WORLD DESIGN THEORY - BLOG POST #6 - Evolution from ‘Braid’ to ‘The Witness’ - Conrad Turzynski22/5/2017 “From minute one, I knew that that was not what this game was. This game is a very focused, deliberate, puzzle game, where there are no extraneous elements in the game, aside from what helps to create the puzzles. There literally are none.”
- Jonathan Blow When talking about Braid, and how some people wished it were more of an open-world experience, Jonathan Blow explained what the game meant to him with the above quote. Braid is all about the mechanics of time travel. Blow changes up the mechanics between levels, and in later levels mixes them together, but the experience is distilled down to only the bare necessities. Instead of adding a lot of extra content, Blow instead re-contextualises his world by teaching the player how to apply their given mechanics in new ways. This means that the game never loses sight of what it is. There are set things that are drip fed to the players in a certain sequence. The game is designed so that the players feels like they’re discovering everything for themselves, and that they’re figuring the puzzles out all on their own. In reality, your experience is very carefully, analytically designed behind the scenes. The only gripe I have (after playing the demo, so to be fair this could have been changed in the final release) is the very beginning of the game. It does a really good job of setting the tone and context for the adventure, but the initial platforming areas are a little disappointing. After playing a reasonable amount of the game, and noticing the loving way the game is crafted, it’s a shame that the initial areas so lazily designed. The player is taught instantly how to jump, how to climb, that enemies can be killed by being jumped on, and that by holding shift, the player can rewind time. To finish the ‘tutorial’ area, and collect the puzzle pieces, players have to jump on an enemies head to get an increased jump. Directly after this, players then need to chain two jumps on two consecutive enemies to get an even greater jump height to get a second puzzle piece. After teaching the player subtly how to increase their jump height, right at the very end is a series of three ledges. Right next to the three ledges is a sign that explains how to jump to the player. WHY. There is literally no way that the player can have arrived at the end of the level without not only jumping, but most likely also jumping with a bit of acrobatic finesse as well. It’s a small gripe, but it does kind of make you feel stupid. The Witness is the second game by Jonathan Blow. Created off the back of Braids successes, The Witness is in essence the evolution of Braid. In a similar manner to Braid, the Witness drip-feeds information to the player gradually as the experience deepens. One difference I immediately noticed is that the world is open to the player right from the beginning. While this game is hailed as a more distilled version of the design philosophy of braid, this game immediately to me seems a little less concise. The game teaches the player the mechanics of the puzzles in a really straight forward way, which is really effective, but the openness does seem to make thing feel slightly overcomplicated. I haven’t played very far into the witness, and i’m sure that this openness would make more sense later on. To me, the main differences between Braid and The Witness seem to be order in which players can access information. The core design philosophies seem to be intact, and The Witness develops these a bit further. |
World design theory (WDT)DevelopersThe goal of this blog is to relate current and past attempts at world design to further improve our understanding. Archives
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