I had played puzzle games where the reason the puzzle was hard is because you have to do 17 things in the right order or whatever.
And I was like, no, that's not this game because this game should be about time.
And because I've been doing experimental gameplay workshop, I had this idea that every puzzle should be on theme for the particular world.
And so if something is on theme, how complicated can it be?
Hello, I am here in San Francisco with Mark 10 Bosch, who is another game designer I've known for quite a long time.
And I'm not sure what we're going to talk about. It's going to be a bit of a surprise conversation.
And I think we'll just go into it. I don't know if you want to say the thing that you said about puzzles on the way here.
Yeah, I mean, the first thing is that it's going to be interesting because I've known you for a long time, but you had already released Braid when I met you.
And so we never actually really talked about Braid that much, which I think is going to be interesting.
And so I've seen the witness like appear sort of slowly and had lots of questions as you were doing it.
But now, going back to Braid, I feel like I'm just I went back through the game and I was thinking about like, oh, like, what do I think about all of these things?
And any time there was a question, mostly is going to be about puzzle design, I think, just going through the lens that, you know, as a puzzle designer.
So those are basically the thing that you said on the way over that seemed really interesting was you said something like on the really good puzzles.
You didn't have much to say or to ask about.
And do you have any like I kind of get what you're saying, but it's also kind of a deep thing that I almost don't know what to say about.
So I wonder if we can approach that before.
It's just, you know, if I notice from patterns in puzzle design, often I notice the patterns that I don't like.
You know, I notice like, oh, I do this a lot and I'm going to ask you specific about specific of those patterns.
But like for the ones that are good, I almost have nothing to say.
It's like, oh, yeah, it's just a good puzzle.
And yeah, you know, sometimes people see me as having like a negative personality, right, especially going more into the past.
But it's like it's actually how you make something good is by noticing everything that's wrong with it and being honest about everything that's wrong with it and not good and whatever and fixing those things.
And that becomes especially true now that I'm doing like team sized games, which this wasn't really.
I mean, you know, there were a couple of people contributing, but it wasn't a substantially sized team like either the witness or the current game.
And so it just becomes even more of that when there's all these people on the project.
Right. You know, on a braid size game, it's like mostly me applying that kind of spotting what's bad just in my own stuff.
And then as the team grows, it becomes more like spotting what's not cohereing in this mass of things that everybody is doing and then having to have a conversation with them about like, we really need to redo this.
And then they're not happy about that.
Whereas when it's just your own thing, it's like, OK, I believe I really need to redo this and I see why and you just do it.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I'll ask about the story later in more detail.
But what ended up in the game is then sort of these panels of text, which are very much like Einstein's dream in my mind, where it's trying to do a metaphor for what the mechanic is about.
And then the gameplay, which is very mechanical and doesn't really connect to the metaphor directly.
So like those two elements feel a little bit disconnected to me.
But also, like you sort of explain how that came about.
So I'm interested if you have any more to say about that.
I mean, it's complicated, right?
Like, I definitely knew that some people weren't going to care about the fiction part of the game because especially when you make a 2D platformer, you have some idea of.
Well, I don't know what it like.
I just could very easily imagine somebody not wanting to read the story.
And in fact, that was very clear.
And actually in the in the original prototype, the story parts were they were just like on a screen like introducing world to.
Here's a giant page of text press space bar to continue.
And that you could especially see people start reading it and then go like, skip, I want to play the game, which is what I would do with most games as well.
Unless like I have to if I sit down in front of a game and it starts doing story stuff, really like what I'm seeing in order to stay with it, because otherwise I don't have faith that this thing is going to be any good.
And I just just let me get to the part where I get to do something.
Right. But so the the way that I squared that a little bit, I was like, I want the story things to be a little bit more interactive, but I do want them to be together and coherent as a story segment.
Like one thing you could imagine is that instead of being front loaded story in front of each world like this, like cave story had been out for a long time.
Right. And that just you meet characters over the course of this linear platformer.
And they tell you things and those things come together to make the narrative.
Right. It's I mean, it's like triple A games did for a long time, but it's like the indie version of that.
And that could have been the model for this, but it just wasn't what I wanted to do.
I wanted to very straightforwardly be influenced by books.
And one of the things about books as different from some other things, especially the way games adopt them, is that books kind of want you to have an attention span.
Right. Because it's this long sequence of text.
And I don't know if I ever explicitly had that as a mission statement, but I definitely felt that way.
It's like, look, if you want to have an attention span and read this, that's fine.
If you don't, I'm going to set it up so that it's in pieces and you could just sort of run by all the pieces, you know.
But like I could have, you know, in those little book stands that are in the game, those could have just been scattered throughout the worlds and you could have encountered them as you could.
That would be a very easy change.
But then it would be harder to get the coherent picture of them put together, which might have been good in some ways, because I I did like this idea of an activity of trying to put together the ideas.
Of the story and what is going on.
But I just really wanted it to be front loaded that way.
You know, I think it is nice that you have those two separate pieces and they sort of like bounce off each other, which you wouldn't get if you.
It's definitely a thing that some people complain about.
But, you know, you can't listen to everybody's complaints.
Right. So you have to decide something.
That's a like I could have done it, but it would have been a fairly different game.
You know, if we if we and what would that decision have been based on?
Right. Like I kind of have a fear that maybe a realistic fear that a lot of players will not want to read something.
So let me design for that. It's like, OK, but like maybe it's not that experimental of a game in that dimension anymore.
Like I wanted to do this thing that I hadn't seen games do.
And so, yeah, but if we're going to go deeper into that, I feel like the ending with the characters moving around, that's like a way that it is more connected.
Right. Like it's like you're doing some sort of metaphor, but it's like part of the gameplay versus like being text that you just read.
So that came from a different place.
I mean, it felt good to figure out the end of the game because I was like, oh, as soon as I had the idea, I was like, oh, this is really going to work and be good.
But where it came from was actually more of the mainstream mechanical exploration, which was, of course, you know, I have all these ideas for different worlds
and I had more ideas than shipped in the final game because some of them weren't very good or at least I couldn't figure out how to make them good.
And one of them was, well, time is bidirectional.
Right. This is one of the things that survived sort of from the original set of ideas about quantum mechanics and relativity, because one of the things we see in physics at all levels, actually, people don't know about this.
But even in like Newtonian physics, the laws of physics are bidirectional with respect to time. Like the only reason that time seems to go more strongly in one direction is like friction and inertia and stuff.
It's like a statistic. What is friction? It's like statistical collisions working out a certain way, which is really another way of saying inertia, actually.
Sorry, not inertia. This is where I didn't eat enough sugar. What am I trying to say? Entropy. Entropy.
Let's go back and re-edit the word entropy into those sentences. But the point being that, you know, the beginning of time is a low entropy state and the end of time is a high entropy state.
And it looks to us while we're inside that, like, it's just things happening and then you get more entropy out. But if you like were to stand way back and look at the whole thing, it's like a very simple shape. Right.
