Peter Thiel on Secrets

By Jonathan Blow | Published: May 11, 2012

Peter Thiel is teaching a class at Stanford about how to start a technology company. One of the students is posting thorough class notes online.

In this instalment, Thiel takes the question of what kind of company to start and reframes it in terms of secrets.

Thiel’s point of view reminds me of the way I think about games in general. Quite often I go out and give speeches about game design or business, and I say things that some think are overly idealistic, or oblivious to the necessities of recipients’ situations, or just plain wrong. Certainly my advice usually runs counter to conventional wisdom. (Yet somehow, by following these principles, I seem to do okay.)

Thiel begins with the question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” and goes on to define secrets, in this context, as “unpopular or unconventional truths”. If everyone knew these things and believed them, they wouldn’t be secrets.

I recommend this write-up to anyone who wants to think unconventionally about game design.

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Island Update

By Jonathan Blow | Published: April 25, 2012

We’ve done a first pass at changing the shape of the island terrain, and here’s the result:

The changes are a little bit drastic in some spots, but overall not as drastic as I had expected. I had been worried about some issues in the natural flow of where players would naturally end up going, especially early in the game. It turns out we were able to solve these without changing too much. So between last island update and this one, for the most part, some areas were moved laterally or expanded, and some new elevation changes were introduced, but areas were not shuffled around; they are all more-or-less in the same place with relation to each other. So for the most part, things are converging, which is a good sign.

And, oh yeah, we are making that mountain a lot bigger. It is the messiest part of the island right now, and has been for a while. There are still a few things gameplay-wise to figure out here, then it will start to come together. My biggest questions in the area have to do with that white building near the bottom of the image; the puzzles inside that building will determine its overall structure, which will determine how it is worked into the surrounding terrain of the mountain. We have some proposals from the architects on what this building will look like, but it is waiting on me to finish the puzzle design.

Because we haven’t done it in a while, here’s the island from a different angle:

The current puzzle count for the whole game is 450.

Posted in Uncategorized | 48 Comments

Panel Art Update

By Luis Antonio | Published: April 17, 2012

It’s now been over 5 months since I joined The Witness team as an artist and I would like to share a bit of my experience on the project coming from a “big studio” as well as the most recent work I’ve done.

Just before I left my last job I was working as a Lead/Art Director on a marketing driven project focused on selling as many units as possible. On one side I had high level decisions being made by stockholders whose focus is on turning a profit while on the other side there was the development team who truly believed they would be able to make a good game.

Also I was surrounded by schedules, performance reviews, hierarchical titles, producers, human resources, bonus system and all the other corporate systems that eventually dilute the organic process of doing something creative. While I understand the logic behind it I  realized that is not the reason why I joined the video games industry and that something wasn’t right.

Now, after these few months, the answers for these questions became clear. Its all based on trust. In this project, all the decisions we arrive at are very organic. Jonathan has a very clear vision of what he wants and the fact that we can see it and believe in it makes it extremely logical and simple.

Our passion for what we do (and what we would probably be doing on our free time if we weren’t being paid for it) gets distilled directly into the game in a very rewarding process.How much and how we give it depends entirely on us and that creates a natural challenge and pressure that most AAA companies cannot provide.

This trust leads to respect and it creates a very unique work environment. This is something that I’ve never seen with all the project management, task scheduling and scrum meetings that try to fix an inherently broken game. I don’t think video games can be produced like an assembly line, at least not games that have something meaningful to say, and I’m glad that I found people that are doing it the right way.

All this may sound trivial but probably 90% of the game developers that I know will understand how big of an issue this is. I still believe big companies can change their ways and make the same profit if not more, but it has to start from the bottom, the people who are hard at work making the games.

As for the second part, I would like to share what we have been trying to do with the many island panels. As you might already know the player has to solve different puzzles using these panel interfaces scattered around the island.

I started my research by looking at what materials they could be made of, what technology they would use and how they would be assembled and how all this could relate with the different areas and narrative of the game.

