We’ve done a first pass at changing the shape of the island terrain, and here’s the result: The changes are a little bit drastic in some spots, but overall not as drastic as I had expected. I had been worried about some issues in the natural flow of where players would naturally end up going, [...]
Here’s how the island is looking right now: But today we are going to have the first in a series of meetings wherein we think pretty hard about the topography of the island and what the flow of natural curious investigation will tend to be from various spots. Expect the island to look pretty different [...]
We brought The Witness to the Game Developers Conference and had the game playable privately in a hotel room to select members of the press. We had to do a lot of work to get the game back into playable condition; a lot of things had been broken since the press tour last August / [...]
Here’s how the island looks today: The current puzzle count is 440. As expected in the previous update, over the past week or so I went back and worked on the endgame again. I built an original version of the endgame last summer; I had one friend playtest it, and it worked out pretty well, [...]
[This message is crossposted from the Indie Fund blog.] Our gift to you, on this very special Valentine’s Day, is the worldwide release of the long-awaited game Dear Esther. If you haven’t heard of Dear Esther, watch this: (Or hey, watch the trailer even if you are quite familiar with the game; the trailer is [...]
Here’s how the island looks right now. It is a bit crazy and messy, especially the stuff nearest the camera: This is because this corner of the world is one of the last areas that we haven’t really figured out, in terms of what goes where. There is sort of just some random stuff dumped [...]
If you’re interested in arty games that push the boundaries of what games are doing, you may be interested in Dear Esther, which will be released on Valentine’s Day of this year (much sooner than The Witness will be!) The trailer has just been released: See more about Dear Esther at the official site. This [...]
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 gameplay possible. We began working [...]
Peter Thiel on Secrets
Peter Thiel is teaching a class at Stanford about how to start a technology company. One of the students is posting thorough class notes online. In this instalment, Thiel takes the question of what kind of company to start and reframes it in terms of secrets. Thiel’s point of view reminds me of the way [...]