So then when you get into quantum mechanics, it's a little more complicated. But there's this thing called CPT conservation where, you know, the product of these things, it's charge, parity and direction of time. Right.
So if you reverse time, then like I don't remember the exact details, but like if you negate the charge or the parity, I don't know, something like that. But like there's a there's a way that it works out and it's invariant.
Right. So you flip one and then the other flips. Yeah. Okay. I should look that up before next time I talk about this again. I used to understand it a little better.
So, okay. How if I was going to write fiction about time going backwards and forwards at the same time, that's not that hard. And in fact, if you make it as we found out since then, you can make a quite high budget movie where you just sort of show stuff going both directions.
But like, okay, I it was an interesting challenge. How do you actually make that happen? Like for real? What even does that mean? And at first I was like, okay, obviously I could like either have some things simulate backwards or record some gameplay and play it backwards.
But you really want the two streams to affect each other. Right. Right. And that's one way. And that's the levels leading up. And then after that, it's like, okay, how do we use this in the story?
How do we do something cool for the ending? And like, how do we have? How do we use this directionality of time thematically for real? Right. As opposed to just saying in the story that things going backwards has some meaning. Right. Right.
And that's where that came from. It was it was just how do I make a good world out of this? And then I guess I guess when I had that idea for the ending scene, that's when I knew that that was the last world of the game. Right. I knew it was probably one of the later ones because I had the earlier ones figured out. But I was like, okay, that's that's a good ending. And there we go.
And I was pretty hyped because I mean, there was basically one week where I had the idea. I sat down and programmed it. It basically worked. And then I sent it to one friend. It was Casey, by the way. Yeah. And he played it. And he was like, yeah, this is cool. Right. So there was like a week, week and a half of like end to end from idea to completely working thing.
And it didn't change that much into the final game. It got a little bit bigger with more details. There's more like intermediate things that happen in that level. But it was basically the same idea.
Could you imagine taking that sort of concept and bringing it back to the first few worlds?
Like, is that worth my directionality? No, not the bidirectionality. The idea. Yeah, the fiction part.
Making it more based on the mechanics. Yes, exactly. Instead of the text. Or is there any way to make that better or worse?
Well, this this borders on let me just start in order. Right. With World 2.
It's really hard to do anything based on the mechanics because there's not that much yet. You just have rewind.
Actually, the original world one was first and you didn't have anything. And so that was even harder to do anything with.
Like the theory was, hey, we're going to have this world where people accommodate to this platform and its rules before we start giving them time stuff, because then it'll be more of a big wow.
It'll be like a big surprise that they have this cool thing. But, you know, as I tried that out, I was like, well, this just.
Isn't a good part of the game. And then also I have to do something when you die.
Because if you're going to accommodate to the elements of the game, you have to avoid spikes and monsters and stuff.
It's not like we could prevent you from dying. So what happens when you die? Do I give you lives or do I give you infinite lives?
But then rewind seems less cool. Right. And so.
All of that went away. Right. So now we start with world two, which is not very flexible in terms of designing with it. Right.
Like the the main thing that you have is ability to repeat things that are hard and ability to.
Get information from later in the level that you wouldn't have had and then use that somehow. Right.
And we don't even go that hard on the second one. Like you could imagine designing for that. Yeah.
And then so that's also why, you know, the there's a little bit of a weird puzzle in there involving the puzzle frame and stuff.
And it sort of shows up there because that's where it can where there's room for it to show up. Right.
I was going to ask about that. It's kind of an off theme puzzle, but I really wanted to do it.
You know, why sometimes you just really have to let me try to finish the current question. OK.
And then anyway, let me so, you know, starting with world three, you could do more.
So would it be like special events that happen at the end of each world?
I'm just saying if you bring the actual princess in there and she is interacting with the mechanic in some way.
Just right. So instead of just the dinosaur dude being the recurring character. Yeah.
I mean, I so the most honest answer is I just never even thought to do that.
So originally there was just not going to be a princess in the game.
And that was what was going to be funny about the whole princesses in another castle thing is like there just wasn't.
But that's a little too easy and it's a little too much of a.
There is this thing in fiction and all this stuff where you do something that's a little too easy of a negative letdown surprise ending for people and they just feel right.
And so I didn't want to do that. So I felt better with the ending.
But once I had that idea, I just never went back and said, what if we did this other thing?
And so even right now, I'm not coming up with tons of ideas of what to do.
I guess it would be because you can freely go through the levels then mechanically it would have to be something like there's a princess scene and either it's like in solved state or unsolved state.
And what happens? And maybe they're nonlinear with respect to each other or maybe they're linear.
Like maybe you unlock another one by finishing the previous one.
I don't know. Yeah.
I mean, maybe maybe you just came up with the idea for Braid 2.
Okay. I tend to do that.
So, okay. Maybe we move on, even though I have tons of more to say about that.
No, that's fine.
Okay. So, so, okay. You talked about the quantum mechanics stuff, which became more time, like more specifically about time, which then also in my mind became more specifically about things not rewinding when you rewind.
And it's like, I feel like that particular mechanic happens throughout the game.
So I'm sort of curious, like how, how did that sort of progression happen?
Where like that element of things not rewinding became so important.
I feel like you're going to say it just happened and then you just explored it literally did. Yes.
That's the right answer. Really the right answer is, because I programmed the rewind to begin with. Yeah. And then I just woke up one morning or whatever and I was like, Oh, here's this loop that iterates over all the objects and backs up this restores the state from the backup.
What if I just don't do that.
Sometimes, but can you explain why you had that thought because to me it's not necessarily super obvious to think about that.
No, but I mean, that's it's one of those miracles that happens in life.
I mean, it's a very small miracle. Right. But like how, yeah. How do you have that idea?
And I've, I've actually, I think I've actually been explicit before that if I hadn't been the programmer and the designer, I probably wouldn't have had that.
Of course, of course, but there's still a leap there that is kind of interesting.
Yeah. Is it just because programmers are lazy and they're like, Oh, I don't want to rewind that thing. That's just too much work for like, I think it might've been a little bit of me being lazy as a designer, actually in the following way.
Right. So I was still before I figured that out.
I was still in this idea that we're going to do all sorts of quantum mechanics and relativity stuff. And I don't know, maybe bi-directional arrow of time is in there. Maybe like quantum waveform collapses in there somehow.
I don't know. Like just all these things, you know, relativistic geometry in some way, time dilation. I don't know.
And I was like, I'm going to have to program all these things or whatever. And then, you know, we're also both friends or something with someone who worked on a game called Spore back in the day.
That was like a very anticipated game from the moment it was announced and it got people really excited. But then it like didn't really live up to the excitement.
And like back then, you know, I was trying to figure out just how, you know, prior to Braid, I'd done all these smaller projects that I never really got off the ground.
