There are all these problems and I'm trying to figure out some balance with the mechanics that we've discussed about, right?
Again, one of the things that I want to do is relate the rules of the universe to the fiction.
And so what happens if the last level, I mean, it almost has to be if this the story parts of this game are a major element,
then whatever the last level has to be has to involve a major relating between the gameplay concept and the story concept,
or it's like not a good finale. Right, right.
Hello and welcome to the Braid Anniversary Edition podcast.
We're back with Casey Muratori and we're talking about game design again,
but especially as pertains to the ending of the game, which I think is one of the more interesting topics.
The game is now out on pretty much every platform.
So if you like the kind of thing you're hearing here and you haven't played the game yet,
you can get Braid Anniversary Edition on consoles, on PC and on your phone if you're a Netflix subscriber.
So give it a try if you haven't.
Let's get started.
When we talked in the last session, we were not quite getting to the point where we had all of the worlds.
So we sort of had worlds 1, 2, 3 and 4. World 1, of course, got removed.
Worlds 2, 3 and 4 got extensively refined.
But we haven't really talked about how like you talked about some things that didn't work,
like doing the quantization stuff. So what about the things that did work?
Like how did we end up getting to like world 5, for example, or the final world or whatever?
Well, again, starting with these principles of it was a physics game, but now it's a rewind game.
Okay, what can we do? Like the physics informs what kind of rewind things we could think about.
And so, hey, there's this whole quantum mechanics thing.
There's, for example, this whole many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
And so maybe there's a world where you can somehow control what choices get made
and they happen differently in different things.
And that's where world 5 came from. And there's that starting with that abstract idea.
And then there's the question like, okay, how is that concretely implemented within the framework that we have?
And it's like, well, it's a game where you rewind.
So instead of rewind, just undoing everything that you did.
What if all that stuff just happens again?
But then you also now can do something new.
And once you think of that, it's like, well, do you support that n times or is 2 enough?
And I decided to stay with 2.
And also there are other questions.
So the temptation, if you want the most easily implementable thing, you would be like,
well, we somehow just replay the rewind data that you just rewound, right?
We save that somewhere and we push it back on going forward.
And then you can just also do something new.
But I didn't want to do that because if both realities going forward are totally separate and cannot communicate,
that's a little bit dry and it leaves off the ability to do certain kinds of puzzles.
So, for example, in world 3, we have objects that are immune to rewind, right?
You could have that here too.
Are there still like two of them in two separate universes or is it one?
Like, what does that mean?
That's a question.
And then is there a different thing, which is again, the same way that things were exempt from being rewound before.
Is there things are exempt from being into universes, right?
Are they in one always?
Right.
And as soon as I thought of that, it's like, okay.
So then you definitely can't just replay the same thing forward because by doing things in one universe,
you can change the state of the other universe at a given time because you like there's a monster that's in both
and you stomped on him in one and so he dies in the other one as well.
And then from there, it's like, okay, well, what do you do if you don't just playback the rewind data?
Well, you do input recording.
That's the thing that we all knew about because it's a way that you would test your 3D game or whatever back in the day.
And for me, like I know some people were very gung ho about input recording.
I always had problems with it of one kind or another.
Like in principle, it's simple like, hey, there's one point in your game loop that you just put the thing like
there's one point in your game loop where you read input.
So just when you do that, also record it and then play it back from exactly that point in my experience.
It always gets more complicated than that.
And I don't know if I've just been unlucky or whatever, but I've talked to people who said, no, I just do this and it's a piece of cake.
But it's never been a piece of cake for me, including in Braid.
But I knew that you can do that and I knew what it was like and I knew what the results are.
Right.
And so I said that's the right thing for this because it means you can change the consequences.
And so by that, you kind of mean just to make sure I understand what you're saying.
Yeah.
So there are two ways you could implement this feature.
One way to implement this feature is that when I see the playback, like in Braid, there's, you know, I do a thing,
I rewind and I see like ghost version of me do that thing.
In one version, that guy lands on the platforms that are there in his world always.
So I can't like move a platform in my world and ever have that affect him because he's literally just going to follow the exact path he followed.
Yeah.
No matter what.
Right.
So to be clear, you know, the rewind data that we spoke of before is numbers like at what coordinates is the guy standing?
Right.
What is the, you know, you could have some integer state variables on or whatever.
And you would the naive version of this or the simple version of it would just be playing those numbers back.
And so you could never change anything.
If you went that way, you could imagine something where that universe can affect yours.
But it can't be affected.
And that didn't seem that cool.
Right.
So basically what you ended up choosing was the one where, okay, we're going to act as if there is a second player who just happens to try to do exactly the same things you did at the exact times you tried them.
But then we're going to recompute the physics of what happens to the guy based on the actual positions of all the things according to the world rules.
So if you move a platform that only exists once across both realities, then he will just miss it.
If now it's not there and fall down or whatever, or if something is there that wasn't there before now, he can't run through it or something.
Et cetera.
Lands on one.
Yeah.
Yes.
I guess like it sounds like the the sort of idea about collapsing things.
So there's one copy of them, no matter which world, you know, which of those ones you're talking about was sort of a natural extension because you had already thought of the like some things can't rewind.
