some things right?
Yeah, both both in terms of
Like why does your life have meaning if you're a designer of this stuff? Yeah, and also
How okay so coming up with aha moments like how do it what is actionable about this, right?
Yeah, how do I make these things and how do I make them good versus not good? Yeah, I
Was just gonna add a very slight thing. I don't think it's that important
But I was gonna say like it's definitely true that for valve they actually when you said, you know
They think of it as a product
They definitely do and not necessarily even in a cynical way that maybe Apple thinks of something as a product
Yeah, they literally are just like we like they literally would say
We believe that like the economics tells us if we've done a good job supplying value
Like they literally think they think of it in almost the way that a commodities producer does
It's like if people want this product and buy this product. That's how we know. We've done a good job and
We are not trying to be you know
Anything more than that. We think that's why we provide value, which is fine
But it's definitely a different approach. Like you said art game earlier. They don't want that
They're not pretending to do that. They they are
intentionally doing something else indeed and in fact, you know, I've never worked there but in my interactions with people who have it's pretty clear that like
They don't believe in the designer who has the good ideas, right?
Yes, they believe on iterating on a design by having
everybody throw their ideas at the thing and then
you know the ideas will fight and the
The market the playtest market will determine the meritocracy will determine what the ideas should be in this game
Now the problem is that's another word for design by committee sort of it's a little bit more of a of a
one that contains a
Play testing cycle within it. So it's more reality-based than if you just have some random ass committee
Deciding things it's it's maybe the best version of design by committee, right?
But it's still yeah, it still leads to very boring results in my opinion and I think that shows in their recent games. Okay, right
There are other companies like that
I also think things about good or bad
But they're they're just one of the major ones and the one that a lot of people know about who who design a lot
Who designed a couple of major puzzle games?
And so it's a good reference point that a lot of people know about
So I don't wish to actually gossip about valve, but what I do want to say to cap that off is just
I felt that the way that they spoke about these things whereas it was better than nothing, right?
Combined with the propensity of people to just take what they said and think that that's everything to say on the matter
Yeah, it ended up being a little bit misleading or leaving people in a place
That was not good enough to design good games from because they were not good enough
To design good games from because this whole idea of the aha moment
Again, it's it's true, but it's incomplete. And so the what I tell people to think about is
Okay
why
What is that aha moment for first of all? Okay, is it just to get people to play your game?
Is it just the equivalent of like in an RPG?
We give people a little bit more loot on a certain schedule so that they feel compelled to keep bashing the monsters, right?
Or is there more to it, right?
Can you if you think you're an artist?
Then you should have some opinion about the content of those moments, right? Like imagine somebody, you know making a film. Mm-hmm
and they're just like
Or telling you how to make films and they say
Well, there should be one one thing I don't make films. So it's a little bit hard
I'm reaching for this but like one one thing that makes
dialogue
Fulfilling is that
Do when you know at some point you have
Characters get emotional and they reveal things about their personality or whatever, right?
So on the one hand, it's like okay, that's a very general statement
You can take that in a very cynical way. That's like
Okay, so to make my film interesting
I'm gonna do these paste at certain points right throughout the running time and as long as I put them enough with enough density
Then people will sit all the way through the movie, right? And that's kind of what valve was saying to some extent, right?
right, but
Okay. So firstly if I'm an artist I care about what exactly these characters are
and yeah
what what they're saying to each other and and how their personalities interact and
That's what I really should be thinking about and if I really am thinking about that
then maybe it's not a problem to come up with dialogue that creates these interesting moments because
I'm working with the interesting subject matter at a more core level. Yeah, right
And so then I maybe I don't need this tip about
making sure interesting things are said and maybe
Maybe if I follow the tip about making sure interesting things are said, I'm actually going to make kind of bad scripts
Right. Whereas if I'm working with the interesting character material
Maybe I just naturally get better scripts, right? You know, I I think this is kind of a bad analogy
But it is no, it's not a bad analogy
Because I could I could think I could probably clean it up a little bit. Okay, so in screenwriting
We do have this exact thing, right? I mean we I don't write screenplays, but I mean they have it. I
So in screenwriting you do have this and I think the problem is people mistake
Observations about what tends to be true of well-written scripts
Yeah for prescriptions on how to write good scripts. Yes, and I think the same could be said for game design
This reminds me. You could probably go search this. Yeah, right
There's some thing that I read I it kept coming up for a couple of years, right?
