This talk was presented by Jonathan Blow and Marc ten Bosch at Indiecade on October 7, 2011. Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions …
Hi everyone. We haven’t posted anything in a while, but this is just because we have been working intensively on the game. These days we are doing a lot of working with the architects, integrating their designs with the gameplay. The result is coming out really well — the architectural …
It’s been a while since we did one of these: The current puzzle count is 350. Some parts of the island are pretty messed up in this screenshot. For the press tour, we made sure the whole game was more-or-less solid and playable. Just after that, though, we were free …
GameSpot’s podcast, HotSpot, had Jonathan Blow as a guest for the September 14th episode. There’s a bit of an interview, and chatting about various game topics; some discussion of Braid, some of The Witness, and what makes a good puzzle? Here’s the link.
It’s been a little bit since the last post. We have been busy doing a lot of good things with the game. Here’s one of them: Ignacio just got back from vacation and implemented a simple lightmap encoding idea that improves the color resolution of our lightmaps, removing banding, like …
Back during the press tour, Michael Abbott invited me to come onto the Brainy Gamer Podcast, and the resulting episode is now live. It’s got some inside-baseball stuff that hasn’t been talked about in the press coverage. So that’s something. See also the previous episodes with Manveer Heir and Matthew …
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been showing a preview version of The Witness to various folks in the press who were interested. Typically I just have them sit down and play for a couple of hours, from the beginning, with no guidance from me; afterward, we talk about …
Lately we started thinking about making the game look better, finally. Ignacio has been working on some graphical effects to this end (though he’s been putting forth a lot of effort on performance as well). Here are a few things he’s been working on: Sun beams. These are accomplished with …
On April 1, 2011, I was invited by UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Undergraduate Association to come give a speech. This was pretty interesting because that’s where I went to school, and I was once a member of the CSUA. I approached it this way: if I were going back to …
We’ve known for a long time that we wanted some kind of color grading to happen in the postprocessing for The Witness; recently we started thinking about what that should be. Shannon wanted to try having colored shadows, as painters often do. We considered different ways of doing this; the …