You were in a space of like, what if I what if some objects don't do the thing?
Is it just kind of that?
Yeah, I mean, I also just feel like it wasn't that hard of an idea to come up with.
Okay.
You know, it just was there.
Okay.
Maybe because I'd been working on the game for a while at that point.
Anyway, so that was world five.
Yep.
And then world six again came from these physics ideas.
It's like, okay, relativity.
You have this time dilation thing.
What if I just, you know, not trying to make it be about speed of light or anything directly because this game is a lot simpler.
There is nothing that would be like speed of light in this game.
Exactly.
But let's just put time dilation in directly and just see how that goes.
And I wasn't sure at first if that was going to generate enough interesting situations.
And it turns out to have, although it is mostly kind of binary, right?
It's like, well, I want something to go slow is the way that it gets used.
Right.
But that's actually mostly fine.
And there are nuances to some of the levels that make it more like the analog part of it comes into play a little bit more because you know, the way it works is you drop this little ring.
And at the center of it, where you drop it out to some fixed radius, you have time dilation that goes and it's, it's a fixed constant, which I believe is O dot two of the regular rate.
And then beyond that radius, it's this one over N minus are not kind of thing to sort of decrease that effect as you go out.
So it never actually the rate of time never goes to one point.
Oh, I don't think if there is such a thing.
So even though the player generally tends to perceive it as being like, oh, near the ring, time slows down actually time slows down everywhere.
It's just most places.
It's not slow enough to notice.
Yes.
And so the initial implementation, so if you're thinking about, okay, what would this actually be?
It's like, well, you're dropping a singularity somewhere where things are totally frozen somehow at that point.
And then maybe we add a little bit of a fudge factor so that you don't walk into that point and then the game is over.
Right.
And what I found was so one of the problems is with the rate itself, like going way down towards zero, it's not that fun to try and play.
Like requiring that is weird because the player just kind of moves too slow through there.
And yeah, everything like if anything going through there is so slow that it's not fun to wait for it or enter require that in a solution wouldn't be that fun.
Also, even before implementing this, I knew like, hey, the music and stuff sounds go backward when you rewind.
They should slow down appropriately when you're in this thing.
And I already could picture in my mind what that would feel like.
Like you would go into the music and it's like, yeah, right.
Now, oh, dot two, which is the current factor that I chose is about the place at which you can still kind of hear the music, but it's pretty slow.
Like if you slow things down much further than that, the sonic energy is like so slow that you don't even hear anything coherent.
Right. OK. Your brain doesn't perceive it as music anymore.
It's just kind of like ambient noise.
Yeah. Like or it just it just becomes quiet, right? Because all the all the wavelengths are so long.
Long. Yeah. So those things together.
And also there's the shape of it.
Like right now it's a relatively big disk that several times the size of the player.
If you make it more like a cone instead of a.
OK, well, this is weird. Like a.
You mean like upwards facing or something or.
No, I mean like where the middle is much more of a different value than the like, say, if you.
So the current disk is like a constant time value inside the whole disk.
You could say, well, there's a disk, but the outer ring is point seven and the inner ring is 0.1 or whatever.
And the thing about that is that gives you obviously large changes in behavior depending on where things are relative to the center of the disk.
Yes.
And it's just very fiddly to try to like it's a big change between 0.2 and 0.7 or whatever.
Right. And again, if you're trying to design puzzles, if the puzzle works when things are 0.4 and below, but not if they're above.
Yeah. And you're requiring people to place this thing.
And there's. So one thing that makes puzzle snappy and feel good is like when they're discreet.
Yeah. You know, and this is actually a very continuous fiddly thing.
And you also, it would be one thing if you were, I don't know, holding the ring in your hand constantly the way you hold a key and moving around.
Because then you could like find the spot that does what you want, but it's not like that.
It's like you drop it and it's on and now you pick it up.
And maybe I could have tried more of the other thing, but that seemed bad because you would be walking around in the slow thing 100% of the time.
It's like it. Well, based on all the things you're saying, I kind of have, I think what I assume the obvious question that anyone would have at this point is.
Why slowing down? Why not speeding up a lot of the problems that you're talking about?
And I can think of reason I can think of answers, but I'd rather hear what yours were right is if the problem is that it's not very fun for these things to slow down too much.
Why was slowing down even the thing at all?
Why wasn't it like, oh, it gets 1.5 X faster or something like that?
I think I just like the slowing down.
Okay, aesthetically speaking, you like things going in and going.
Yeah, but also there's there's a reason to bias things in that direction, which is.
Again, it's so it's a puzzle game, most of which you have tuned to be playable at 1.0, right?
If things get slower than 1.0, it's playable.
Right. Mostly.
It's just, you know, slower.
If things get a lot faster than 1.0, maybe it's not playable anymore.
Like if you're trying to jump on a monster, like if you're jumping on monsters at 0.2, it becomes a really different experience.
Right. If you're trying to jump on monsters at 5.0, like that's unplayable.
Right. So you wouldn't be able to go up as high.
And then if you can only go to 2.0 or something or 1.6, now you can't make as much of a difference between things to solve puzzles with.
Right. Like the timing can't be that different.
Now that said, I never explored.
That's the reasoning or some of the reasoning.
