Braid dev currently toying with RPG

Braid developer Jonathan Blow has said he's currently working on a 2D RPG, although he freely admits he might end up doing something else instead.

"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," he told Gamasutra.

"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."

Late last year Blow posted on his blog asking fellow game developers about their experience working with conversation trees, and he told Gamasutra that that was linked to this, hinting at a tight relationship between dialogue behaviour and core gameplay.

"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.

"The way I'm thinking about it for the current game is that what goes on in those dialogues is actually very closely related to the core mechanic that you do in the RPG. And I can't really say more about it," he explained.

"That said, though, if in this game, people do the, 'Oh, I'm just playing with the dialog tree' thing, it's fine, because the way the dialog is used is not necessarily in a straight, dramatic, linear story sense anyway. I think that you just have to be aware of those things and design with them in mind."

Elsewhere in the interview Blow discussed the conflict between story and challenge in modern games, whether Braid is the last word in time control (he doesn't think so), and, er, people taking interview quotes out of context. We're not, we promise!