There's like some guy who was like a music producer back in the days of music labels. Okay, and he was like
All hit songs have one of the following things and it's like 12 different things
like
Repeating phrases. Yeah, or like yeah, you know
Oh baby in it or something like that like
So many things like that that like you read them and like yes, they're true of all these songs, but
You just pattern matched on what you saw about songs and maybe you just
Like that's not the same as these things make the song good. Well, I'm actually saying something a little bit subtler than that
I'll be explicit. So Sid Field wrote a book called screenplay. It's one of the most famous books
In screenwriting history in terms of like its effect on the industry
And this book was the thing that basically codified the three acts of music
um, and this book was the thing that basically codified the three act structure for movies
Yeah, um as a thing everyone was supposed to do
And if you look at what this says, it's like, okay
You know act one is generally this act two is generally that act three is generally this they tend to break up at about
This much time in the movie and all this sort of thing
and what you I think would
What you would take away from that in a positive sense is if you looked at that and said okay
If I wrote a screenplay and it kind of doesn't fit that that well
that might be a good indication that I need to work on it a little bit more because
Maybe I haven't quite tuned it to fit in a movie format as well as it could or something like this. Yeah
This the not very positive way to take that or the thing that would probably make things worse is
When I sit down to make a screenplay
I just literally type in those three parts
Because i've been told that's what makes good screenplay and that's going to be horrible
And that's going to be like that's going to be like most movies you see nowadays where it's just
It just feels like someone turned to crank and like the climax happened here because that's when sid field said it would happen
And that's it and
So I do think there's there is a value to looking at structural things and saying
Good X tend to look like this but that's more of just a litmus test
You can employ to see where you're at currently. It's usually not a great idea to go
I'm gonna make that intentionally because
That means you're gonna everything's gonna feel forced. Yeah. Well also I think a role for that kind of thing
Again across media and games as well. Yeah is
To help people who are new if you sit down and you're like
I want to write a screenplay. Oh, it's it's like a bunch of scenes. Yeah
If you do that, it's like
Pretty easy to come up with something that's a mess or not very good
And then you don't necessarily have a conceptual framework yet for why yeah, why is it not good?
And how do I make it better? Yeah, whereas something like this
Um, it's like here's a structure of films that works. You could be like, oh, right
Now that I think that kind of thing should be taught loosely as not here is
What all things should converge upon which unfortunately
This seems to be a failure mode of human beings is they tend they tend to do that with everything, right?
Yes, but if you keep it loose like okay, generally it's like this
But of course, they're not going to be able to do that
Like okay, generally it's like this, but of course, there's a lot of freedom around it
But your first goal is someone learning
Should be to understand why this structure works what it does that avoids
Problems and failures exactly and then you internalize that and now you can do it yourself
Without needing that structure exactly right and usually they're not meant to be procrustian
Like there are examples of great screenplays that don't really look quite like the three-act story structure
So, you know that it's not a requirement
It's just a thing that tends to be a structure that is consumable as a 90 minute to two hour thing
That humans understand right but it's not there are other things you could put on the screen
And we know that there are they're just more rare, right?
So it's not even a thing that it has to have it's just you know, they're these things and the valve matrix
Approach which I don't really know if it's valid. I think people had probably done that beforehand
But that sort of idea feels similar to me
This is something that a lot of good games probably do have you can see that there are a lot of
Interactions between mechanics and they're not all just like one-offs or something
But it's not like just if your game does the matrix thing then it's good
That's not what is actually going on there, right? Absolutely not. So um
Yeah, so so when I do this kind of a thing, right
And so the witness especially is about
This kind of surprise that val would call an aha moment, right?
But braid also is in a simpler way
and when I do that
Like the fact of the aha moment is fine, but what i'm thinking about is like
What is the actual idea?
And why is that actual idea interesting right and how clearly is the idea?
communicated in the level and
Are there other things about the level that are getting in the way of communicating that idea and
By communicating I don't even mean necessarily super clearly
That can be a thing that happens
But sometimes sometimes you're talking to a player's conscious mind and sometimes you're talking to their subconscious mind
Which is actually very way more active than most of us think it is
Um, yes, and is actually responsible for way more of what you do than you think like we have this model that like my language
decision-making thing
Part of my mind is me
And then the rest of it is just like I don't know. It's some little thing in the background
It's really the opposite right and if you ever doubt that then just have a conversation
Where you're saying stuff like i'm saying right now
Fluidly i'm saying a sentence and just ask yourself. Wait, where do these words?
Come from right. Am I planning the words right if so
Can I see the plan? Yeah, if it's a conscious plan
Where is it? Yeah
Right and so even just regular conversations that you're having all the time
It's much more like they're being produced by something that you have no visibility into
but you make a story that it's intentional and
A matter of your moment to moment will to say these things, right? Right?