Right. I never actually went and explored that.
And sometimes you do it and you find that there's something you didn't think of or whatever.
But this one works.
So it was fine.
I started doing it and I found it was cool and there was enough to do with it.
Right. And it's interesting because definitely at this point the goal was not exhaustively search the space for literally everything that I could do.
It was how much is enough and how much of a game is a big enough game.
And I remember toward the end of 2005 feeling like, oh, if I just do the ending now, like after I had World 5 and 6, I didn't know.
Is that all the worlds? Right.
But I sort of figured, well, if there's this many puzzles per level, I think it suddenly feels like a big enough game, which is cool because at the beginning of the year, it was almost nothing.
Right. Yeah.
And then I was like, let me just figure out the ending.
You know, again, I was thinking about bi-directional arrow of time stuff and how like before I did the actual fictional ending in the game, I was definitely thinking about what if one of the worlds is.
Somehow there's two coexisting universes, but the time just goes forward differently.
And what is that? Like time goes forward in each universe, but from the perspective of the other universe, it's backwards.
But somehow they coexist. Right. And there is a version of that in the game now as it stands.
And that version is relatively limited compared to what you could imagine, I would say.
So, so far I've described several instances of starting with a high level idea and then coming up with an implementation within the framework of the game that implements that idea.
Right. And so for this one, it's just really hard because if you have like the future for one world is the past for the other world.
So like almost nothing can happen.
Like when you start to think about it. Right.
Yes, not obvious how the current design of braid like naturally extends into that space.
Maybe it does, but it's hard to think about how it almost even for any game.
I mean, you could imagine a game where you go forward and then you switch to the other universe and you're in the past and you go forward and they keep constantly changing each other.
But like you experience it literally.
But within this game, the idea would be something like you're always going forward in yours and there's stuff always going backward there.
And like, how do you affect things? Right.
Like if you step on a monster, if you kill him in the other universe, then he wasn't there for you to have stepped on him or something.
You know, or you can't kill him because he dies at the instant you stepped on him and but you have no effect on that universe simulating.
In your perspective forward, because it's backward for that one.
Right. So in world four, when you go left, you can't kill dudes by jumping on them.
And the reason is because they're going backwards anyway.
So if you kill them at that instant, you go back.
Right. And in world four, that works because then you can walk to the right.
And so you get this interesting difference in a world where it's just the arrows of time are in opposite directions and fixed.
You don't have that change at all. And so like you can't do anything anyway.
I thought through many permutations of this and a lot of them were like, I can't do anything.
But there was, you know, I thought of this thing where you did have limited effects on the other time stream.
And it was a little bit weird. And I wasn't sure if it was enough for a world.
And in the final game, there isn't very much of it. There's a few levels.
But one of them is the final level of the of the game.
And that was, again, one of these things where I was thinking along these lines and I had the idea for that level, which I don't I don't even want to.
Again, I don't want to say what the core idea is because reasons.
Right. But but it was a pretty simple concept.
I was just thinking, OK, there are all these problems and I'm trying to figure out some balance with the mechanics that we've discussed about.
Right. But again, one of the things that I want to do is relate the rules of the universe to the fiction.
Right. And so what happens if the last level?
I mean, it almost has to be if this the story parts of this game are a major element, then whatever the last level has to be has to involve a major relating between the gameplay concept and the story concept.
Or it's like not a good finale. Right. Right.
So I was just thinking about, like, what would that be?
And I came up with an idea and I was hyped about it. And again, probably took less than a week to put the initial version of the whole ending level together.
And as I recall, you were the first person who played that.
I remember I was like hanging out at a coffee shop in San Francisco working on it.
And I was talking to you on the phone about you had played this level.
And I was like, what do you think about it?
I don't think I knew that was the first person.
Maybe I did. You you were pretty much the only person to play that until like there was a time later when it was like, OK, I've got a build of the game together that I'm going to send out.
And like Jeff played that and a few other people played it.
But I think you played one a little bit before that because I just wanted to try it out.
Yeah. And I just remember, like I heard from you that it worked pretty well for you.
I don't remember what the conversation was at all.
I mean, I thought it was brilliant at the time.
Yeah. And from that from that point, I was like, OK, that's the last ingredient.
The game is the game is basically done, except, of course, it's very far from done.
Right. But like this is the last ingredient in the soup.
And now we just have to cook the soup. Right.
You're stirring the pot from now on and making sure it doesn't burn or whatever.
Put a little pepper in once in a while or whatever.
Yeah. And and so there were two parts of that.
Right. There was what's the finale.
Right. Is the ending good?
And there was also just is there enough?
Are these worlds enough? And I I guess I wasn't totally sure about that
because all the worlds weren't totally fleshed out.
But I was like, I think this is enough.
And if that ends up being wrong later, maybe we could add a world or something.
And it ended up being fine. Like the game was totally big enough.
It was in fact, the game was bigger than I thought it was going to be.
I think that's maybe a good transition point for me to ask a couple of questions about that framing story.
I know you don't want to talk about meaning things, which is fine by me because I don't either.
Yeah. But I do have some questions about the intent behind certain choices.
You kind of alluded to one of them, which was, for example, that eventually in the final builds of the game,
you don't have to read the text in a prompted style.
