SubscribeWe 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Graphics Tech: Precomputed Lighting
For the past 15 years or so, graphics technology in games has been driven by shooters. Most shooters generate visual interest in their scenes by having lots of dynamic lights, with extreme use of bump mapping, and moving shadows, and particle effects.
For The Witness, I wanted to develop a graphical style that values simplicity. [...]
Concept Art
In order to begin discussing the game, it seemed more appropriate to show some concept art, because the game is very visual.
Click for full-sized versions. The gallery seems to hang some versions of Google Chrome. Sorry about that. It works fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
These concepts (and many more) were all done by Eric [...]