And like your your conscious mental state is more about
deciding or being cool with the fact that
You are making these decisions
Rather than them actually being decisions or what whatever well you can especially see this in like
uh
Action game things as well. Oh, yeah, it's like look if it really was all conscious play
Then the instant you know
How you should jump on top of this monster head and you just would but actually it's just it's so continuous and
complex that there's you just it trains up and
You know after an hour or two of play suddenly you're like perfect at it without even ever thinking you just you just do it
And there's not really a lot of reason to believe that somehow only action things are getting trained up that way
It would make a lot more sense if everything you do is sort of getting stuff pushed down into the subconscious area
Where you're having all this head prediction and all these other things. It would be weird if suddenly
You stopped having that capability just because it was phrased as a logic puzzle or something
Yeah, it's really pretty much most things like one model you could have for it is that
The conscious part of your mind that is actually supposedly making decisions in all of this
Is a relatively low bandwidth piece that is pretty slow and
Useful yes, but you
Know can't really handle that much necessarily right and so
The world is full of information and full of things happening. Yeah, and and
Even your body is very complicated
Like what percentage of what's going on in your body? Are you controlling consciously?
Yeah, the answer is 0.0.0
Yeah, I like the precision of that answer john. I don't think it was precise enough
But you know, there are parts of your mind that are participating
In that right, right?
Anyway the point being as a designer
You can play with these things and you can have an interesting time and you can try to do something either something
purely artistic or something a little more pragmatic or some mix of the two and
It's a very interesting rich space to talk about it and i've talked about it in speeches in various ways
My viewpoint is just one viewpoint, right? And I think the problem is
that we have a
paucity of designers who are
Even considering any of this. Yeah, right. And so if you want to hear about people
Who are doing this kind of stuff?
It's like
It's a one-digit number of people. Yeah, and some of them don't do that much of it, right?
And then even with someone like me, it's like i'm releasing a game every 27 years right now
Perfectly
And then you're like, oh my god, I'm going to do this
It's like i'm releasing a game every 27 years right now, right? Right. So
You know it is what it is to bring it slightly back to something you said before as well
putting two and two together it seems to me that
one of the things you said earlier about
uh braid for example, or at least the decision about what to do there
is
You'd mention sort of you don't really want to compete with triple a because if you're competing with triple a
You're going to lose you can't put together
The kinds of spectacle that they can just on a purely budgetary basis
You know, let's get more specific about this so that people know what we're talking about. Okay. Okay
you've got a game and
Let's say there's some set of things in the game now. Well braid there's keys gates monsters
Yes
And we'll talk for a minute about just like noun kind of things
But if you really want to be comprehensive like there might be like verbs that you can do like jumping
Right verb not really a noun right right, but a long one axis
and
Whether the verbs should be
Listed in what we're about to say or not. It's sort of two different ways of doing it
Okay, the easiest way to think about it is just all nouns, right? So like you might have
Player is a noun right and monster is a noun. Yep, like goomba style monster
Yeah, I don't want to use that word because it's copyright Nintendo. Okay, so i'm gonna say monster. Okay, um
It's copyright italy, um goomba are yes the circle
uh so
This idea of good design quote unquote with very sarcastic quotes. Okay
Not just regular sarcasm quotes. Okay, um
Is that you just want to make sure?
that
Any two things interact with each other and so
Does player interact with monster? Why yes both by jump, right?
I could kill the monster or a monster overlaps with me and kills you and kills me right? And so if you make a list
Of you know, people have probably seen this kind of matrix where you have, you know 17 nouns
Yeah, you list them both across and down so that everything
Is cross-referenced to itself along the diagonal like think of a spreadsheet if you don't know what a matrix is
Yeah, a spreadsheet where you have the rows and columns you put all the nouns down the rows and all the nouns across the column
So now you have in the same square in the same in the same order. You have a big square to fill in
And the diagonal is just does this thing interact with itself which you you probably ignore although maybe not right?
But so then under and in fact, everything's redundant because like the upper
The upper triangle and the lower triangle are just the transpose of each other
So I suppose it depends how you look at it if it's if it's a transitive action where it's like
Player acts on Goomba is this
Yeah
In this case in this case, yes, so it's player acts on Goomba would be via jump
So it may or may not be and you could put a check there and then Goomba acts on player
Kills the player you could put a check there and the idea is you just want check marks
check marks in all the boxes, right and
then you have a design space that is not like dead and
That's true like and in fact earlier games had a lot of dead design space
So it is the kind of thing that you solve the problem is though
It's like you're bringing this conceptual machinery to bear to solve this
Kind of an easy problem that anyone who becomes a good designer
Already intuited. I see, you know, like if you have things in a game that don't affect each other
You end up in situations where it feels kind of bad or whatever and the rule that you can learn
that's much simpler than draw this matrix and put all the things in it is just
Your game is often richer if things affect each other
And you know, it seems to me also that it it's maybe phrased a little bit poorly or framed a little bit poorly when presented in the matrix format because
It seems to me. It's more interesting to just go look
This is just a good spot check for you to find
possibilities like if you're sitting around thinking about something and it's like
You kind of a little stuck. Yeah, think about is there any are there any things that you haven't looked at for interactions?