Right. It's it's clearly set into the game so that it's accessible as something you you know,
you walk to the podium, you read it if you wish, you run by it if you wish,
you can read it twice if you wish, you can go back to your right. Totally.
And so I don't necessarily have a specific question about that,
but I have a broader question about it, which is in your lecture to the Center for Fiction, the Calvino one.
You talked about the Braid House, for example, as being the frame story,
which you were likening to something like in Einstein's Dream or if on a winter's night,
a traveler where they have there is a meta structure kind of that's outside of individual smaller structures
that are in there that like tie them together.
Yeah. Like in those books and also especially invisible cities.
If you just had a bunch of three page vignettes, it's a little bit missing something like what what am I reading?
Yeah. Is there any long-term progression of any idea or can there be can there be any conclusion
when it's a bunch of three page vignettes? Like maybe you can do something, but it's hard.
But once you have this thing that contains the pieces, then it's more of a shape, you know?
Yeah. And so if I could try to ask the question without forcing you to go into any sort of like
specific meaning things, what I'm kind of interested in is how did you arrive at this particular structure?
Because there's actually several elements.
Like the most obvious thing is that there's some text that comes up when I run by a podium.
But actually, if you look at how many there are, there's the player starts out on like a bridge in a burning city.
They walk to a house. The house has multiple rooms. There's an attic.
We collect puzzle pieces. We put the puzzle piece together.
None of that has to be there. It could have been like Super Mario Brothers where you literally just play through these six worlds
and interpret it how you wish. You must have had reasons for wanting each of those pieces and also not other pieces.
So I'm curious if you could maybe go into that a little bit.
How did those come about in what order and why were they there?
Okay. Well, the opening scene where you start definitely was a very early idea.
Okay.
Right. And there's at least two purposes served by that.
One of them is just, you know, this very simple thing of I had an idea of an experience that I wanted the player to have at the start of the game.
Okay.
Just an art thing. Like, wouldn't it be nice if the following, right, and you see yourself silhouetted and you have this like simple moment
and that includes all sorts of even pragmatic things like the game not booting to a menu and just booting to this scene that almost could act like a screen saver until you start playing the game.
And there's not like 50 logos that come up.
Zero logos. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the first thing a lot of people want to do is put their company logo that nobody's ever heard of or cares about.
And that's the first thing you see. And I'm like, no.
And in fact, witness was the same way it boots and then you're in the hallway.
Yep.
Yeah. The other thing and it's related, but a little bit meta is because my agenda was for this to be an art game and not just to be an art game,
but to show other designers and players like this is a way that games can be that games usually aren't being.
Right. So it was to make a point kind of like the game starts up.
You see a thing. It's not like Mario.
Right. You're like, what exactly is going on?
Yeah.
And it's a statement.
This experience you're about to have is different from the ones that you are used to.
Like I wanted to hit people with that right away, but in a way that was also beautiful and nice.
So that was a very early idea. Pretty much like those initial builds of the game that I sent to you guys didn't have this.
It was just like you're in level one or whatever.
But you had wanted it at that time.
Well, I don't know.
But relatively soon after, once I started thinking about how do I put all this together, like that came in there.
Okay. So the house.
Well, I'd had this idea that if it's a puzzle game, I think the idea that you would be able to trivially run through the levels came much later.
But before that, it was like, okay, these levels are going to have puzzles.
I had done enough looking at games to see that if you have a very linear structure and you have puzzles,
people get stuck on a puzzle and then they can progress no further in the game.
Right. And that's terrible.
They get mad at the game.
There's plenty of enjoyable times that they would be able to have that you're not letting them have.
And you're not even giving them that much of a chance to figure out the puzzle because banging your head against one thing is not that great.
Even for just processes of thought.
Right. Right.
If what helps you solve the puzzle is better facility with the universe of this game and how the rules work and all that,
then like if I just give you more experience with the game in different contexts,
then you're better armed to come back and solve whatever you were stuck on.
So. All of this led me to think, okay.
We want a structure where if there are a bunch of worlds with different physics in them,
like we probably should introduce them roughly in some sequence.
But who is to say you have to solve them in sequence or even play them in sequence?
Right. And so it's deliberately different from a book that way.
Although, again, books like Dictionary of the Khazars are deliberately nonlinear, but it's very rare in a book to do that.
Right. Most books are like choose your own adventure is deliberately.
Right. Yeah.
But this was a way of of trying to make the puzzle game good.
OK, so if it's kind of nonlinear and you can go to things in whatever order, how do you know when you're done?
How do you get to the end?
I can't just put the end after World 6 or whatever, because what if you haven't finished the other ones?
Right. So there's got to be something gating you from the ending.
Right.
And it would be nice if that was something where you could see your progress incrementally.
Like you can imagine there's just some door that's locked until everything else is done and then it opens.
And that is functionally what is there.
But I came up with this thing where, like, you know, the different ladders are there based on what worlds you finished.
And you can climb higher, although you can't really get to anything.
So that feels a little bit better. And if you've solved them discontinuously, there'll be a gap where you can't climb.
But then you see the other ladder out there and you get this visual feedback of progress.
And there's this mystery of like what's in that attic.
Right. Right.
