Something like a year and a half ago, when I was starting to get serious about making The Witness, I was talking to Casey Muratori about 3D modeling and texturing. Braid was a 2D game; The Witness being 3D meant that it would be much more expensive and difficult to …
On Friday we officially reached the Puzzle Complete milestone. This means that all puzzles that will be in the game when it ships are in the game now. It does *not* mean that the game is done. We still have a lot to do! But it *does* mean that the nature …
We built a DirectX11 rendering backend for our engine, which is likely to be the default when running on Windows. Up until now we had been running on DirectX9, which made sense when we thought the game was going to be done a while ago. But these days, DX9 is …
What’s up, internet? I’m Eric – one of the artists working on The Witness. I figured what better way to celebrate more than two years on the project than by making my very first post on the development blog! (plus, Luis and Orsi hassled me!!!) So here goes: In the …
This summer, we began working in earnest with architects, to bring further sophistication to the design of locations in The Witness. Before this time, we had a game that was fully playable, but buildings and the areas around them tended to be placeholders, developed only enough to make the basic …
I am working hard on puzzles right now. We’ve had figured out, for a while, the basic set of locations you can travel to on the island, and what the puzzles are in each. These locations were defined to varying degrees of specificity, though. Sometimes we know what the puzzles …
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; …
As explained by Jon in his previous post, we are using precomputed global illumination in The Witness, and one of my first tasks was to work on that system. I have developed some interesting technology to compute automatic paramaterizations, to formulate the lighting computations in a way that can be …