And I was trying to figure that out. And I was like something like Spore seemed tactically a problem because it was a bunch of mini games all put together.
And when you make one big game, you just get to keep polishing that big game until it's good. But a bunch of mini games and a bunch of totally different interaction loops, it seemed intractable to me to like make all those different things good.
Today, I wouldn't balk at it. But like back then, it seemed like a problem. And so I think maybe somewhere in the back of my head, I was dreading.
And this is, you know, this was a long time ago. And this is me psychoanalyzing my past self in an unfair way.
But like, I think I'd had all these very high like it's a very high level concept to say, maybe including time as a dimension like space in the game is a thing that will happen.
Right. There's a long way to go between that and something that's good to play.
And so I'd started with all these ideas and I was thinking about them and just I wasn't getting that much traction thinking about them turning him into something that would be good to play.
But then once I started doing rewind, it was instantly good to play.
And so it's like I saw a path forward in the game that would be more interesting than the vague ideas that I had had. And so that's why I just kept going that way. Right. And after you get a few of those, you're like, OK, this game is actually about rewind now.
Whole games about rewind or, you know, related time phenomena.
It's interesting because that's kind of a depth first search versus like a breadth first. And like, I feel like you or I try to do both.
Right. I try to follow down, but I also try to force the sideways jumps as well, which I think is that what you said when you meant like nowadays you wouldn't bulk at it as much like.
So you think there's a difference now with how you would approach it.
I think now I just feel like I personally have the ability to do a lot more work. Oh, I see. And then also because these current games are bigger team games, it's like when you have people helping you, you can do a lot more.
But that's a separate because I was talking about my my perception of a game that was like a collection of mini games.
I'm actually going to have to check the spore release date with how much this really was before Braid versus contemporaneously. I feel like it was before. Yeah, I think spore was in development, but no, I think it came out.
Yeah, I think it had come out or was about to come out something like that when Braid came out. Yeah.
What this makes me think of is that I wonder if nobody had made that game and now you were making it now like this idea of like making things concrete in that way. I feel like it's much clearer to people these days.
Right. This this concept of we're going to take this abstract these abstracts ideas and make a game about it. Would you agree with that?
Do you mean to people being like designers of independent games or whatever? Yes. I mean, yeah, there are a lot of games that explore weird time concepts now.
And are you saying it's that same? Are you saying those are the same thing? Or are they not the same thing? Like the sort of like, oh, let me take something and make it concrete and like drill into it.
Because it feels like from when I hear you say that, it feels like it was the before times where like it wasn't very clear how to do that or if that was even a good idea.
Whereas nowadays I feel like it is very clear that it is a good idea or any are there any differences that you see there?
It's hard to know exactly what to say about that because it's a big complicated situation right here.
But I think the place that I probably know you from is the experimental gameplay that I used to run at the GDC.
And I started that well before Braid.
I believe the first one was.
I think I had the idea for it in 2002, which means maybe the first one was 2003.
Anyway, though, the reason that I started that was that I was frustrated to some degree with what people were doing when they design new games.
There was definitely this idea of an independent developer designing games that are not mainstream, so they could be like weird, right?
But like what exactly that meant?
People didn't have a very clear concept.
And so I started that workshop, which was at the at the Game Developers Conference every year with a relatively crisp idea of what this meant to do an experimental game.
And I use the word experimental because I was like, you need a way to judge success or not, which was one thing that was missing, right?
It was all this like, oh, I'm being an already indie person because I made something with like a weird character with five eyes and a cone head.
And that's why it's an indie game.
And it's like, well, actually, that's not that interesting.
Right.
And so I tried to delineate one way that things could be interesting, which is.
You have some idea for interactivity that is substantially different.
The idea of an experiment is that you define a priori what when it's successful and when it's not, which is a little bit harder to do with art, but like at least trying to do that.
Right.
And so back in those days, we at least had some very clear picture of what qualified as game mechanical experimentation, right?
Or game dynamical.
I don't I don't love the term game mechanics as much as some people do, but it is definitely one of the ways we thought about it.
So that's the mindset that I was in when I designed braid is that I'd been thinking about this for a few years from running this session.
So I think by definition, that means I didn't think there was very much at that time of this.
And now I do think there is a lot of it, but it's executed in a shallow way that doesn't really get to the good part.
I mean, do you feel that way, too? Do you feel like?
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is when I heard you say like the drilling deep, I think is sort of showing like sort of very putting a lot of value onto everything that you see would have a lot of potential and just really like going towards that direction versus sort of imposing it from the upper level.
And then saying, yeah, well, now I'm I've said I'm going to explore this thing, but like I didn't actually I just kind of imposed the exploration from the top from sort of this theoretical standpoint.
It did not really go deep and like the going super deep is the part that lets you get the good stuff and people maybe don't think because they call it experimental, then all of a sudden it becomes that and slightly different.
There's I think there's two aspects to this and I'm trying to figure out how to separate them in my head.
One of them is if you if you see a game that has done this, the good version of this, if you don't understand the deeper parts of what the exploration was and you just see the surface part, which is like, oh, it has a cool trippy game mechanic.
That part is not that hard to to imitate.
Right. Like, OK, I have some idea for a wacky mechanic. I want to go make that happen. And then I've got my game. Right. That's one thing that happens.
And now we've both been public about talking, you know, we've given some speeches about what we think is good design and stuff.
I do think maybe at least some people use those as references out in the world. And then another thing happens, though, where that kind of exploration that we talk about happens.
But just like not very thoroughly. It's like if somebody tells you to sweep the floor and you kind of like run the broom across the floor a little bit, but there's still like lots of dust on the floor.
Yeah. But that dust is like very valuable gold dust that you want to put in your game, actually.
Like, I feel like that happens a lot because it's like it's really not very easy to do this weird thing that we do in game design.
Well, it's weird because sometimes it's easy.
Sometimes you get an idea like on the game I'm working on now. If I sit down to design levels, there's like so many levels. Right.
It's amazing. But there's also decisions that are really hard to make.
There's decisions that feel agonizing because like I don't know the right way to make this decision.
There are some things where it's like, okay, clearly the right thing to do to do mechanic or to do justice to this one mechanic or decision that we made is to do a whole bunch of work so that this one piece of it is like 10 percent better.
And I do that and probably you do that.
But like and I'm saying probably because I don't see your day to day work process. Right.
But, you know, most people do not do that.
And there's something about maybe you miss the gravitas.
Right. Maybe it feels more flimsy and people don't know why.
And it's because you didn't do that part. You didn't do all that work that makes the extra 10 percent.
But, you know, most games that try this don't even get there.
I guess the point that I was trying to make is there is a way of doing this design process where you just kind of are doing it.
But it's like if you go to work because it's your job and not because you love the work. Right.
You're going to do the thing. But the person who loves the work is going to do way more.
And so maybe there's just an instinctual like love for exploring consequences of design or like fleshing out this design space of things that happen.
