I never watched that movie but I bought Braid and beat it...I respect Blow's commitment to artistry solely from how good Braid was, but I do admit to wishing he would take the half-easy route and make an add-on/sequel of sorts, to build upon such a unique world he created. Not all sequels have to be commercial derivatives (Portal 2 was pretty good, as was the sequel to the original Katamari Damacy game)
On a technical perspective...I'm sure he's written about this...but how does Braid manage to keep what I assume is a total record of gameplay? That is, theoretically, you could leave the game on for a very long time and rewind it...at some point, the console's memory runs out, right? I'm saying this as someone who really has no idea how little resources it takes to pop/push game events off a stack...I'm just assuming that if Photoshop has an undo-limit, Braid would have one too?
(Though Photoshop is different in that the program has to anticipate the user leaping back 5000 steps in a single go, where as with Braid, the player only has access to the top of the stack of events)
On further reflection, games that have "replay/ghost" modes, where a speed-record is overlaid atop the current game layer, invoke the same event-recording mechanic without trouble, so I guess I'm just overestimating how much space an abstracted game event/state would take to record.
I assume it doesn't record what happens every frame, but specific events. That way if you don't move, it doesn't write anything until you do. Some record systems only record player input.
Jonathan Blow gave a tech talk at GDC about how the rewind mechanic was implemented. It turns out that he does in fact save the non-constant game state of every frame. Around 6:20 is where he talks about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSeYShR-OG0
On a technical perspective...I'm sure he's written about this...but how does Braid manage to keep what I assume is a total record of gameplay? That is, theoretically, you could leave the game on for a very long time and rewind it...at some point, the console's memory runs out, right? I'm saying this as someone who really has no idea how little resources it takes to pop/push game events off a stack...I'm just assuming that if Photoshop has an undo-limit, Braid would have one too?
(Though Photoshop is different in that the program has to anticipate the user leaping back 5000 steps in a single go, where as with Braid, the player only has access to the top of the stack of events)
On further reflection, games that have "replay/ghost" modes, where a speed-record is overlaid atop the current game layer, invoke the same event-recording mechanic without trouble, so I guess I'm just overestimating how much space an abstracted game event/state would take to record.