And look at possibilities there because the thing that doesn't really make sense to me about the matrix formulation
is
Games usually don't quite break down that way like in braid
It would suck if monsters and keys didn't interact that is a worse game if you took that away
Yeah, I don't think I know if anything important happens between the
Like goomba going like to a cannon
Or something like this like well things where i'm just like I don't know if that matters and it's like I wouldn't necessarily
Think it was bad or good if it did it's just a possibility. There are lots of things that don't interact. So for example, uh bullet shot out of cannon
Yeah, does not interact with key in any way. It does not interact with gate in any way
Okay, it does not interact with cloud in any way. It doesn't interact with
You know fire pit full of spikes. Yeah, it doesn't interact with
Stuffed animal dinosaur at the end of the level. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it doesn't interact with book podium
Right like and so as we said earlier
This is deliberate for braid because actually for the design to be good with regard to the
Perturbations of the rule set that happened with time. Yeah, I wanted a stable simple
Rule set that was easy to understand and actually if I had done this square matrix thing
before
Adding the time rules. I probably would have ended up with a more complicated rule set. Yes more importantly
One of the things that you get out of that kind of very dense full interaction matrix is
Like more surprised like the player didn't necessarily
Think that these two objects would interact and maybe it's not even likely. Yes
But then once in a while they do interact right and something cool happens and you're like
Oh, I should have expected that and it seems plausible and natural and whatever and that's enjoyable
I didn't want that right. I want that to come from the time stuff, right? Not from like the baseline stuff
And so if you go do that with the baseline stuff
You're like doing two things at once
So do that with the baseline stuff you're like doing too good of a job with the baseline stuff and you're you're crowding out
it's like, you know if you're if you're mixing a song and
Like you want the guitar solo to be the point
but
You're turning the drums way up. Yes, like whatever all the other things, right? Yes
That is sort of a meta point, which is that this particular full
interactivity space
idea
is an idea of how to make a game good and it is
contextual whether you want to do that or not if you have very sophisticated ideas about what you're doing and
And you know what you're doing then
you
May well do the opposite in fact now, of course the general heuristic applies that you should know the rules to break the rules, right?
It's a tool right? It's like it's something you can use to see what areas you haven't explored
Which is useful as long as you don't feel compelled right to fill it all in
Because you thought that was the point or something. Absolutely, right? Um, the thing that you said about
the matrix thing being a tool
I think that's the correct way to use
Something like that is hey, I'm kind of stuck this. Yeah, this design isn't working for me. Yeah
You know, sometimes our mind just isn't that good at sometimes
It's very good at like honing in on like exactly what's wrong, but sometimes that's hard
Yes, and then you can use a tool like that to just put your attention on every
Because this space is very intangible the space of like what interacts with what yeah
It's not visible anywhere. And so you could look at this matrix and be like, okay
Do I want the bullet shot out of the cannon to interact with?
The ring the time control ring. Yes. Do I want it to hit the time control ring and bump it sideways or something?
In some games you might in this game
I did not right because I didn't want the result of any puzzle to be have the bullet bump the time control ring
That would have made a worse game, right? But in a lot of games it makes a better game, right?
So for example, spelunky, I think is one of the most successful examples of a game
That leverages this kind of multiple object interaction in a way that
Has a long lifetime through the game that keeps giving you surprises and that's delightful and funny
Even though it usually results in you losing the game, right? It like feels fair and it feels funny. This is actually
In spelunky 2 I felt it was mistuned to where the game was just really sadistic and I didn't want to play it
Okay, so something about the first one kind of hit a better it. Yeah, it it worked better for me personally
But yeah, so that kind of thing again interesting
Conceptual tool like you should understand the idea of lining everything up in a matrix because that's a certain kind of illustration
Of what it means for things to interact with
and if you understand that then you can use it as you're saying as a kind of
Analytical tool occasionally right but the failure mode is to think that
The goal is to fill out the matrix with check marks and yeah, not only that that's necessary
But that it's sufficient. Yes, and yeah, almost everybody thinks that is sufficient. Right?
