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We showed The Witness secretly at PAX… in plain sight.
Chris Hecker, the developer of SpyParty, and Andy Schatz, the developer of Monaco, have been writing about their preparations for a joint exhibit at PAX. They were keeping a secret, though: there was a secret 3rd partner in the exhibit, and that was The Witness.
For all three days of PAX 2010, The Witness was publicly [...]
Design Charrette
Apparently, “charrette” is French for paste a bunch of stuff all over the walls and eat fast food and think about design ideas until everyone is very tired, as I learned this past Sunday from a group of seasoned architects. We performed such a charrette in order to start figuring out what the locations in [...]
Island Paint-Over
Shannon just did our first draft of a paint job on the island terrain. These are still very much placeholder graphics, but it is starting to look reasonable, with the exception of the ugly green area in the foreground!
We’ll be working on that ugly green area soon…
Island Shrinkage
In the previous update I talked about how, despite the fact that The Witness is an “open-world” game, we are trying to make the environment as compact as possible.
Today I took a step in that direction by moving some areas around and compacting the island, changing its shape a bit:
Here’s a shot from the other [...]
Why aren’t video games satisfying?
Why can’t video games give me a powerful, high-density experience, so that after 3 hours I am satisfied, I feel like I have had enough? Wouldn’t that be cool?
A movie can give you a satisfying experience in 2 hours.
A painting or a sculpture can give you a satisfying experience in 10 minutes.
A song can [...]
Braid: A Movement Piece
The Chaparral High School Alumni Theatre’s production of Braid: A Movement Piece during the summer of 2010. Using a unique combination of content movement and contact improvisation dance techniques, Braid follows the story of young scientist Tim on his quest to find a Princess.
The Island Today
We are starting to tinker around with the sky (this one is way too dark). Also, moving around a bunch of locations and adding some new ones.
I’m doing a couple of weeks’ worth of serious map organization / reorganization in order to get the game to a point where we can playtest it at [...]
A game to watch for: Miegakure
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 [...]
Hey, who is making this game?
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:
Location Development
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 [...]