Braid dev on next game

The man behind the XBLA hit Braid elaborates on his next game.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Jonathon Blow (who is bringing Braid to PCs) talks about the game he's currently developing:

"I don't really want to give much detail about it, though. And the reason is that I've had three or four different games that I was convinced was the next game I was working on, and I'd work on it for a little bit and decide I could maybe do something better.

"My newest game I started is looking very promising. I'm very excited to do it. But if the patterns of history continue, then I may not be working on it a month from now, so I don't want to start telling people about it."

So this might not actually be the next release fromBlow, but he does go into a little bit of detail about the game itself:

"It's an RPG right now, a 2D RPG that I'm working on. You never know. Next month, it could be a Pac-Man clone or something."

To get an idea of the kind of RPG Blow's making, he describes his philosophy of dialogue interaction in the genre:

"When you play an RPG, you usually go and try to exhaust the whole conversation tree, just because you know that there might be something that you get. That's true.

"The way I'm thinking about it for the current game is that what goes on in those dialogs is actually very closely related to the core mechanic that you do in the RPG. And I can't really say more about it. But there is more of a tie, like you were saying is going on with Braid -- a tie between the game mechanic, or the core ideas and themes, and the things that you do."

Blow also hones in those journalists who take one sentence from his interviews and turn it into a headline that isn't entirely representative of what he's said:

"The other thing that I learned is, of course, the classic internet thing that everybody learns, which is that if you do an interview or give a lecture, people will take the one sentence that they like the least and make it the headline, and everybody will flame you for being stupid and saying something that you didn't actually really say.

"But that's just the peril of publicity on the internet. And the way to get around that is to never say anything substantive, right?

"If I go to a PR training class, every question you ask me, I'll say, 'Number None Incorporated is very interested in providing the best experience for its players.' Then all the interviews are going to be shit. And why should anybody listen to them?"

If we were like this, we would have taken the following interview comment; "There are certainly some games on [Xbox] Live Arcade that are just bad, and shouldn't sell that many copies, in my opinion"; and titled our story, 'Braid dev says most XBLA games are just bad.' But Gamezine.co.uk has integrity ;-)