And some people are really naturally drawn to it.
And some people just don't exactly know what that is. I guess.
Like, I don't know. And they're doing it from more far away.
And I don't mean to say that in a way that like I'm not trying to, you know, be elitist or talk down on it.
It's just we see this a lot. Like, I don't I don't think I'm saying anything surprising to you.
It's just maybe the metaphors are weird. But yes, I think it's sort of related to what you were saying at the very beginning,
which I think I'm seeing in Braid as well, which is that you were totally OK with throwing away your first idea of the lots of different rule sets
because you found something better along the way. And then you just kept doing that until it was the things that were most exciting instead of just what you wanted it to be from the outside.
Yes. Well, OK. So I think there's something important to say there. Right.
And this is where I start saying the kind of thing that a lot of people won't get or they think is kooky or whatever.
But like, OK, why am I a game designer? Why is one a game designer, broadly speaking?
And some people have an answer like because I want to make things that let people have fun or whatever. Right.
And OK, it's not really why I'm a game designer, because like you could open an ice cream store or something.
People would really like the ice cream. But I'm doing something different. Right.
Like, I'm really interested in something about like the universe and how it works.
And that's something that thematically comes through in a bunch of different ways in Braid.
But it's like something that I was interested in since I was a kid. But I also simultaneously was really unconvinced somehow
that any of these traditional pathways was going to be the way to to generate the understanding that I was looking for.
Although I guess I didn't totally understand that consciously, even like when I went to college, I thought I was going to major.
I was a major in physics for the first two semesters because obviously I'm going to do physics.
I want to go understand the universe or whatever. But then I was just in the computer lab all day every day.
So then then I suddenly realized that that's what I was doing and then I didn't get a degree anyway.
So that's all good. But like, what kind of understanding is that that I'm somehow attracted to in game design?
Right. And I can't honestly answer that question with accuracy because I still don't exactly know.
But there are some things I can say about it. Right. Like a game that's running is like a little miniature universe.
It generates surprise in this great way that we know how to play with sometimes.
And that surprise is nice because it can give people nice experiences and it can generate entertainment.
But there's also just something deeper about it that is interesting to me. Right. That I don't totally understand.
I don't remember the start of the question. I'm trying to bring it back around. What was it?
We're just talking about like ways to design the game and like being ready.
I was asking like, oh, you're more ready to like throw away. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. OK.
So like the curiosity, the being interested in this general kind of thing is like it's like how you get to the starting point again. Right.
But like I'm trying to explore because it's something about the universe in a way of like understanding existence.
I don't understand it. I don't like if this were something that I had complete understanding of, it'd be pretty easy.
I could sit down and type some stuff in and give it to you. But I don't.
And so there's this exploration process. There's finding something interesting, some way to shine a spotlight on a small piece of what I'm interested in.
And then let's try to show you that. And that's the game.
And because I don't understand it at the beginning, I don't know what it's going to be at the beginning. Right.
I have some idea, but I don't totally know.
And therefore, if I force it to be the idea that I started with, then I'm actually preventing myself from going after the thing that I'm really interested in.
And I'm just more like. Just trying to make a fun game.
Or, I mean, maybe I don't know, like, I feel like some of these games do that, though, like I feel I feel I'm not privy to the interiors of a lot of these development processes,
but I feel like they start out with a high concept and then they just stay too closely to that, regardless of the fact that it isn't that interesting.
Right. That's what you feel like as a designer. I feel like there's so many great places you could go from that that they don't.
And so there is something happening there. Sorry, other designers. I don't I don't want to be Mr. Grumpy.
Yeah, there are some games that do a good job at this, too. I'm not trying to say every other game does.
I think I'm just I'm trying to it's a very subtle thing. Right.
And so just saying whatever comes to your mind is going to be interesting because it's so hard to actually define what is good and what is not good.
And, you know, the fact that they've tried and they've done something that doesn't invalidate it,
it's just more like here are all the different ways that you could approach things and like why makes what why are some more successful than others?
Well, it's especially hard to talk about for the following reason.
And I'm trying to get better at this, but it's still it's a weak spot in my personality.
Right. Which is another way of saying the thing about leaving the original idea behind is like, OK, at time, T equals zero.
When you start the game, you are at some level of knowledge about the world, about whatever your particular line of philosophy is that you're exploring.
And you want to by the end, by T equals one, have something better.
Right. You want to have developed better as a person because that's how you know that you have something good in this game.
Right. That you can give to people.
And to do that, for it to be actual valuable, true stuff, which game simulations, this is a whole other side thing that maybe we could talk about.
But, you know, the fact that they're little universes that are simpler, but they're still the fundamental nature of them is like ours in that complex ingredients come together and generate output in a surprising way.
And if you factor out all the details, that fundamental action is still interesting.
Right. And it's still the same.
Like, and somehow we piggyback on the real universe doing that to make a game like imagine the universe didn't ever have things coming together to interact.
If you could even imagine that, how would you then make a video game that had that? We don't know how to make that is what I'm saying is we use that property of the universe and we just adopted. Right.
Does that make any sense? I mean, there's the, you know, principle that we could only notice the universe has patterns in it.
If the universe didn't have patterns, we would be there to notice it.
I mean, something a little bit more specific in this case, which is some kind of like patterns evolving over time or something.
Right. Right. But, you know, and maybe time is fictional and whatnot, but there's still something there.
Okay. So if you identify too closely with your starting idea because it's yours and this was your cool, clever idea that you had, then that self limiting because you're not going to walk far enough away from that to find the thing.
There's like an ego problem where if you have too big of an ego about your original idea, you kind of fail in this process.
Maybe, or you can always get lucky, right? But, but it's harder now.
Whenever I talk about this, it's hard to talk about the topic in a way that does justice to the actual things I'm talking about because they're like, we're sitting here talking to each other, you know, because this was a successful game that a lot of people like to play.
And so there's this I'm in this role of like successful game designer who did a good thing or whatever. Although some people hate this game. Right. But enough people like it that blah, blah, blah.
And it's, it's hard a little bit to talk about this stuff and not jump back because there's an ego element in like, oh, I'm a smart game designer and I know better than these other game designers who are all doing the wrong thing.
All that. Right. And on the one hand, falling into that mode makes it harder to talk about these things clearly and in a way that does justice to them.
On the other hand, I do think those things are true that people don't execute on this correctly. And so trying to find a way to talk about it without it becoming just an exercise in thinking well of myself is, I don't know.
Like I think I do. I do 90% okay at that. But like, I still feel myself when I'm talking about these things. I'm like, haha. And, you know, I would like to just get better at that. I don't know how to do it.
No, I do know how to do it. It's just, it requires. Let's just say that you liked like where you said you like to see the flaws in the thing so that what that's what makes it better.
You do that for other people. You do that for yourself as well. Yes. So you're not being unfair to other people because you're being incredibly critical of yourself.
