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by seanosaur 953 days ago
I love the inclusion of commentary, I bet aspiring game devs out there could find that quite useful.

Are there other games that provide similar commentary?

4 comments

So the guy who made the classic Prince of Persia kept a regular journal during it and his previous game, Karateka. You can buy the journals on Amazon[1].

I found out that this year Digital Eclipse decided to turn those Karateka journals into an interactive documentary, and that's now on Steam under the title 'The Making of Karateka'[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Karateka-Jordan-Mechner-ebook/...

[2] https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/karateka

Also a lot of Valve games have audio developer commentary that can play while playing several of their games[3].

[3] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Commentary_System

Also Zachtronics (SpaceChem, Infinifactory, Opus Magnum, Shenzhen I/O) released a book called Zach-Like[4] which had a lot of design documents from their various games. It's available in a physical format as well as Itch and you can download it on Steam also. I have the physical copy. It's just a PDF though. Still super interesting.

[4] https://www.zachtronics.com/zach-like/

Most valve games: half life 2, portal 2 have in game commentary from game designers, voice actors, etc. But I'm sure Braid's developer will be much more technical than those, but similar concept
The valve commentary is fantastic.

Jonathan Blow also has a bunch of commentary on his youtube channel ... but it comes in multi hour chunks where the minute by minute value isn't necessarily great. Hopefully, the commentary for Braid will be focused.

[Although, ultimately, my purchase decision will probably hinge on whether or not they sped up that ~2hour cloud nap that's required to get that one star.]

> Hopefully, the commentary for Braid will be focused.

If nothing else, it's at least edited.

"We recorded over 60 hours of interviews and conversations, and we distilled those into 15+ hours of commentary that is actually in the game, in the form of 250+ activatable commentary objects." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1722714896490512810

The Grim Fandango remaster that came out a few years back has one.