This first set of images shows some proposals of how the panel screens could possibly look. I tried not to focus so much on the gameplay but more on ideas that could lead to further discussions among the team.

After some solid feedback and a couple of art meetings I was able to understand what was working or not and decided to do a new set of proposals. Also this time I tried to focus on the more technical aspect of getting these panels to work in the game and if the effort we would have to put into them would be worthwhile.

The same amount of work went into the structure of the panels and how they would be assembled. This time, working with the architects gave valuable input into understanding how they would actually be built in the environment and the amount of work required. On this image you can see a screen capture of several prototypes before being tested ingame.

These are usually modelled very fast with just base colors so I can do several iterations until I find something that I’m happy with.
And finally here is how some of them are looking in-game. They are still in concept but by placing them in the correct context makes it a lot easier to understand what is working or not.

Posted in Development | Tagged | 16 Comments

Island Update

By Jonathan Blow | Published: April 10, 2012

Here’s how the island is looking right now:

But today we are going to have the first in a series of meetings wherein we think pretty hard about the topography of the island and what the flow of natural curious investigation will tend to be from various spots. Expect the island to look pretty different in the next update! (Or maybe it will turn out that things are mostly fine…)

Lately, I have been working on some of the more sophisticated puzzles in the game. These are things that were at least sort-of done already, but I wanted to revise the designs to improve them — to ensure that the puzzles are as interesting as possible and built as closely as possible around the core themes of the areas that contain them. I am happy with the way these are coming along so far, but there is definitely still some work to do here.

The art team has been working further to nail down the style of the game, now focusing on cliffs and plants and other natural things, as well as control panels and other bits of machinery. We’re also taking a few buildings that the architects have finished designing, and starting to build out the geometry as one really would for a video game. (The architects give us buildings modeled in SketchUp, and they tend to come into the game a bit messy, but also, not modeled the way an experienced video game modeler would do it).

On the programming side, we’ve got lots done lately. Andy has added a software occlusion culling system, which should help with frame rates in the game. He’s also been playing with culling for water reflections. Salvador got animations working in the exporter and in the game, so now we can play animations on entities, which is very useful. (We worked on the game for years and built something fully playable without this ability!) I have been going back and doing the gameplay work for animated entities, as some things have to change in the gameplay logic. In all it is a very nice improvement. Salvador is now working on asset streaming, which will help the game start up faster and run better (and help it run at all on lower-end platforms like the iPad). Ignacio’s been doing a whole lot of fixes to various systems and hammering away at the todo list. One of these things has been better control for the tone mapping process. We now get a graph of tone mapping curve:

And we also get the ability to export screenshots into Photoshop that have a color key on them; then the colors can be tweaked in Photoshop and re-imported into the game to alter tone mapper settings. This is in many cases more convenient than playing with those sliders.

Posted in Progress Shots | 36 Comments

Post-GDC update

By Jonathan Blow | Published: March 27, 2012

We brought The Witness to the Game Developers Conference and had the game playable privately in a hotel room to select members of the press.

We had to do a lot of work to get the game back into playable condition; a lot of things had been broken since the press tour last August / September. (When you are making sweeping changes to a big and complicated game world, it is pretty easy for things to get bent out of shape). So the GDC served as a good internal deadline to have the game banged back into shape.

I didn’t expect a lot of press coverage to come out of this, because at the GDC there’s just a lot of stuff going on, a lot of things for people to pay attention to and write about. So I had been doing this mostly as an opportunity to keep the press up-to-date with the game, see how it is evolving graphically, etc. But, to my surprise, we got a lot of coverage. Here are links to what people are saying about the game lately:

First, a video interview on Gamespot (excerpted; we probably talked for 45 minutes or an hour).

Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku finds a musical treatment for The Witness’ game design philosophy.

Ben Kuchera at the Penny Arcade Report, with a piece about online distribution channels, and another biz-focused one.