And you get the whole game to think about that, because you see the attic at the beginning.
And I mean, if you poke around and at some point, probably long before the end,
because you end up coming back to this house between every world and every time you quit the game and restart it, you're back in the house.
And so you probably poked around at some point and you're like, oh, what's up there?
I never put a sign saying you're trying to get into the attic.
Right. But it's natural to want to know that all seemed like a good way to structure it.
And what about the puzzle pieces?
Because it's not necessarily, I mean, a simpler design of Braid and one that had less interface complexity as well
would have been one where I simply collect abstract puzzle pieces or Mario coins, which I know you love.
And there's just a number when you collected 10 out of 10, then the ladder goes over.
But you very specifically chose to have a separate sort of even UI and a totally different thing in the game, a multimodal.
Right. Yeah. That's a big decision.
So you must have had a reason why you wanted that instead of the simpler version.
Yeah, that decision was made very early.
And again, it's over determined. Right.
So one of the things about the game, we've already said, wanted to feel kind of painterly, kind of analog, expressive.
It's not a bunch of tiles.
And I don't remember if we mentioned this.
I don't think we did.
But there are places in the game where you would normally traditionally just splat out a bitmap a bunch of times aside from map tiles.
So, for example, World 2-3, I think I think I said earlier something else was 2-3, but it's probably wrong.
2-3 is a monster hunt level where there's like a HUD on top that says hunt and there's icons of monsters and you jump on one and it crosses it out.
Most games of that time and earlier, there would just be like a monster HUD bitmap and an X bitmap and you just draw those.
Yes. And in fact, if you look closely at that level, all of the six monster icons are different.
OK. And all of the X's are different.
OK. Why? Because it feels a little bit better and it's more in the spirit of the game.
Right. And so that is the kind of thing that I was doing and wanted to do.
Right. OK. Now, that means if there's something like a puzzle piece that you're going to get, that's like even more important than monsters that you would step on in one level somewhere.
And so how do I make it more meaningful? How do I individualize each of these collectibles?
Obviously, they could probably look different from each other. But what are they?
And so I just liked the puzzle piece idea. I guess other games had puzzle pieces as collectibles before.
Like, I think someone said Banjo Kazooie has that.
Yeah, I've never played that game, so I don't know.
And I don't know to what how it's different or the same.
It might actually be almost exactly the same now that I think about it.
Yeah, it's possible that, you know, like life is is big and complicated.
So it's possible I even saw that in like a Best Buy at some point.
It's true. You know, yeah, but I don't remember it.
And I certainly never played the game.
There is one pretty large difference, which is that in Banjo Kazooie, the puzzle that you're putting together is much more similar to what happened, say, in Mario 64.
It's a picture of the world you will go to when you enter that puzzle.
In Braid, that is not what happened.
So there's a pretty big difference in what the puzzle is.
But the puzzle piece collection part does seem very similar.
Totally. In Braid, it is a completion of the level.
And you get a picture that you could think about if you want.
But I like that. It's it was another element of storytelling that is not hitting you over the head with anything.
Right. I like the idea of having a little let's put puzzle pieces together activity that wasn't too hard because it can give you a little bit of a mode switch about what you're doing.
Like, oh, I'm grinding hard on puzzles or whatever.
Like, how do I get the puzzle piece puzzles?
And then I get a little bit of a relaxation of putting them together.
And in fact, that's partially why the puzzle frames are also embedded inside the worlds.
Right. There's two places to get to them.
So, for example, the world to puzzle you can get to in the middle of world to or you can get to it in the house.
Right. And the reason it's in the middle of the levels is just to give you a little bit of pacing and a sense of progress in the middle of the level.
All of those reasons put together made it seem like a good idea.
Right. And then that's just kind of how ideas work.
As far as I know, like you think about other things that it could be.
And it's like, no, this is this is good.
This other thing is good.
Now, you also did something with the puzzles where in one specific instance, the puzzles actually become interactive in a level sense.
Yes. How did you come up with it?
And why did you decide that this was an appropriate thing?
Or because that is not something that's happening with the yeah, I just got done telling you all sorts of things about how the game is about time manipulation.
And you shouldn't have puzzles that aren't about manipulation.
And yet I did this thing twice.
That's why I'm asking. You see why I'm asking.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay. And the answer is one basic fact about it is just sometimes something's cool and you want to do it.
And this was pretty cool.
I thought it was pretty cool.
And I played with some people hate the second one.
Okay.
I don't know. Like maybe I was a jerk for the second one.
Okay.
But maybe not.
I think it's fine.
It's not it's not a super long game or anything.
It seemed to me the only appropriate way to do the second one.
Let me put it that way.
There's also there's an idea that I tend to have about games, which is the following.
You can just do some stuff and it's just kind of random and not coherent.
And that's not very good.
And so one of the ways that you do to fix that is you establish a pattern that people can understand either consciously or subconsciously.
In this game, it's that, you know, things are about time and here's how long the worlds are.
And there's a dinosaur at the end and all of that.
Right.
Twelve puzzle pieces, put them together, etc.
Etc.
And that gives you there's an amount of good game-ness that you get out of that approach.
It's like a predictability of some aspect of the game.
Yes.