And that's why we get so many bad puzzle games and I would also add a separate thing, which is that I
It seems to me to be both
Both a bad idea to fill the whole thing out. Yeah, and also
insufficient to fill the whole thing out because when I think about games and try to map it onto that
ontology, I
Don't know why you would a priori say
That it's a 2d matrix. What if I want three things to interact in some cases or four or what if I want
These two things to interact but I want there to be five different ways. They interact whereas this thing over here
There's only one and so again it even if you took it as a prescriptive thing
I'm gonna go fill out the whole matrix
As a naive game designer I walk into that and go I
Still don't really know exactly what that means because there's so many other things
I've obviously seen in games that don't actually fit that model
Even if we talk about filling it all the way in but that's what I meant earlier or it's an example of what I meant by
seeing this kind of device and like
Reading it in yeah
Looking at how it fits in this framework with the other things that we've been talking about
Looking at how it fits in this framework with the other things that you know
Yeah, right. Yeah, and then does it make a consistent picture or to what degree does it make a consistent picture?
How seriously should I take it? Yeah, and a lot of people just don't really run that
Process right right. Yeah
And
And and yeah, so let me ask you to elaborate on
On uh one other thing that got said in all of this just to maybe wrap up this section of what we've been talking about
Yeah
You said that in this game
Uh, the jumps are much shorter than mario jumps. Yes, and that is not an accident apparently
So why is this the case lots of reasons?
So it's over determined as we say which means that even if you got rid of some of these
It would still be correct for the rest of them
Okay, so you really really in braid for many reasons want these jumps to be short. I will start listing reasons
Okay, and um
As part of the framing could you also say
How did this come about like like did you just throw in a value at first and then it got refined over time or like
Is there any also like procedural? Yeah, I do not really remember. Well, so so to lay down the ideas
There's this initial fundamental question. Yeah
Which is
How does jumping even work mechanically? Yeah
Yeah
Do you press the button and just a jump goes right or do you hold the button and you like jump higher?
Right as long as you hold it, which is how super mario brothers works and right was considered to be
An innovation at that time that made it a lot more friendly and playable like if you go back and play like
load runner or whatever
Um, I think load runner had jumping but whatever, you know
All these old platformer games that had jumping even donkey kong. I think it just goes it goes a prescribed height. There's no
There is a little air control. I think is there air control in donkey kong
There might not be a little bit. Maybe but it might just be either you jump up or you jump sideways
I'm not sure but it only always went the same height but jumping was very limited for a long time and
this
You know, so the super mario brothers jump is both
Much more controllable both in terms of like holding the button. Yeah
To control height and air control. Yes, right
And it's also just really big like it goes up a large portion of the screen
Yes, which is good
If you want to give players a lot of freedom about where to go or what to try all these are good things and
The more control you give them over the jump the more they have like
Recovery from slightly not doing the right thing
Which means your levels can actually be harder and people can deal with them
Like you can throw more at them and people can deal with them. So these are all good design decisions
In the context of that game right now again, the problem is people look at that and say oh therefore
These are good design decisions period right right and that is not how it works. Right? Right? So, okay braid
different game, right
Firstly is another aspect of what I already said, which is I wanted the base rule set to be simple
Right. I didn't want you to be solving a lot of puzzles with the base rule set, right because then
We're taking up space that would be used by the time stuff or just muddying it like right like if okay
There are a lot of things in braid which are of the form
Here's a gap that's too wide to jump right
Clearly you need to get across it, right? How do you do that?
Right, how do you do that right and that's already kind of an ambiguous situation. Like if you throw that at a player
They're gonna try to jump across the gap a little bit even if it's way too far, right?
So that's problem number one, especially if they have rewind right now if you give them a tool whereby
By holding the button more or less they can jump further or less far
That makes all of those situations
Both harder for you to design because you have to make it so that they're really far jump
Obvious not only can't cross the gap, but obviously can't cross the gap right?
It has to be clear to people that they shouldn't be trying to do that right?
And you're muddying the situation for the player because any situation they're in they're like
What are the tools that I have to solve this puzzle with?
And one of the tools is always going to be the jump button and that's true in braid, too
But but the jump button in braid does one very simple well-defined thing
And the less simple and the less well-defined it is just the less clear in any context
That it is to the player whether it's part of the right answer. That's like how you figure out puzzles is
You maybe put forth propositions in some way like maybe it's this
Right, maybe it's that and some of those you can discount right away like oh, yeah
You clearly know because I can't jump that far right right and the less clear you make that the harder you make
The general puzzle solving process across the entire game right?