But also, of course, you're going to like the stuff that you do. I think that's also true. Like, yeah. All right. So the thing that struck me the most when I played.
Was how minimalistic the puzzle design felt. And I think that was like sort of the thing that blew me away the most maybe I want to say.
And I was wondering if you had more thoughts on that. I sort of heard you talk about it a little bit, but maybe we can go deeper there.
That's a direction that I went more in over time that I kind of discovered while I was working on the game.
There definitely was more complex level geometry in the beginning and more monsters and stuff.
Although one thing that I think one idea that I had early on was.
I want levels to fit on one screen so that they're framed like whenever possible. Like sometimes it'll be fun to have bigger levels.
But if everything fits on one screen and you're thinking about a hard puzzle, you can see all the elements right there.
And you're taking away some artificial difficulty and you get to the essence of the puzzle. Right.
And that then has consequences, though, because, well, if the jump height is fixed and the camera like doesn't ever zoom out, which it didn't because.
I didn't want to program that kind of thing. Like even in the beginning, I was like, are we just blitting bit maps at one pixel to one pixel?
Or do I assume 3D hardware like who even knows? Right. That has consequences.
Like so how many jump heights can you fit on the screen, for example?
Not really that many, like five or six at most.
So that puts an upper bound on the level geometry if you put those two things together. Right.
Also jump widths. Right. If you want to put two things far enough apart so that you can't jump from one to the other and it's open space between.
You could only have I don't know. This is a guess, but maybe four such things across the screen or something like that.
So now that whatever complexity you get by putting those together is still much higher than the average complexity.
But it was still this force that I was aware of. Like, OK, good puzzles are going to be things where you can see all the information.
And that means they're not that complicated. And I definitely I had played puzzle games where the reason the puzzle was hard is because you have to do 17 things in the right order or whatever.
And I was like, no, that's not this game because this game should be about time.
And because I had been doing experimental gameplay workshop, I had this idea that that each every puzzle should be on theme for the particular world,
which, as I said, I did break in that one instance kind of because I wanted to.
But, you know, for the most part, I was very strict about that. Right.
And so if something is on theme, how complicated can it be?
Because if there's some specific idea about it, if that idea only takes place in one part of the puzzle, what's the rest of the puzzle doing?
It's kind of dead weight on that. Right. Unless the idea happens multiple times to like fill out.
But that's hard. It's like a lot harder to design one idea taking place in multiple ways.
We actually do that on the new game a little bit. And actually, Zach is really good at that.
He's probably maybe the best person I've ever seen at that particular thing. So.
I think that gravitated towards simpler puzzles, but also just sometimes I would be working on a puzzle and I would be unhappy with it because it looks ugly or just this thing is weird.
And then I would delete the thing that was weird and I would like it more.
And I just I kept seeing that trend. I was like, OK, this game is better when I'm more minimal.
That was only something that I really had clarity about, I would say, by the middle or two thirds of the way through development, for sure.
So does that mean that the puzzles initially like they had the same elements, but they had more elements as well and you just remove them?
There were definitely like more arbitrary monsters that didn't have much to do with anything, for example.
There still are a few in the final game just for pacing or to put something there or whatever.
But there were more there was more complex geometry. So, you know, one of the levels that shows up again in the game a few times is this level called the pit.
Yeah, I was going to ask. And it's super. It's one of the most minimal. Yeah, literally.
It's one screen. And there's a pit. And what can we do? And it happens like five times, too, which is great.
Yeah. And so that in the original prototype of the game.
That was the level where I introduced the magic key and the magic key was the the predecessor to the current world three stuff we were talking about where things don't rewind.
But the idea back then was like, OK, the key doesn't rewind. It's like special. So there was no sparkles.
It wasn't it wasn't like a modifier on objects the way that it is now.
It simply was OK. The key is kind of cool. And I was like, OK, what's a simple way that you demonstrate that to people?
Well, I want to force them to figure it out and have this epiphany from figuring it out.
What if they have to go into a pit and get the key and the pit is a little higher than they can jump?
So maybe they think that they could jump out, but you jump in and then you're just stuck.
And then you basically have to rewind out. And then, you know, if you go and you look at this level, it was a very long level that totally doesn't fit on the screen.
And you go to the right for a while. You jump on some monsters or whatever.
And then I was following game design advice, traditional good game design advice, which is before you find a key, you must encounter the locked door and not be able to proceed.
OK, because otherwise you don't appreciate the key. Otherwise, you just get the key.
Now, I have violated that rule sort of in the final game because you have the pit and then the gate on the other side and you get the key first or you encounter the key first.
But because it's 2D and it all fits on one screen, you see the gate and it's kind of fine.
Yeah. Well, I think what it's saying is you should frustrate the player first so that they appreciate it, which doesn't mean they have to see it. They're just frustrated.
I don't know if it's about frustrated even. But it's like if you get a key and then you see a locked door that looks like a really bad ass locked door, but you just have the key.
You don't even maybe realize when you picked it up.
Right. Yeah, that's like a nothing burger and nothing burgers feel bad.
Yeah. So it's about avoiding that kind of which you've succeeded at that, right?
Because you fall into the pit and then you don't know what to do. And then therefore that's the part where you're like, oh, I need to be doing something.
Something needs to happen. It's just not given to you.
Yes. But to go back to the original level, it was so you would go left to right along the ground.
Right. You would run into this gate and you're blocked. So you climb up this trellis and like back left and then over here there's like a pit and it didn't fit vertically.
So it was like kind of half scrolled on the screen and then you would go into this pit over here and be stuck and come back out and come down around.
It was way less elegant. It was ugly. I mean, it worked like mechanically. I could have shipped that level.
Right. But I turned that level into the absolute minimum thing that you see because it was like, OK, what do I read?
What is actually good about this? Right. And then what do I really need to do that thing?
That's good. And then also, you know, I had just some idea of, hey, it's really cool to do things with the minimum amount.
Right. That's sort of an eastern aesthetic to some degree.
There's some Western traditions that do this, too. But like, what can I do something highly effective with a minimum amount of material?
Right. And it's a game design application of that idea. And then once I did that a few times, I saw that it was working, I guess.
Is it a program or thing as well? Or like, do you think it's sort of your program or part like liking elegance in design, like minimum code for what it's doing?
Things like that. It's quite possible. I mean, I didn't have that association in my head very deliberately at the time.
But, yeah, of course. Yeah. It could be just that I had trained myself that way to appreciate that.
OK, that's interesting. Now, it's weird because so the aesthetics of the game visually are not minimal.
Right. Like the style, the painterly style of the game is very much not minimal. So it's not like I'm saying minimalism in all places is the right thing.
But that's it's complicated. Well, I think, yeah, I don't think minimalism is always the right thing or not.
I mean, it's just an aesthetic that comes that you can decide to pick and you're like, OK, I'm going to go for minimalism.
And that's what the game is going to be about. And then there are going to be some good things and some bad things that come out of that.