Ben Gilbert at Joystiq, with a design-oriented posting and also a more biz-like one.

Alex Rubens from G4 with an overall preview of the game.

Daniel Starkey of Destructoid, with a preview as well.

As you can see from the write-ups, people seemed to really dig the game. So that is all good.

Keep in mind that, because I am known for my previous game and and the reporters are there talking directly to me, the tone that tends to get adopted in these write-ups makes it sound as though I were making the game myself. That’s not the case; there’s a good-sized team of very talented people building the game! (This reminds me that we need to update the About page to list everyone who is currently working on the project.)

Posted in Development | 32 Comments

Seamless Cube Map Filtering

By Ignacio Castaño | Published: February 27, 2012

Modern GPUs filter seamlessly across cube map faces. This feature is enabled automatically when using Direct3D 10 and 11 and in OpenGL when using the ARB_seamless_cube_map extension. However, it’s not exposed through Direct3D 9 and it’s just not available in any of the current generation consoles.
Read More »

Posted in Engine Tech | 22 Comments

Playtest; Island Update

By Jonathan Blow | Published: February 24, 2012

Here’s how the island looks today:

The current puzzle count is 440.

As expected in the previous update, over the past week or so I went back and worked on the endgame again. I built an original version of the endgame last summer; I had one friend playtest it, and it worked out pretty well, though I felt it wasn’t quite epic enough. I didn’t know what more to do with it at the time, so I just let it sit, and went to thinking about other parts of the game.

Lately I had more ideas for the endgame, so I went into personal crunch mode and rebuilt into something more epic. This was one of the most productive periods of my working life (maybe the most productive) and I think this area, all taken together, may be the most interesting thing I have ever designed. However, it may be a little too difficult for the player, at the moment! Today I playtested this endgame and one other area of the game, with a game designer friend of mine, and it took nine and a half hours to play through these two areas (6 hours for the endgame, 3.5 hours for the other area). I think this is a little long, so I am going to be tuning these areas and cleaning them up a little bit. This weekend hopefully I can get in some playtest time with Jeff and Casey of Jeff and Casey Time, so if that happens we will see how it goes.

(It’s interesting; I haven’t done a playtest of The Witness for a while, but I was still thinking of it as a 10-15 hour game, and that’s what I tell people when they ask. But if these two areas by themselves, even after being cleaned up, are 6-7 hours of playtime, that means the whole game is … … much longer. Sometime in a month or two, I’ll do some playtests with people who have never seen the game before, and we’ll see how long it really is.)

Meanwhile, on the art side, we’ve been working on the style of the game; expect a future blog post as we come to conclusions on that.

Tech-wise, Andy has been working on performance stuff. First he made raycasting much faster; til now the game had been relatively lazy about spatial organization. Andy implemented a quadtree for finding entities in the world and enabled k-d tree generation and serialization for casting rays against individual meshes. (We had k-d tree code already as part of a library but weren’t using it.) Salvador is working on in-game animation playback, as well as exporting; until now we have been making do without animations, but once this is in the game it will help us with a number of issues.

Posted in Development, Progress Shots | 47 Comments

Dear Esther is out.

By Jonathan Blow | Published: February 14, 2012

[This message is crossposted from the Indie Fund blog.]

Our gift to you, on this very special Valentine’s Day, is the worldwide release of the long-awaited game Dear Esther.

If you haven’t heard of Dear Esther, watch this:

(Or hey, watch the trailer even if you are quite familiar with the game; the trailer is beautiful and worthy of multiple viewings.)

We expect public reception of this game to run wide: some will love it, and others will be very concerned about whether this thing can be called a game and what that means. So far, this has certainly been the case in pre-release reviews.

Game Informer scored the game an 8/10, saying: “You should consider checking out Dear Esther the same way you’d appraise a film. If you’re interested in absorbing an intellectual story and gorgeous visuals without having to exert a drop of effort, take a chance on this curious experiment.”

