Working on The Witness, Parts 5 and 6.

Casey Muratori has made new postings about the work he has done on The Witness:

Working on The Witness, Part 5

Working on The Witness, Part 6

In this one he talks about how to distribute grass. Legally. As well as the different colors of noise one might want to be familiar with in order to do this well.

11 Comments:

  1. Very well written essay.
    Makes me look forward to it even more.

    I know this sounds nutty, but I bought an iPad Air a month ago just for
    the express purpose of playing “The Witness” in high fidelity Retina Display at the lowest weight.

    • Oh no it’s not nutty. It still wouldn’t be nutty even if another ‘newer’ ipad AIRweightlessX4 came out and you got that one too.

      In fact you gave me an idea, I am gonna get a new ipad, new computer and steam big picture so I can have 3 instances off the witness running sumultaneously, so you know… I can beat it 3 times… Like, more efficiently.

      All kidding aside, good on you for preparing. All that’s left to do is wait. Patiently. Unpatiently. Or patiently…

      • Actually, you aren’t wrong about another model of iPad Air being released
        in the time before “The Witness”, itself, is, in turn released.
        There’s very strong buzz about iPad Air 2 being released, along with
        a bunch of other stuff, this June: possibly at WDC14.

        I believe this because I’d forgotten about Apple’s recent switch to
        a 6 month (instead of a year) product release cycle for thier more popular items.

        No matter ….
        I’ll just Craig’sList the original iPad Air (it’s in mint condition despite CONSTANT use)
        and put the proceeds of that sale towards the purchase of an iPad Air 2!

        See how dedicated I am towards “The Witness”?
        And I’ll bet that I’m not alone in thst thought, either ….

  2. Thanks for the heads up! Great write up. I am chomping at the bit to read anything and everything about The Witness. This was realavant and actually pretty interesting, even for someone with zero programming experience. I have a photography background so I understand the whole aesthetic problem with the clumping.

    The insight from the different team members is really something. It really seems as if the top people of their given field have all been collected to work on this game. Which fortunately or unfortunately makes the wait for something of such quality even harder!

    Gah! I am going to find the the worlds foremost scientist on time travel research and offer to be a test subjct so that I can go into a future time and play this thing!

    Jon, could you do me a solid next time around and don’t announce the next game until a month before it’s out? K, thanks! ;)

    • There might be something interesting about making an early announcement for a game that rewards patience and deep consideration of minute features.

  3. Aside from clumping being perceived as ‘less random’ by people, the other problem is that I would imagine grass and other plants tend to grow more evenly distributed than random, as they are more likely to grow in a spot that is less crowded with other plants. Anyone who’s ever seen grass would find a lot of random patterns to be unnatural. Might be less of a problem with things like trash (though that tends to congregate in certain areas, so perhaps not).

  4. Oo, that article sounds like it’s discussing the same problem as stomatal spacing on leaves! In that case, there’s a particular optimum the plant’s aiming for – but stomatal spacing is neither entirely random (because the plant would have the same problem the article identifies – predictably occurring clusters) or entirely ordered.

  5. what is the release date for this game? this is all i care about. while this site is intriguing it ultimately is one big spoiler

  6. Yes, a release time frame would be very nice please. Pretty please?

Leave a Reply to Hemlock Drew Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.