jonathon-blow posts

Jonathon Blow's acclaimed indie puzzle game Braid generated a ton of attention for the developer. Now he and a small team are working on his next project, titled The Witness. Over the weekend he launched a blog site about the game and decided to post a few concept artwork pieces from the game, followed by some early screenshots

The concept artwork comes from an artist named Eric Urquhart. Some of the art depicts a rather fantasy-looking village which the captions say is surrounded by a force field. There's also a blog post about the lighting details for the game's engine that shows off some screenshots such as the one above (although he doesn't really want them to be called screenshots yet since the elements are still place holders). There's no word about gameplay in The Witness yet but it reminds us a lot of The Prisoner at this point, which is a good thing.

It's been over half a year since the Xbox 360 received one of the most hotly anticipated independent games in recent memory. Now that it is April, PC users have been given this incredible boon as well. Jonathon Blow's Braid was released not too long ago, and I'm glad to say that it is still as good as it was last August. In fact, in some ways, it's a little better. But no worries, as it is still the time-bending platformer that was released to such rave reviews. In fact, if you've played the Xbox 360 version, you have pretty much played this one as well.

The Xbox 360 release earlier this year of the downloadable platform action game Braid got a ton of critical praise for both the game and its creator, Jonathan Blow. In the past, Blow has promised a PC version would be released before the end of this year but now it appears that's not going to happen.

In a post on the game's official blog site, Blow writes, "I had originally announced the release date for the end of 2008, but for various reasons, this hasn't happened. Once we slipped into mid-October and all the big Christmas-season blockbusters started coming out, it just seemed like a bad idea to schedule Braid for that time period, as it seems likely it'd get released and then disappear."

The new release date is now scheduled for sometime in the February-March time frame and Blow also states that Mac release for Braid is also planned for release sometime after the PC version. There's no word on what differences, if any, there will be between the PC/Mac version and the Xbox 360 original.

Welcome to a new weekly column here on Big Download! Independent Minds aims to take various aspects of indie gaming and present them to you each week. From game round-ups to design elements to interviews with prominent members of the scene, it's an exploration of what makes indie gaming great as well as what makes someone an indie. The very first topic of conversation is something that, given the failure of Eternity's Child and the success of Braid, has been on a lot of minds: criticism. How do you respond to people tearing apart your most beloved works?

Independent developer messhof is known for his almost psychopathic hatred of gamers. Well, not really, but with how experimental his games are (especially his latest, the seizure inducing Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist), you would definitely think so. One of his most punishing games is the incredibly difficult Flywrench. Taking this difficulty almost as a personal challenge (well, not really), Braid's developer Jonathon Blow decided to crank out a prototype of Flywrench with the difficulty completely removed. Labeled Nicewrench, it's an interesting experiment in exploration and how the removal of a single feature can completely change a game. It's only a prototype, though, so don't expect refined graphics, controls, or even a point. It was coded in 2 days, after all.