Yeah, I do think there's a question of you can add things that are not minimal that feel like they build up maybe a world or something.
Like there's always sort of there's a component that's very clear cut and then there's sort of a random just let me fill it out a little bit.
And it doesn't have to have a meaning. And it gives us because the world isn't so pure all the time.
And it has some random components. I feel like those you can try to insert on purpose.
But I think in in Braid, it's good that you didn't do that.
But did you ever consider that idea of like maybe not the pure minimalism is OK as well? I don't know if it made sense or not.
I mean, at some point, you kind of just have to decide what game you're making.
And I was you know, Braid took a long time, I think.
And so so like exploring a lot of dimensions like that, I just it was hard enough to get that game done.
And actually, from that perspective, minimalism is appealing in design.
It's like I just don't have to execute as complex of levels this way.
Well, yeah, we have to decide what is important. So that takes a while in a different way.
OK, so then, OK, there's all these mechanics.
And I assume you came up with them like you were saying, sort of going down the tree of possible things that you could be doing.
Nowadays, I think and we gave a talk about this, like I feel like my aesthetic would be to try to combine those things as much as possible.
You have the non-rewinding thing that like happens in almost every world.
But like the ring doesn't happen in the time versus space world, for example, like time and space being correlated.
I mean, and then there's the shadow thing could happen in the ring world and like especially the ring.
It feels very easy to like insert everywhere. But like there's others things like that.
And like, were you thinking about that at the time? And what do you think about it now?
I thought about it toward the end of development, right?
Like, is it an incomplete search of the search space to not do the combinatorics of these things?
And again, I was just feeling really slammed to try and finish the game.
So from that standpoint, I was like, oh, man, I don't want to do all that stuff.
But also, I mean, there were sort of technical problems to some degree, like, and they're not that insurmountable.
But, you know, the world for thing that decides what time it is based on your coordinate.
Like, how does that interact with like the time ring and like what what even is that?
And then can the code be structured in a way that makes sense? I don't know.
But I also, you know, kind of like in the beginning of the project, when I had all these high level ideas and I was thinking about it,
I started thinking about like, what puzzles would I make if I had these multiple elements?
And I just didn't think of any that were amazing. Right.
But I also didn't think that hard about it. And honestly, sometimes, again, thinking about things in that high level way isn't that productive anyway.
Sometimes you need to get the actual thing and then start playing with it.
And then all sorts of ideas show up. And so if I had done that, it's quite possible that there would have been lots of cool things.
And it's quite possible, actually, that if somebody goes and programs a system that can do both of those things at once, that they would find a bunch of really cool things.
OK. They're going to have some pain trying to do that. But if they can do it, then good for them.
OK. So let's see. You also like part of the minimalistic style is I feel like you don't have that many puzzles in the game, or at least compared to other games that you're making now.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it seemed kind of big back then. I believe the last count.
I vaguely remember the number 70 or something. Well, yes, 60 main ones. Right. Plus, yeah.
Well, and also there's stuff in the epilogue that I think of as right, even though you don't concretely get anything for them. Right.
So it's it's ish 70 ish right puzzles in the game, which is not a lot compared to the witness or the current game.
But it sure seemed like enough at the time. Yeah.
I did have a question. So when I first decided I was going to do this game, you know, I'm figuring out the idea of it.
I'm also figuring out the scope of it. Right. How big is this game?
And I was very I was very conscious that I didn't want the game to be too big because I would fail to finish it.
And I didn't want to fail to finish this game. Right. I was going to stick to it and like do it.
And, you know, this was also a time the late 90s, early 2000s was when games were really getting 3D and hard to make and ambitious.
And there were all these games that were just failing to be completed because they were just too hard for the team to make. Right.
And so I was like, I don't want to do that. But even up until that time, so I started really I started working on the game when I was on vacation.
And then I had to take a couple of months to finish up a previous job.
But like from April to December of I want to say 2005, that might be off by one was when I was figuring out the bulk of the game.
And, you know, December of 2005 was when I figured out the end game.
And about that same time, I was saying, do I have enough worlds here to make a game?
And I was like, yeah, OK, this is going to be enough. I just have to, you know, cap it at this many worlds.
And then I just have to build out puzzles because some of the worlds had like three puzzles in them or something, you know, because that's just I mean, I was going to ask about that.
Did you have like too many or not enough? And like, what did you do about that?
Too many worlds or too many puzzles per mechanic.
Did you cut puzzles from some mechanics and a little bit? I mean, I cut for quality a little bit.
I'm not sure I would do things this way today.
But for Braid, I felt like it was nice if all the puzzles had the same number of pieces.
I know. And it's 62, which is funny. Yeah.
You know, so so each puzzle is like four by three.
And so that's per world. You need 12 puzzles.
Well, approximately you could like have kind of two puzzles to get to one puzzle piece.
But that's right. Then you're kind of not really I don't know. Sure. You're messing with the structure a little bit.
It's not as. Although I do, you know, so there are cases when there are two puzzles leading to one puzzle piece, but it's usually simple version of idea and then full version of idea.
Like I'm thinking of, for example, there's the multiple gates like underground with not enough keys thing.
And it's like, here's a simple one. Right. And then here's a more complex one.
And then you get the puzzle piece. Sure. But honestly, this is a little bit of an uncharitable way to say it.
But that structure is a little bit of a cop out because it means I could stop thinking when I have 12.
You know, I don't think you're missing anything. It doesn't feel like you need more.
Yeah, no, the game feels complete, which is why it worked. If the game didn't feel complete, I probably would have changed that decision.
Right. It just happened to work out that way. You know, on the witness later, just the nature of the ideas was that some of them just seemed to have a lot more puzzles than others.
And from the very beginning, I was like, OK, we're not we're not going to do the braid style structure here.
We're just going to let it be more variable. How did you pick 12?
Was it just because some puzzles were like, so that's kind of the average number that you were getting?
And then you were like, OK, now I'm just going to fill the gaps. I don't know.
I mean, you kind of have to have enough to make a.
Like I had the idea to do the puzzle board because I wanted there to be a reason to collect the things.
I wanted you to do something with them rather than just like a number eight out of 12 or whatever.
And I guess like Banjo Kazooie or something like that had done this.
OK, you collect puzzles. I don't know if you actually put together the puzzle pieces in that game.
I never played it. I don't know anything about it, but people have told me since then that that had that.
But as far as I was concerned, it was a new idea.
But so like a two by two puzzle is stupid, right?
Because you're not even you're not even putting it together. Right.
So it has to be more than that. Right.
And I just kind of landed on 12. I don't know.
It's a little bit also the aspect ratio of the thing. It just kind of worked out that four by three was squares.
Although I kind of I guess I chose that to make four by three. Good. I don't know.
OK. Yeah. Did you finish answering the combining the mechanics question or like?
I mean, I just kind of didn't do it. Yes. Right. Yeah. OK.
