Indieview #3: Jonathan Blow, Braid (http://braid-game.com)
I caught up with Jonathan Blow at GAMMA 3D, the stereoscopic video game party put on by the Kokoromi Collective. I mentioned that I had been interviewing indie developers over the last few days, and then I remembered who I was talking to. He offered to be my interview subject, and conveniently enough, he had a voice recorder with him. Somehow the recording turned out to be audible, albeit with a catchy dance beat in the background.
Why did you decide to start making games?
I just always wanted to. I made my first game—it was a really stupid, simple game—in the sixth grade. I was about ten years old, and it was the first time I ever used a computer. Way back then, they didn’t really have computers in schools.
I got into this class—there was one class at my school that had computers in it. They were Commodore VIC-20s which—I don’t know if you know what that is—not a very powerful computer. And I made a game where there was a number cycling, and it would be like, “Press the spacebar when the number’s on 7!” And from there I went on to more sophisticated entertainment.
Speaking of which…what inspired Braid?
It’s kind of a really long story. I had been doing some game prototypes, which you can see on my website.
One of them was that billiards thing, right? Where the game would show you where the balls would end up on the table depending on how you hit them?
Yeah. So that worked okay for what it was, but it didn’t do exactly what I wanted. But I was thinking about that kind of time…stuff. And I had been thinking about using “rewind” in games. So those were the gameplay ideas.
So as soon as I thought about making a game about manipulating time, it reminded me of some books that I had read. There’s a book called “Einstein’s Dreams.” It is an homage to one of my favourite books, which is called “Invisible Cities.” “Einstein’s Dreams” is about the life of Albert Einstein before he developed the theory of relativity. So he’s working hard, he’s putting in time at the patent office, and he’s having these dreams related to what he’s working on.
It’s a really interesting subject for me. It’s one of the things that the design of Braid is kind of about. Some of the puzzles you can approach really logically, but a lot of them are really lateral thinking puzzles.
A lot of people, when they get stuck, they’ll go have lunch, they’ll go to sleep, and when they wake up they’ll have the answer.
Note: Here, unfortunately, a large section of the recording has been drowned out by loud techno music. When it becomes audible again, Jon is discussing the puzzle design of Braid.
All the puzzles are designed to be very whole, with a minimum number of elements. Nothing is random, there’s no ambiguity. It’s kind of a model of enlightenment. Like what would it feel like to be enlightened, and to suddenly be able to do things that you couldn’t do before?
What games do you think have influenced you the most as a game developer?
My favourite games, originally, were the text adventures.
You’re in good company.
Yeah, like adventure games were awesome. When they kind of transitioned to graphic adventures, that was a time when I wasn’t playing games much, so I didn’t follow those too closely.
There were a lot of games I played in college…I don’t know. There’s no one game that was the most awesome game ever made.
That’s interesting, it sounds like it’s not just games that influence you; it’s also books and whatnot. Wow the music is really loud in here.
It’s all right. This is gonzo journalism, or whatever.
All right, here is my obligatory last question: do you have any advice for aspiring game developers? (hint hint)
Well, you’ve already done some of my main advice. What I always tell people is that it’s about making simple stuff, and when that works, you make more complicated stuff. That’s how you do it. Some people feel like, “Oh, I need to go to school, and I need to learn all these skills, but the internet is very, uh, bountiful in…
In some ways.
And horrible in other ways, yes. But, you can learn a lot there. You can see a lot of examples, and get a lot of ideas.
So, advice for somebody who’s already doing something…find the thing that you really really really care about a lot, and put that in the game. Make that the heart of the game. Because that means other people will care about it too. And it also means you can feel really good about what you’re doing.