As mentioned in the previous couple of updates, we are starting to take steps toward establishing the visual style of the game. This past week while I was on vacation, Shannon did a bunch of world editing, with the primary goal being to draft out a few areas of the …
Until now, we had been using Uncharted-2-style blend mapping to color our terrain. This is a way of using a low-resolution texture map to control the blending of high-resolution textures; this gives you the ability to maintain fine pixel-by-pixel detail while also blending between multiple textures in order to create …
Now that the gameplay is further along, we are starting to think more seriously about how the game is going to look. Shape and color are very important thematically; one idea that’s been floating around for a while is that different locations on the island would have very different color …
In a previous post I mentioned that we had done a bunch of playtesting at the GDC. As a result of that playtesting, I ended up heavily restructuring some areas of the game world. On top of that, there were a few areas that had been incomplete at that time, …
At GameCity in Nottingham, UK in September 2010, I played through select portions of Braid and gave commentary. I had been under the impression the session was officially recorded, and I’ve been waiting for an official video to hit the internet, but at this point I am not sure this …
This month was time for the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco [this has been its official name for a while now: the completely ungrammatical “Game Developers Conference”. Whatever.] We used this opportunity to have game designer friends come and playtest The Witness. We did somewhere between 40 and …
We are hiring. We at Thekla, Inc. are a small independent developer making games with tradition-breaking designs. We are pushing the boundaries of what a video game can be. Our current project is The Witness, a puzzle/exploration game designed by Jonathan Blow, designer/programmer of the critically-acclaimed Braid. Our office is in …
Since The Witness takes place in the outdoors much of the time, we knew from early on that we were going to want to have grass of some kind. We added grass into the engine quite a long time ago (starting around December 2009?) and it’s gone through several iterations …
Toward the back you can see some of the stuff that was being worked on in the previous post (but from a different angle!) The current puzzle count is 251. That’s pretty good, but on top of the increase from last time, another 25 of the old puzzles were rewritten. …
This is an experiment in writing up a blog post for a development task while I actually perform the task! So right now, as I start writing this, I don’t know how it will end! I was talking to David Hellman about the game the other day, and he was …