SubscribeDesign 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Island Snapshot
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…
The island so far…
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 [...]