VideoGamer.com scored the game a 9: “Discovery is such an important part of Dear Esther, especially when everything is so phenomenally pretty.”

Meanwhile, Destructoid gave the game a lowly 4.5/10: “It’s as if it wants to be a part of this wonderful medium of ours without asking itself why, which is exactly why you should seek it out and learn from its failures as a game enthusiast, critic, or developer.”

We like that there’s such a big difference of opinion because it means the game is breaking new ground. It’s playing in territory that is not safe; there is no established understanding there.

Dear Esther is a game that no publisher would have funded. Dan, Rob, Jessica and the other associates of thechineseroom have done an excellent job putting together a beautiful game. We are happy to be backing it; we hope you enjoy playing it.

If you’d like more information about Dear Esther, here’s an interview with Dan, and here’s a link the game’s page on Steam.

Update: Dear Esther has been wildly successful, selling 16,000 copies in under 24 hours. As an investment, it reached profitability in 5.5 hours. More details are available at a new post on the Indie Fund blog.

Posted in Announcements, Other Games | 41 Comments

Island Snapshot

By Jonathan Blow | Published: February 1, 2012

Here’s how the island looks right now. It is a bit crazy and messy, especially the stuff nearest the camera:

This is because this corner of the world is one of the last areas that we haven’t really figured out, in terms of what goes where. There is sort of just some random stuff dumped there right now. That will change pretty soon.

Expect the next few island snapshots to show a lot of big changes. We’ve reached the point where the basic gameplay is settled, I’m refining many of the specific puzzles, and we’ve got at least rough drafts of many of the architectural layouts. That means we can start planning the island a bit better. Over the next month or so, we’re going to be changing the shape of the island to something a little more geologically plausible, something that carries more information. It’s going to be interesting to do this without disrupting the gameplay layout of the island too much.

The current puzzle count is 427. In January I scrapped and re-designed an area and its 60-or-so puzzles. The previous area was inside dark caves, which is a bit cliche, and the gameplay hook that motivated my setting that area in caves, which I had hoped would be cool, didn’t work very well. In addition, I felt that the puzzles themselves, while fitting into the rest of the game, were the weakest part of the game. I’d been feeling this way for a long time, but I didn’t have a good solution for it til late December. I moved the location and redesigned the puzzles. Now the theme of the location is totally different, has a gameplay hook that works way better than the cave thing, and is very cool. The puzzles situated in this area are also much stronger than before, because I found a way to change the rules of those puzzles to make them much tighter. They’d felt wishy-washy before (people would play through that area and, after finishing, lack clarity on what the puzzles were saying. That’s no good.)

We certainly could have shipped the game with the old area in the caves with the old puzzles, and probably shipped the game at least a month sooner, but an important skill in building a beautiful game is knowing when something just isn’t good enough.

Next I am going back to the endgame, which I did my first pass at last summer sometime; I’ve got a gameplay hook to add which I think will bring it over the top and make it extra-good. I’ll be working on that over the next few weeks while also working with the landscape architects on the island revision.

Also, we’ve got a new programmer starting soon (this week or next!) Combined with our other new addition, who’s been here a few weeks (Andrew Smith, ex-Zipper and -Oddworld; hi Andy!) we will have quite a bit of tech manpower to bring to bear on finishing this game.

Posted in Development, Progress Shots | 33 Comments

The trailer for Dear Esther is out now.

By Jonathan Blow | Published: January 18, 2012

If you’re interested in arty games that push the boundaries of what games are doing, you may be interested in Dear Esther, which will be released on Valentine’s Day of this year (much sooner than The Witness will be!)

The trailer has just been released:

See more about Dear Esther at the official site.

This will be the second Indie Fund game to release. Just a few days ago we announced that Q.U.B.E., the first funded game, is already a financial success. It appears obvious that Dear Esther will be as well.

Posted in Other Games | 49 Comments

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