Braid

I have a backlog of games not played/to be finished. In the not finished list, I have some very lengthy ones, that I have no idea when I will be able to finish. And what is worse, I’m afraid that the moment I try to come back to them, I might have forgotten about what the game was. It is like having to reopen an already started 500 pages book, and not remembering anything about it (Game of Thrones, I’m looking at you!). In the not played list, there are a few interesting ones.  One of them it’s called Braid. It was released a few years ago, but its been only recently that I  had  a bit of time to spend in it. This picture in their site explains the basic idea: Time manipulation.

This video show the thing in action:

Wonderful 2D art and great design. Worth your time and attention. At least it made me grab my xbox 360 controller at home again.

I’ve worked in games for more than 10 years, and what happens sometimes with that is you no longer play enough games at home. The usual comment from friends is: Ah, you must be playing all the day at the office!. Nothing farther from the truth!. This days I have very little time or interest in playing the nth iteration of a famous first person shooter, or spend hours analysing statistics in a Japanese RPG. And I did that in the past! A lot! But not any more.

Games like Braid are far more interesting to play for me now.  Some developers are trying to make less expensive games, but much more interesting than some big ones in the market now. What they do is avoid all the expensive procedures needed to publish a game and try other sorts of ways to get to the public. Also they have much smaller budgets, less staff, less everything. But sometimes a great idea behind. Here is an opinion of one developer about these associated costs. They created Super Meat Boy, an extremely fun (but hard to master) platforming game. It was a success. Now, they seem to be reluctant to all this new next-gen consoles:

“The overhead cost of just developing for those consoles is insane,” continued Refenes.
“It costs zero dollars to develop on Steam if you already have a computer. When you look at PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo you have to buy thousand dollar dev kits and pay for certification and pay for testing and pay for localisation – you have to do all these things and at the end of the day it’s like, ‘I could have developed for other platforms and it would’ve been easier.’”
This overhead makes it risky for independents to get behind new platforms without some guarantee of their success.
“You have to take into consideration that when you’re independent, you don’t want to take the risk of jumping on a platform that you have no idea how it’s going to do until it’s already established,” said McMillen.
via Team Meat has no plans for next-gen | Game Development | News by Develop.

“Indie games: the movie” is an interesting documentary film about these kind of games and how they are developed. Basically, lots of hard work, time, passion and dedication. Watch it when you have time! 🙂