And it was it was it seemed too hard and like a potential thing to do for another game.
But I also knew I'm not going to do a braid to that's just that that's not enough for a sequel.
I see. Yeah. And which worlds were the hardest to come up with puzzle that you were saying like this one?
This one only had three or whatever. Well, World 2 was hard just again because there wasn't much to work with.
And you wanted that to be like you felt it was important. I was its own world or like you could have been combined.
Yeah. I mean, I felt like there would be enough interesting things. Right.
And I guess there are. I mean, World 2 is also the one where you might be the most thinking like, well,
what exactly is on theme of you can rewind and not die. Right.
So that's the way many of these are. So some of them very explicitly are like jumping down the big pit that has spikes in some places that you should not hit.
Honestly, in retrospect, if I were to tune the game, I would slow down the falling speed,
but we didn't want to do that for this edition because we don't change the game.
Others are more loosely like that, like, OK, I have to bounce on something with certain timing and I'm not going to maybe die,
to jump, so let me rewind and do that.
Or I need to jump multiple times off a couple monsters here,
and it's just a little bit difficult to execute,
but I could try again.
And then some are very vague.
So I'm thinking of the beginning of World 2-4,
where there's a puzzle piece right above the entry door,
and there's nothing near it.
And you're like, how am I supposed to get this?
And then you throw a switch, you travel across a platform
to get to the pit, and then there's a monster there.
And it just seems like it's a thing to dodge and avoid
and maybe get killed by, and then you rewind or whatever.
But really, you get the monster back to the other side,
and it's like, is that a rewind puzzle?
Puzzle, not really.
I don't know, man.
It's an interesting puzzle.
It's about, it's weird because aesthetically, it
feels like it does the right thing in a number of ways,
where you have this challenge that's very minimal
and looks impossible.
There's just like a puzzle piece in the air.
What are you going to do about that?
And then there's misdirection to it,
because that monster way over there
doesn't seem like it's relevant.
It seems like the goal is to guard you from going forward,
and you have to do something quite specific to solve it,
because you have to catch the monster on the plate.
The monster walks fast enough that he'll probably
fall in the pit and die, and so you
have to catch him on the platform with the right timing
and send it across at the right time
to just barely get him across.
And then you have to jump over him or something
without killing him.
So it's pretty hard to do accidentally,
which is a hallmark of a good puzzle.
And the rewind helps you with that timing and execution
a little bit, except that when people are new at the game,
they kind of don't get that part of it.
Like if you die, sometimes.
If you just die and it says rewind
and you don't have anything else you could do,
you're going to rewind.
But if you miss a jump, a lot of the times,
newer players will like, OK, I'm going
to go walk all the way around the level
and back up the ladder and whatever,
because they don't realize they could just
rewind for three seconds.
But from that standpoint, yeah, I
think that's why World 2 was the hardest, apart
from the worlds that didn't make it into the game, which
were so hard I couldn't get anything.
Right, which is probably a sign, obviously.
OK.
Yeah.
Cool.
OK, so now I think we'll go more into specific puzzles,
but it's good because we're already talking about World 2.
So is there more to say about why there is a puzzle actually
in the world?
Like why did you want to do that?
I liked the idea of there's a certain thing
to say about this, which is like,
Braid is a little bit more immature design-wise
than some later games, right?
And so there's things like when it's your first big game
that you know, or not big, but like the first game
that you know is going to be really good and is going to gel,
there's this temptation to put all these good ideas
that you have in there, right?
Or to make it like everything.
And so the idea that I had was like, whenever
I do a pattern like that, I like to transcend the pattern
at some point or break it in a surprise way, right?
So with the stars, this happens, too.
There's like a really weird star that actually
involves the puzzle pieces.
Spoilers, everybody.
I'm not going to say exactly what.
And that's one that people hate when they figure it out, too.
But sorry.
I thought it was fine.
Yeah.
It's a short game.
Deal with it.
But you know, I wanted everything
to be as good as it can be.
And what is better than just having
this very parallel sequence of there's a puzzle per world
and they have 12 pieces and it's very regular.
It's having that same sequence, but then
with like a magical break surprise in there somewhere,
right?
And I do think I executed that imperfectly because it is like,
that is the one puzzle in the entire game
that you cannot solve when you get to it.
And that's messed up.
Because that's actually a very strong property for a game
to have that it's only your knowledge that determines
whether you can solve it or not.
With that puzzle, that's not true.
And it's a flaw somehow.
But it was too late to redesign the game, right?
And for this edition, of course, I
didn't want to go like, quote, fix that thing
and destroy all of world 2, right?
Like it's just, yeah.
So we left it.
And I also, I'm not totally sure what I would do.
Like it would, you have to start moving things around.
And like, OK, we need to shift some puzzle pieces
from later in the game earlier.
But that means all those puzzles,
which are all integrated with the particular level,
have to change.
You have to redesign so much stuff.
I just didn't see how to do it.
And then maybe it's too easy.
Maybe by the time people get to that puzzle,
they just have all the pieces.
And then you have the nothing burger,
like the key in the door, right?
And so I just didn't know.
But that was the thing is like, let's establish a pattern.
And then let's like hyper space out
of that pattern in a totally unexpected way
to also join it together into the rest of the game.
Because otherwise, this mechanical thing
of playing around with the puzzle pieces
is just kind of a separate thing that isn't as meaningful.
But if you tie it to something else,
now it's more meaningful.
Or it's more intertwined with the rest of the game.
I thought you were going to say that.
But why would you even make puzzle pieces
that touch each other?
You have to actually make a puzzle with them.
That was just the idea that I had.
Right?
So there's the question, how do you get collectibles
and make them meaningful?
And there's a couple different ways.
So there's a different.
People probably don't think about it as a collectible.
But in Braid, a different way that this happens
is as you solve each world, I guess
it's once you complete the actual puzzle piece,
then that stairway sort of shows up
and you can get up to the attic.
And it's sort of like you're collecting the stairway pieces.
Right?
But that's a way of making it matter.
Because you can go climb on those stairs
even when they're incomplete.
Right?
And you're like, oh, I can get up two of them.
But then this one's gone.
But I see if that were in place, I could go up two more.
Right?
It's just even though logically speaking,
it's you need five out of five.
It's just better in some way.
Right?
And so with the puzzle pieces, it's like, OK,
why collect puzzle pieces?
One, it matters.
Two, it could tie into the story because you have an image
that you're gradually revealing.
And it gave pacing that you can play with.
So that's why there are puzzle frames
in the middle of levels often.
Sometimes they're more toward the end.
But it's to give you a break and some variety
in what you're doing in the middle of the level
before you go back and do more hard puzzles.
It's like, oh, if I got five of the pieces,
I could try putting them together.
If they don't fit quite, I could at least look at them
and try and figure out what corner this corner is,
even if it doesn't attach to something.
Or I can try to figure out what the scene is going to be.