So for example also there's a little bit of momentum on
The braid character movement there's some speed up
And there's a there's a much faster like slow down to stop because you don't want to feel like you're skidding on ice all the time
Right having no momentum feels really bad. It feels like a crappy indie game, right?
having a lot of momentum
It starts to be a factor in puzzle solving like if I already start running before I throw the switch
I can get to the target place right sooner
Right, then if I throw the switch and then start running and that's the kind of thing
I don't want that in the solution space of this game ever right right
I don't want a puzzle where you solve it by already being running when you throw the switch because that's not about time
That's about like your running mechanics, right? Right and so
All of the design of the player mechanics
Was about this right it was about
Pre-curating it before I even know what all the puzzles are going to be exactly
It's about pre-curating it to be simple and not to cause problems. Okay, that's number one, right?
reason number two
And so basically all of that stuff you just said it's very clear. It's like, okay
In braid the goal is not really to replicate any of the gameplay from super mario brothers super mario brothers
Is about doing these action puzzle sequences where giving players really interesting controls
Is part of creating the richness of that space. Yes in braid the idea is you're supposed to be logically kind of like figuring out
What is the correct sequence of events here not sitting around spending a lot of time figuring out?
Not sitting around spending a lot of time figuring out just how to do the air control to like
Go up through the thing or something like that
so
This is these design decisions are basically
Have to be different in braid because the type of thing the player is supposed to be doing is just drastically different
Yeah, and like the just the the conceptual focus of the game is in a totally different place
Right and you need as a designer to be maintaining that at all times. Okay, so number two, okay number two
Decided early on braids a puzzle game. It's not an action game as you just said
What are puzzles like in this universe? Well, they're pretty much
It's hard to get somewhere
and so the goal is get to that place and the way we indicate that place is by
Putting a collectible there or a key or something right and that's how you know that you successfully got to the place
All right
Now I think I already to some degree although this became further refined as I kept working on the game
but to some degree I knew
I wanted puzzles that are relatively simple in the sense that
They're not like all a set of 17 steps
And that's what makes them hard is to figure out the order and the timing for the 17 steps because again
That's probably not about cool time manipulation stuff exactly
Okay, like like any game
Can make you do 17 things
In order to solve a puzzle and once you've solved a couple of those
If it's only about figuring out the order a number of things to do
That just gets boring. Those situations are isomorphic to each other very quickly, right?
So I had some sense that it's like I want to focus on the time stuff. And so
I don't want the puzzles to be massively
complicated
I want them to be
As simple as I can make them
While
Highlighting the cool thing and again that became more refined during development
But I believe I had that idea in the beginning
And so once you have that idea
You're like, okay
Well, also what is it about puzzles often? They're hard, right?
What makes a puzzle hard
There's kind of two classes of things
There are things that are on focus to what you're trying to achieve and there are things that are off focus, right?
Things that are on focus that make a puzzle hard is like well
I'm not used to thinking about time behaving in this way
And there are some consequences of it that I haven't visualized yet, right?
So so I i'm having a hard time solving the puzzle because I don't realize that there's some effect that I could bring to bear
Right
And as a designer you have control over like how much you hint that or
Whatever, right, right, but when people realize that it's on topic. It's like oh, that's what the game's about
Now I understand more about the time thing, right? Right something that's off topic
is
Well, this puzzle is hard because i'm trying to think about it and again
There's a lot of steps and right keeping that in my mind like a chess master is very hard for me because i'm not a chess master
Right, right. Another one that I was thinking about very heavily early is
This is all about jumping. I promise. Um
I can't see the whole puzzle
Right. There's like some stuff off the screen to the left and to the right and up right
And i'm kind of trying to remember all these elements, right?
That makes a puzzle much harder than I can just look at the screen and see all the things right
And so early on I had this idea that
I wanted a puzzle to fit on a screen
Because that removes a lot of this incidental difficulty, right? Right, right, right. So that leads to
compact designs
That are simpler in terms of number of walls and number of rooms and whatever right but also
We've put we've now stated two constraints
we've said
Puzzles are about it being difficult
To get to a particular place
Which often you know reading between the lines
This is a game with gravity and you jump and platforms. Right. So right usually up is hard
Right, right. Yes, or across to someplace that is separated by something you would fall down through
Right, okay
and
We want puzzles to fit on one screen
Okay, so the height that you jump right
Determines how interesting the puzzle is
Right, and it needs to be short enough that you can fit
A puzzle of the interest level that you want of the maximum interest level that you write on one screen
Right if that's not true if you jump half the screen
Then a puzzle could only ever be like two jumps max
Yeah, you could almost see this in something like going from donkey kong
I never thought of it this way, but in going from donkey kong to
Super mario brothers if you have the super mario brothers jump in donkey kong the entire game would take two jumps
You just jump to the mid level then you jump right to the top, right?
So you can immediately see like yeah the the complexity that you want on one screen
Yeah
Tells you exactly how high the jump can be because if it's higher than that you can't make the game
Yeah, like literally. Yeah now, okay
So everything that I just said here is that you can't make the game
So everything that I just said here is very particular to braid specifically
But the meta skill that I would encourage people to develop is yes a priori while figuring out what your game is to be able to see
enough of this kind of constraint
for your domain that you're working in that
You then can do something much closer to the right thing out of the gate than you would otherwise, right?
