Miegakure, by Marc ten Bosch, is a puzzle game where you travel through four-dimensional space (and manipulate objects in that space). I was privileged to play an early version in 2009; just this week I got to play the most recent version, and it is coming along tremendously. It is my Game of the Year, though it is unlikely to be released this year. I find it easy to think of Miegakure as one of the great puzzle games of all time.
If I can be said to have an agenda in game design, it has something to do with mind-expansion. Because of that, I very much appreciate it when other designers make games with that kind of intention. Games that are truly mind-expanding are very rare and very difficult to make, but this is one of them.
Keep an eye out for this game, and when it comes out, play it. Since it will be a while before release, so there’s no demo available.
Here’s an introduction to the game.
Here’s an interview Marc did with Gamasutra with further details.
To keep up with news on the game, you can subscribe to Marc’s blog.
Some people have been asking me about the team working on the game. If you click up there on the About link at the top of the page, you’ll now find a short description of everyone working on The Witness, which I’ll paste below for your convenience:
Read the full article »
To start off, here’s the customary island snapshot:
It may not look tremendously different from the last one, aside from the translucent water and added objects at the near corner. However, a number of locations have been worked on in the past few weeks, which happen to be either far across the map or underground, so I figured I’d post some highlights.
Keep in mind that all of this is placeholder graphics; because we consider gameplay to be very important, we are planning out the gameplay carefully before we go into full production.
This area is an old ruin carved from stone; as the world gets developed, the area around it will become more deserty. In a later blog update I’ll show this area more extensively:
Read the full article »
… and the web site is updated. See it here: http://indie-fund.com/
Earlier this year, some friends and I, all successful independent game developers, put together the Indie Fund in order to help support newer folks with good ideas. All the hoops involved in setting up such an organization have been passed through, and we are now open for general submissions. If you are an independent developer who needs money for a project-in-progress, go check out the Apply page to see what kinds of games we are looking for.
Thanks, and good luck!
The addition of the recently-discussed terrain editing code means that we can start giving the island more shape and character, in a natural way. This is early yet…
In The Witness we decided that it’s a good idea to have a heightfield terrain making up the bulk of the island surface. The advantages of this are in rendering performance and in ease of texturing (it is relatively easy, with one continuously-parameterized terrain block, to get rid of seams; if your terrain is a bunch of otherwise-unrelated meshes, then what do you do?) Read the full article »
I figured it would be fun to post occasional screenshots of the island so people can see it gradually come together over time. Here’s the first one.
Keep in mind that this is all a rough draft for gameplay purposes, and none of this is supposed to look remotely like final game visuals.
Despite not looking fancy yet, there’s already more than 5 hours of gameplay. So that’s pretty good.
(Click image for full size.)
In the previous part, I talked about my reasons for wanting to use Cascading Shadow Maps (one of the biggest: image stability), then said that we had implemented Michal Valient’s version of the algorithm, and mostly liked it, but wanted to reduce the memory usage.
This time I’ll show how to reduce the memory usage by 25% on machines that support non-power-of-two textures; or, on machines that don’t, how to fit 5 shadow maps in the space previously used for 4.
Read the full article »
Ignacio has implemented the first version of the handling for light sources that change (doors that open or close, lights that can be switched on or off, etc). The idea is that we just precompute different lightmaps for each of these cases and blend between them at runtime. In the future (not the future of this game, but the general computer graphics future) when we have realtime global illumination, this would not be necessary; but for now this is much faster to compute and much easier to implement. The drawback is that we have to think about the different cases in advance (things can’t be too dynamic) and the amount of lightmap storage space grows rapidly as the number of variables grows.
We don’t yet smoothly interpolate between the maps in the shader; we just switch the maps outright. Interpolation is coming soon. But in screenshots you can’t see changing conditions anyway, so it’s time for some screenshots.
First is the house with the door closed, then with the door open. After that comes the sculpture room, with two light sources toggled in various ways (see the captions on each picture). For now you’ll have to forgive the light leaking in the corners and the shadow speckles on the walls; they are due to issues with the dynamic shadow system (which is not really related to what is being shown here) and those issues have yet to be resolved!
Subscribe
