Posted in: Games, Indie Games, Video Games | Tagged: braid, Thekla Inc.

Braid, Anniversary Edition Will Release In April 2024

Thekla Inc. has released a new trailer this morning for Braid, Anniversary Edition, confirming the game will be out next Spring.

Indie game developer and publisher Thekla Inc. confirmed this morning that they will release Braid, Anniversary Edition next April. The game's original designer and creator, Jonathan Blow, posted a lengthy blog, which we have a chunk of it for you to read below, detailing how they went through the process of making this version of the game better for players to mark the occasion. Along with a new trailer to show off what it will look and play like. The game will be released for PC via Steam on April 30, 2024.

Back when Braid was originally being developed, with its launch platform being the Xbox 360, 720p seemed like a pretty high resolution. Neither the Xbox 360 nor the PlayStation 3 could render most games at higher resolution than that; a few games could barely do 1080p, if they were very spare with regard to per-pixel detail, which Braid was not (Braid's style involves drawing lots of translucent particles over each other, which means each pixel is drawn many times!). But when David Hellman came on to the project to do the game's visuals, we decided we would future-proof the game by drawing all the source art at *twice* 720p, then scale it down for the game's release. At the time, around the year 2007, this was difficult to do; the tools we were using would chug unresponsively when trying to edit such large bitmaps. But surely this would all be worth it, because it would allow us to re-release the game with sharper graphics later on!

We just didn't think far enough ahead, I guess; before too long, 4k monitors became available, some folks are using 5k monitors, and 8k is on the horizon (though that seems pretty excessive to me, right now!) If you play original Braid on a 4k monitor, the result is blurry and unpleasant to look at. The original double-scale art that we had archived for Braid would still be blurry at 4k, and anyway it was never really meant to be seen at that level of detail.

So, if we want people with modern computers to be able to enjoy the game the way it was meant to be played, how do we do that? Well, I guess the answer is for David to repaint the whole game at much higher levels of detail, so that is what we did. While we were at it, we could add extra animations and effects to make movement feel better; we could use more sophisticated brush-stroke effects to animate the foregrounds and backgrounds; we could go to some of the scenes that, in retrospect, could have used more attention in terms of visual concepts like unique landmarks, and build them out into what they deserved to be. Then we could upgrade the sound and music (the original sound effects were mostly bought by me for 99 cents each from a random sound-effects web site); Martin Stig Andersen (who worked on Control, Inside, Limbo, and other games with great audio) and Hans Christian Kock (who has done extensive film and TV work) have been handling this and the results are very moody. Don't worry though, the soundtrack is all the same music, though the guys have done some great mixes that really amplify the mood in the late-game.

In fact, the whole time, one of the guiding principles has been that we must not _Star Wars Special Edition_ the game. Greedo doesn't shoot first, we don't add a bunch of CGI that sticks out like a sore thumb and ruins the mood, and so forth. So whenever we add a graphical enhancement, we're careful to respect the original game, and to ensure the new thing fits well. Sometimes this is very difficult! But it's important that we don't change the fundamentals of the game in the process of upgrading it.

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