Yeah, there is this old idea in games
And it seemed true at the time when people were saying this the idea was
Oh, you know the you can design a game, but the first time a player actually meets your game
They're just gonna the play test result is going to be totally different than anything you ever expected
And that's why you have to play test the iterate and you can't really a priori design and like
That's a little bit true, but it's actually not that true. Like if you're a good designer, you actually should kind of know
What's gonna happen? I in fact remember you saying this
Uh, you did a podcast
on for the notion podcast, okay, yeah taking a app or something
And you literally said something to the to the effect. I thought this was really interesting. So I wrote it down you said
I usually can actually at this point now with this amount of experience. I have
I usually can get pretty close early on when I first started doing games, which was in the 90s
I had no ability to do that. My brain didn't work that way
So somehow I absorbed it by doing a bunch of game stuff you were talking
Whenever I hear quotes from myself, I get annoyed by how unspecific the sentences are that i'm saying
It sounds like a bunch of vague. That's what happens when people talk
I know right as opposed to write and like I
So to me I took that as like oh, okay
John perceived
What you just said about playtesting you perceive that to sort of be the case early
But at some point you crossed over into like having done so much thinking about it that now
It's just not that surprising what players do anymore
Is that a correct reading of that like over time?
You just feel like you guess better about what a player will do with two important caveats
Okay, right. One is i'm not really talking about people who have never seen a video game before
And who pick up the gamepad and say hello computer into it or whatever
Right hello
Hello computer
That's a very generational reference
If you're talking into the mouse, this doesn't count for everybody else
And then the second one is you are assuming a cooperative player who wants to
Work with you to have a good time
Right because of course you can have an antagonistic player. That's a different thing. Yeah
um, but
Yeah, like
it's
It's
Definitely it gets harder the more unconventional it is what you're doing and the less like
the more experimental relative to previous games is what you're doing but
Generally speaking
It is a skill that can be built and you are not
Uh, you do not have to be going in blind right you can make these kind of choices
And use them
To generate a good experience that mostly
works the way you thought like the
The example that I was probably talking about in that podcast
That was a watershed moment for me in the sense that I designed a whole thing which was the
The introductory area of the witness which is a closed off area where inside
You're sort of learning how the game works and then we let you out into an open world after that, right?
And so it's like a smaller open world, but very small, right?
And I just designed that like in a week and programmed it and all it doesn't take that long to design but like
Programming it iterating it whatever without any kind of play testing
I was just like I think someone's gonna come over here and they're gonna see this and they're gonna wonder about that. Yeah
And then I you know play tested it quote unquote
Play tested it quote unquote at packs. I remember I just dropped the game down
Completely unsupervised like the the station was like unmanned
Apparently like I was hanging out in the shadows watching. Yes, it was in a booth shared with chris hecker
and andy
Andy shots this game, which I think was monaco at that time, but I think it was
I feel like yeah, okay
And they were each trying to draw big crowds. So it was kind of like crowding out the little witness station that had nobody manning it
Because because to defend to create space I would have had to be there right and I didn't I wanted like this mysterious thing
So lesson was don't ever do that in a shared booth if you want to create that effect
Um, but nevertheless during during places when it wasn't during times when it wasn't totally crowded out people came up and played the game
It would sort of auto it had a timer
Where if it was idle for you know a minute or something a minute it would put up a warning
And then after another minute it would restart
Yeah, right if there was no further input and so it just ran itself and it would restart from the beginning
In the hallway just it's basically like the game is right now. It's a little bit less polished. Yeah
or you walk down a hallway you do a panel you're in this area and
Basically everybody who played it played it
Like I thought it would go. Yeah. Yeah and got out into the game and then
Sort of knew what they were doing in the game and
To be further explicit. There are no words anywhere in this opening sequence. It's like just
Visual things that that you notice and then go interact with right and um
That that was great. Like I didn't exactly know that that would work if it had failed
It would have been a relatively low risk thing. Right? Yeah, I could have always come up and helped people or something
Right. Right. Yeah, but it just worked
And that that was an existence proof for me that like okay
This is not only are we doing really weird unusual game design here that people need to learn stuff
But that amount of learning can happen rapidly
consistently and pretty much
consistently and predictably yes and predictably and without
Words, right
I wish that I could make that like that's a lesson that was very very clear for me
That I wish I could communicate to other designers convincingly, but if you didn't like have that experience
It's like you hear someone tell you that and you're like, okay, whatever it doesn't land the same way right but to bring it back to braid
um
I was sort of just iterating on stuff that I had seen initially in braid, right?