You have a gradual reveal of the scene that's
going to be in the image.
Right?
All those things are positive.
And I just didn't have a different idea
that was better that had as many positives.
So then did you place those panels
where you have to put the puzzles in locations
where you thought people needed breaks?
Or I mean, was there other reasons?
Probably there were.
But was that the main reason that you
were thinking about the locations of them?
I think so.
Also, though, it was a general heuristic
that I'm trying to give people a nice break in the middle.
But it's also just a little bit intuition
and a little bit trying to work with the designs of levels
that I have.
And sometimes I felt a little bit stuck,
like the ideal place for this puzzle piece or puzzle frame
would be here.
But I kind of can't do that without destroying the level
because it's too tight.
So I have to put it on the next level.
And it's not quite where I would like it to be or whatever.
There's also, this is kind of an unspoken rule in the game.
But I believe you'll find it intact.
They're never at the beginning of a level for some reason
because you have to get to them.
It's like a reward.
You have to earn it a little bit somehow.
So they're usually toward the end.
It actually would have been fun to put one
at the beginning of a level.
But I just never did that.
The pattern breaking thing?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Pattern breaks are better when people actually notice them.
I don't know if anyone would really notice that one.
Sometimes you just weaken your thing by doing that.
Yeah, there would need to be some point
besides that you're breaking that pattern.
There would be something interesting about the fact
that it's breaking.
If something happened because of that.
All right, so World 3 is very much about phase, I thought.
And it's a very mathematical concept.
And I was thinking when I explore something,
I either explore it by playing the game and seeing what happens
or explore it by knowing what the math is
and just sort of walking along the path of I
know all these different kinds of math
or I know properties of the mathematics.
And I can explore that way.
And I was thinking how much of all these phase things
were one kind versus the other kind?
Was it all like, OK, I'm putting it all in the game,
and now I see what happens.
The cloud, for example, the first one,
we have to phase the clouds.
How did that come about, for example?
That one was just observation of what happens, I think.
Did you have moving platforms?
You know, I'm not sure what came first.
Definitely in the original prototype,
I didn't have clouds or moving platforms, I don't think.
All that came later, like levers and platforms and stuff.
But I think I was thinking about it's
very easy to imagine two of the same thing next to each other,
and one rewinds and the other one doesn't.
And then what happens?
And what's a simple version of that?
And it's a very easy way for the player
to see the illustration of the thing.
And yeah, maybe that is where the idea for having cloud
platforms came from, although probably I
wanted something that you could write on across gaps anyway.
Oh, really?
Maybe.
OK.
I don't know.
And then, yeah, OK.
In the commentary here, I should know what the facts are,
but I don't honestly remember.
Yeah.
Understandable.
But then, how about the mathematical reasoning
thing and the phase part?
Were you thinking about math at all when you were making this?
I mean, so there's a level called phase, right?
Which is the first cloud one that we're talking about.
Although the concept of things being in or out of phase
is across the world.
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Which is what you meant, yeah.
I mean, I was certainly aware that that's
a mathematical thing, but I don't
know that it drove the design.
I didn't design any of the levels
by starting with math except the one where actually
that's in World 4.
It's not even in World 3.
So yeah, no, it was more about observing
what was in the world.
And do you know what you implemented first?
Was it the key?
If it's not the platform, was it the key?
It was the key, absolutely.
The key was in the original one week prototype.
Yeah.
And then platforms and clouds and whatever being unrewindable
came later, right?
Because I had to have the whole idea like, oh, it's
a modifier on objects, which that
fits into the experimental gameplay way of thinking.
It wasn't that hard.
And then it's like, oh, well, players
need to be able to tell the difference without just,
like in the original game, there was no way to tell.
It was like a surprise that the key didn't rewind.
And it's not that simple of a situation
because it's just you're grabbing it,
and then you rewind, and you come out of the pit,
and the key just kind of comes with you.
It just feels weird, and you don't even
know exactly what happened.
It's not like the key doesn't rewind.
It's that you got it out of the pit, I guess.
I don't know, right?
And so part of what happened when working on the real game
was, how do I clarify this in some way?
Oh, it's a property of this object.
It can be applied to any objects.
OK, well, we do this particle system,
and later this distortion field kind of a thing.
OK, so this is sort of related, but not really.
And you have this option to pause time completely
instead of going back and forth.
And was that, I would guess, it was controversial to make,
because to me, it almost feels more fun to go back and forth
and more about the time.
But it makes it much easier when you can just pause it
and just wait for things to happen.
And it's also not very discoverable, I feel.
Yeah, I mean, the way that happened was just,
in the very beginning, there was just rewind at 1x speed.
And then you stop rewinding, and the game goes forward again.
And there are some situations when
you want to rewind a lot, right?
So that's why there's speed adjustment.
But then also, with this weird thing,
you can rewind, and then the game goes forward.
It doesn't feel that good.
If you try playing and just rewind at 1x
and then forward at 1x, if those are your only two things,
it feels it's just a little bit frustrating
is too strong of a word.
But it lends itself to frustrating interactions
or something, right?
Now, the 0x time speed just came from, well, OK,
if you can rewind fast, you maybe
miss what you were going to do.
So you should be able to go back forward, right?
And then if you can go back forward at 1x,
well, we should probably have symmetry,
because that's a thing.
So you can go forward as much as you can go backward.
And then do you go from minus 1 to 1,
or is there a 0 in the middle?
And it just seemed better to have a 0 in the middle.
Well, it does make a lot of things easier.
But again, I think a lot of players don't get that.
I see.
Right, so it cancels out.
Well, and it adds skill ceiling to the game.
It adds an advanced technique that you can use.
And so for example, there's one puzzle in the game
with the time ring where the plant's popping up and down,
and you're trying to get them in a certain phase
with each other.
That's about phase, and it's not on World 3, Mark.
And it's a little bit hard, because you can mess up,
because the extent of your time ring goes really far.
You can either, there's at least three ways to solve it.
You can do this very laborious brute force thing
until you kind of get the thing that you want.
There is a more elegant thing that you
can do that's just a few moves where you drop
the ring in the right place, and you get the guys
in the right sequence.
And then they're timed so that as the monster walks,
the guys go up and down with the right timing, right?
Or the elite ninja move to do is just sync them all
with each other and then stop time
while they're all in the floor.
And then they just go by, and you hold time stopped.
And I like that, because it's like, oh, the more mastery
you have of this game, the more you
can take this puzzle that seems really hard
and do something that that guy didn't even think of
and have an expert solution.
And there are a few cases in the game where that happens.
Many puzzles that doesn't happen,
but when I was able to do it, I liked it.
That's cool.
["The Greatest Showman"]
In this episode of the Braid Anniversary Podcast,
Mark Tanbash asked the questions, Jonathan Blow
answered the questions, Jason Brisson produced,
and Will Torbett edited.
Thanks, and we'll see you next time.