That helps hold it together, I guess, in a way.
All sorts of things like the feeling that the player is in good hands with the designer comes from this, for example, right?
Their ability to solve puzzles comes from them understanding what the hell is expected from them.
Right. And all sorts of things like that.
Yes.
If you don't establish the pattern solidly enough, even if you as a designer think that they're there, the players won't realize that they're there and they won't work as well as you would think.
Now, suppose you do a good job establishing those patterns and following those patterns.
Then what?
Is there more value to get after that?
And I think the answer is yes.
Okay.
Because once you've established a pattern, there is now surprise in breaking the pattern.
Okay.
Then it's an extra moment that the player gets to have on top of what they have already had.
Now, normally this makes the most sense sequentially in time, which is why it's going to be harder for me to explain this thing because it comes early in the game.
But a different example of a pattern break that's a lot more subtle in this game is, well, the epilogue that you get to at the end, right?
Even the final level before the epilogue is pretty different from what else happens in the game.
Right.
And that acts as a break and also just like a dramatic, it makes it feel like a heightened moment that it's so different from the rest of the game.
Yes.
But then in the epilogue, I straight up break rules that were constant through the rest of the game.
For example, like obstacles look a certain way.
They have high frequency details and are well defined and all that.
And then in the epilogue, you can just like walk behind stuff.
All of a sudden.
Right.
And I don't know that that's something that players will consciously get, but it's it's different from what's happening.
There is stuff to play in the epilogue involving the story, right?
And game mechanical items, which heretofore have never been in the same place at the same time.
Right.
So that's like a pattern disruption or a convolution of of what had been established already.
The thing that you do for those or what what you get for interacting with them is a different class of thing.
Right.
And again, I don't want to go too much into it, but it's it's different.
So I'm breaking the pattern established by the game up to that point, but I'm not in danger of disrupting the game because this is a tiny part at the end.
Right.
So now when it comes to something like the world to puzzle, I'm playing a little bit of a game with myself there.
OK, because that isn't about time stuff.
Right.
To me, it came a little bit later in development after this other pattern was established.
And so to me, it's a pattern break sequentially in time.
Even though to the player, it totally isn't.
And I know that.
But there's something if you go enough layers when you work on something for years.
You can get really complicated about it.
And at some point, I like the weird existential fact that this is a game about us having different experiences sequentially.
Like the the chronological sequence to the player is different from the chronological sequence to the designer.
And this thing being there early for the player is some vestige of that phenomenon.
And absolutely nobody is ever going to get that.
Well, if I may.
But I know it.
Yeah, like is it a little bit like when someone's telling you a story and they say, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Is it kind of like that where it's like, oh, I know all of the stuff because I already know the whole thing.
I'm telling you, I made this game.
I know what all the things are.
I'm sorry.
I started to say something that would only really make sense if you also had known the whole thing.
And then I'm like, oh, wait.
OK, sorry. Yeah.
Like and so it's this little thing coming out that's like, well, I already know all this stuff.
So trust me. This is interesting.
You'll get it in a little bit.
I mean, I think the Princess Bride movie does that.
Yeah.
Remember, yes.
Yeah.
Usually that's done, though, in an audience friendly way.
Right. I am doing it in an audience unfriendly way.
Yeah.
And and that was fine.
But it's it's a weird thing and it's quite possible.
So every everything that I just said about that is all what I think about it.
But it also might just be my mind's way of justifying this thing.
That's cool that I wanted to do.
Right. Right.
Coming up with a reason why it's OK.
Right. Right.
There is another reason that I think is is a little bit similar and may also be slightly a rationalization,
which is World 2 is the world where, like we said, you kind of can't do a lot.
It's just rewind.
The other worlds have all these elements of magic that emerge from the rule set.
Right.
And in World 2, there's like no room.
There's the initial magic of like, oh, cool, I can rewind.
Right. Right.
But on the face of it, there's not room for phenomenon magic in the same way.
And so making a hole in it, like poking a hole in that universe through which the magic happens,
somehow felt OK.
And in fact, if that's going to happen, so that could have been in any world.
Right.
Why is it in World 2, which seems to even be the weirdest place to put it because it's so early in the game.
And the answer is because World 2 is where it makes the most sense in some way,
because World 2 is so spare mechanically.
So it has the most conceptual space for it.
But also in the other worlds, because they're more complicated, like it would be more confusing or less special.
Yeah.
So they're like, see, this is the thing that I always try to say to tell people is like,
it's good to have reasons about why you do things.
But like I said, most of your brain is not the reasoning part.
A lot of it has pretty cool ideas.
And if you reject them because they don't totally conform to reason,
you're maybe not hitting your potential in terms of ideas.
Like what ideas can you bring to bear?
However, if you don't apply reason, you're just like Shingy or somebody who is somebody that Casey showed me on a video one time.
You're like to elaborate, you're one of these random wacky artists who just is doing wacky things all the time.
And that's what makes you creative is that you're random.
Right. Right.
And I have never actually had very much like that is the kind of person with whom I have fundamental personality conflicts.
Like I don't like that.
Okay.
But I do have a little bit of it, right?
A little bit of it.
Right.
As the last little like cherry on the cake that's already very good.