Like there's something about a platformer level that's very simple and easy to read right features tend to be meaningful
Yeah, and yeah like by the end of braid
I was just very interesting in this communication
Property or this this aspect of communication that i'd seen in the levels and I wanted to do a whole game about that
And that's where that came from. So are we done with the list of reasons that the braid jump has to be shorter or not?
Because you listed sort of three basically, but I don't know if there was a four those are the main
ones
It's mostly the conjunction the fact that there's an and there between
Puzzles are about getting places
And you need to see the whole puzzle. That's the biggest one. That's the biggest one
There's probably a bunch of other smaller things that contribute as well, right even just dexterity in some sense like
The holding down the mario button thing
Is in that game?
Unless you're playing it at a super high level, which of course you can go on the internet and watch videos of people doing this
Yes in that game. It actually
helps people
with a variety of dexterity levels relative to the game because again
You just have more malleability in what you're doing and how you're responding to situations
But in a puzzle game
It's like it only adds dexterity in some sense because it's like oh I need to jump this high to get to the puzzle
So I have to so I have to hold it at least
This long and maybe if I don't totally do that
Right. Don't I can't solve the puzzle but I should be able to by just holding down the button, right?
It's like that's a different way to get at what I was saying before but it really is a different phenomenon
like what I was saying before was that the puzzle is not about holding down the button and now what i'm saying is
holding down the button
Should not be a way to fail the puzzle, right? Right. Like I I don't so
One other aspect that I focused on early on in terms of what the game is about that
I was not completely successful with but for the time I was okay was the following thing
Not only is this a puzzle game not an action game, but what does that mean?
Let's come up with a strong statement about what that means because the the stronger and clearer the statement the more it can guide
design decisions whereas
The statement this is a puzzle game
Not an action game is not necessarily again
Actionable in the sense that yeah
There still needs to be some more steps between that and telling you the answer to decisions, right? Right?
So here's a stronger version of that statement
Which I very explicitly formulated to myself, okay because it is a puzzle game not an action game
Once you figure out the answer to a puzzle
you should
Then just be able to solve the puzzle there should not be an action element
That is hard that you also need to be able to do to solve the puzzle
I see and then so that's a statement about solutions and then you can walk that one step to
What do you do as a player
Who doesn't know the solution you attempt solutions, right? Yeah, if you have a concrete idea about what solution you are attempting
It should not be dexterity based to the greatest extent possible
It should simply be that you try the thing now
I think in the game as it stands today. This was not completely successful just because
You watch people who are new at the game. They're trying to jump on a monster's head
They miss or whatever like all these things happen
Well, we also know for a fact because it has now been documented indelibly that brian
Brian mariani could not finish braid despite being one of the people who has played more hours of the witness than anyone
On planet earth because he could not successfully jump on one of the bounce
Not goombas because that's trademarked monsters. Yes. Now he may just be much less of an action gamer than most people as well
also, though standards are really different today than even they were back then like
In the 2000s they were hard platformers
And if you go back to the 80s or the 90s
Platformers were really hard and tweaky because that was just the only way to get gameplay out of them really
Like also there's probably an expectation in 2008
Because there hasn't been the iphone
gaming
scene and all these other things that
anyone who would find a
Sure to be esoteric game like braid, which is probably what you're thinking when it comes out
Yeah, will be a relatively accomplished gamer
Yeah turned out not to be the case
But at the time no one would have thought like oh
All of these potentially casual gamers might check this out or that that isn't what anyone would have been thinking
Yeah, and you know, so what I would just say is this decision was successful and I did
This statement about there shouldn't be an action barrier to solving things
was very clearly successfully executed
relative to the platformers of 2000 to 2005 which were like
Very hard made for gamers and whatever right?
And it's just you know in sometimes these things are just hard, right?
Yes. Now there are also other design parameters to this right? So for example
How could you make it easier?
to jump on monsters well, maybe if I slow them down
So that they're it's more like they're in one spot and they move slowly right?
It's easier to target because you're sort of more targeting a space on the ground
Right than where they are the problem is that has a pacing effect across the entire game
Now anytime anybody's solving a puzzle it takes a lot longer is slower and all this stuff, right?
Yes, and then like okay. I have a certain amount of time to do this
and then like okay. I have a certain amount of space for rewind buffers
If that's like 20 minutes on the most complicated level
If it takes three times as long for the monster to go that's effectively six minutes
Right, it starts getting scary like these kind of things happen. So
I think I did a good job given
The context I was working in yeah, but but I don't think you can objectively say that there's no
Right action skill required to solve puzzles because there definitely is it's just not that much
Compared to what it would have been in another game or what it would have been if I decided that this was an action game right?
Right, right. Yeah
In this episode Casey Muratori 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