So a random cherry on a good cake, on a logical cake is good.
But a logical cherry on a random cake would probably not be.
Yes.
Although, you know, logical is maybe not quite the word that I would use.
Coherent or...
Coherent and well structured and high quality ingredients.
I think I get what you mean.
I don't know if you explained it well, but...
No, I think that's good.
And I don't think that I've ever explained this particular thing.
Like I've talked to a few people about it, maybe even on the record.
But I think what I just said for anyone listening is the best explanation that I've ever given of this thing.
Of that thing, okay.
To anyone else.
Not totally related, but this thing that we're talking about, the World 2 thing, is also the biggest mistake in the game.
But not for the reason that we're talking about.
And I alluded to this before when we were talking about playtesting, right?
What is the biggest mistake?
The biggest mistake is the following thing.
Okay.
Everywhere in this game, the first time you see a puzzle, you can solve it.
Okay.
Not true here.
And you don't need to gain extra powers, which you do in other...
Like if it's Metroid, I need a thing to get up there, right?
Very common.
And when people start the game, they don't know that it's not Metroid.
And so part of what the game is doing is helping you understand that it's not Metroid.
Except here.
Here, you can't solve the puzzle the first time you get there.
And part of that had to do with me being afraid in some sense.
Because...
Afraid?
Yes, that I would blow the secret and that it would be too easy because there are four puzzle pieces or something that you get in the first couple levels.
Yeah.
And if those had had the necessary pieces to solve this, if you got them before you got to the puzzle,
then you would be able to solve it.
But if you have a few pieces and they have this highly visually conspicuous element, there's no camouflage for it.
Right.
You just see it right there.
And maybe after doing The Witness, I would have had more cojones to like try this, but I didn't at that time.
I was like, it just seems to me like it's not going to be good and people are just going to do it.
And it's...
They're going to see what the thing is and they're going to do it and then they're not going to enjoy it because it's just kind of obvious and meh.
Whereas if you don't know the answer and then you have a bunch of puzzle pieces and there's a bunch of visual information to look at.
And then you come back to it and you're like, oh, yeah, then it makes more sense.
There's other things like the thing that solves it could have been in one piece, but it's in two pieces.
Why? Because it was just a little too narrow and small in one piece and fiddly.
And it felt better to me to put the two pieces together and have a big thing.
Although programmatically, you can solve it with one.
Like there is like I make a little platform segment for each one.
You know, I've been speaking vaguely as though to avoid spoilers, but like it's not like we've said enough detail to tell you.
Like there's an image.
There's a table in the image, the painting of the world to puzzle and the table looks very, very, very much like one of the platforms that you can stand on,
the kind that you can jump up through, but you don't fall through, which is a platformer trope.
And so if you realize that it's really a precursor to the kind of thing that happened in The Witness a lot.
Right. Okay.
Even some of the earlier puzzles in The Witness, like there are some trees there and they're conspicuously standing right in front of you.
And they have information that you want spoilers, by the way, but you don't necessarily know that that's where the information is going to come from.
Right. And part of the magic is that it's right there.
So so really, this was a prototype for a whole game.
Actually, okay. If you're if you're going to really think about it.
That's a good point.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. And that is maybe okay.
Well, this is something I didn't realize before, but maybe the reason why I insisted on putting it in the game,
it didn't want to drop it is because I felt like there was really a lot possible there and I wanted to like get it going a little bit mentally.
Yeah, dip a toe in that particular because if I threw it away, maybe I would never come back to it.
Right. You know, so you actually kind of referred to this phenomenon a little bit.
Not that specific aspect of it in your Calvino lecture at the Center for Fiction.
Where does this idea come from?
Because yes, like if you go listen to that lecture that you gave,
it's very clear that you think that, for example, some of the stuff you do in Braid has these sequence breaks.
Some things you do in The Witness have these sequence break ideas.
And you talk about the If On A Winter's Night A Traveler potentially having these sequence breaks.
Like you're not sure, but you're like your interpretation of the book is like if you look at it this way,
there's these possible things where it's like, oh, he sets up something that happens recurringly.
And then all of a sudden one chapter, it doesn't happen, you know, intentional, unintentional.
Like what am I reading into? You know, what's going on? And it creates this like interest there.
And what I was wondering is, is that something you're realizing after the fact?
Or did you realize that in the books at the time and you carried that forward and that's where it comes from in Braid?
Or is it something totally else? Like how does this idea arise?
Because it's not something that is often talked about elsewhere.
I don't think I ever got it from anyone else.
I don't know if anyone else in the games industry has said this kind of thing.
Okay.
But my perception of it is that this is just an idea that I developed on my own.
Now, is it influenced by stuff like Calvino and all this stuff?
I mean, probably like at the very least this idea of this abstract multidimensional pattern that we're putting together
is certainly influenced by those books because they do that all over the place.
And probably again by games like Trinity, which also does that.
Like Trinity has a sequence.
I mean, it's like a nonlinear sequence, right?
It's got a pattern of worlds on the other side of doors.
And at the start of the game, you're already in that pattern.
You just don't know.
Right.
Because you start on the other side of the door and it establishes that pattern.
I don't know that it ever really breaks that pattern except in like maybe the final closing speech.
But it certainly antes it up at the end by having the final scene be the most dramatic, you know, most important one.
Right.
And it is a break.
It doesn't work the same way.
Well, yeah, you certainly don't.
You know, in most of them, it's like I'm trying to get something out of it.
Right.
And in that one, it is not.
Well, and you do not return to the door.
Yes.
By which you entered, which is a very different thing.
Well, it's bookending, right?
At the beginning, you didn't enter through the door.
Exactly.
And yes.
So it's definitely different than there is a definite break in the pattern that's been established, I would say.
Yes.
But I don't know.
Like again, I can't speak for Brian, but I would imagine he was probably thinking about that as a book ending of like the shape of what you're doing.
And probably not like a sequence break or anything, because that's a little bit of a different thing.
But the point being just all of these things that like, yeah, they mix up in my mind.
And at some point, I have something to do that's influenced by them.
It reminds me a little bit of like almost something musical, like there's a rhythm and this is like the break.
It's like we've established a pattern of beats that you are now familiar with hearing.
And if we just continued that beat, it becomes a little bit monotonous.
So don't be so consistent.
Occasionally throw in a weird off tempo riff because that's what makes this music interesting.
It feels like that to me a little bit.
Like back in the MTV days when there was all this terrible pop music on all the time.
Like, I don't know who her songwriter was she was using, but I always liked Alanis Morissette songs a little bit.
Or not Alanis.
Paula Abdul I'm thinking of sorry.
Those are very different.
They have nothing to do with each other.
But like her songs, they were like very poppy kind of things.
They had like one more change in them.
Okay.
Then like most a lot of songs are like, you know, I forget what it's like.
There's the main thing and then like a refrain and then you're back on the.
Normally it's chorus like verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge.
Chorus is the normal structure of a pop song.
Okay.
Anyway, whatever if that helps, that maybe doesn't help, but that's very much in territory that I didn't know what to say.
But but the point being, yeah, I mean, I I definitely like that kind of thing.
And there are similarities there, right?
Like whatever you do sonically.
Has to make sense relative to the song that people had already been hearing, right?
It can't be totally random and out of nowhere.
It has to naturally progress.
And you could say that that's what I try to do when I do an end game or or something like that, right?
In end game is probably a special case of a pattern break that a lot more people are familiar with, right?
This probably bigger and more important pattern break in a way.
Yes, but I like to play around with it all over the place.
You know, you know another way to think about it that you'll understand because we've talked about this before.
Okay.
Just in terms of like economics and capitalism, right?
There's just this phenomenon, right?
Well, like let's say you start a company and you're famous for making high quality things or whatever, right?
You establish this pattern that people associate you with high quality things.
And the thing that inevitably happens is somebody comes along and says we've stored up a great deal of potential energy
that we are not exploiting because we're spending all this money on quality, right?
If we stop spending money on quality, it'll take people a while to figure it out.
And in that time, we'll make a bunch of money and then eventually we'll have depleted our brand value and we'll crater, right?
But that like happens with literally everything intentional or not.
Okay, that's the pattern.
That's the thing.
There's establishing this pattern of being something valuable that people want.
And then now that there's a bunch of potential energy in there converting that potential energy to kinetic energy, right?
Okay.
So this is like that.
And in fact, it's actually it is a little bit similar in that even once you've established a pattern,
if you break it a whole bunch after that, you obliterate it, right?
So in the same way you said if you yeah, if you completely trash the brand value.
But in this case, you're not trying to trash any value.
You're trying to make it be good.
Yes, I'm adding to it.
But I'm just trying to tell you like like that idea that I have about this thing that happens with brands.
I don't know where I pick that up.
And I mean, it's obviously something that's true.
But like I think about it in this way of like storing potential energy and yeah, it's like that.
Like you're building a strong structure.
Okay, that can then withstand you poking some holes in it.
So if I then create yet another analogy for this tortured set of analogies we're using.
So in some sense, what I hear you saying now is it's almost like building up, you know, it's the ski jumper.
I if I build up enough speed, I can go off this jump and do a cool trick.
I can't keep doing that because I will just crater into the ground.
But if I set myself up properly, I can sort of have enough like it's almost like design momentum.
I can have enough design momentum to carry me through a wilder space that I would not have been able to sustain
continuously, but because I'm only going to do it for this trick and I've done a good job setting myself up.
I can I can accomplish this thing.
That's more than what I could have done if that had to be the whole game or something like it's like it's it's almost like
a it's momentum is you have a pattern momentum that allows you to do something you couldn't or otherwise have done on its own.
I mean, I think that analogy makes more sense with regard to braid and whatever.
If you imagine that like the ski jump was 95 percent of it was the downhill part.
Yeah, and and everybody paid attention to the downhill part as being and you did stuff on it.
Slalom, it's slalom.
Whatever. Yeah.
And then you do the jump.
Right. Yeah.
Right. But but in reality, like the jump is kind of the point.
Yeah, that makes it a little different.
I mean, I could imagine a game like that, but I haven't done that game.
Right. You know.
Yeah. In this episode, Casey Miratori asked the questions.
Jonathan Blow answered the questions.
Jason Brisson produced and Will Torbett edited.
Thanks very much and we'll see you next time.