We haven’t done one of these in a while. Here’s what the island looks like currently: The current puzzle count is 497. (This is lower than last time; last time was an overcount, as we had some temporary duplicates in the world that were being counted mistakenly.)
In The Witness, when progress in your game is saved, we also save a thumbnail that shows you where you were. This makes it easier to load a particular game later if you had multiple saves. Here is our current, very unpolished load screen: Right now, we save the thumbnail and the game data as [...]
Last Wednesday night, just before Thanksgiving, we shipped our first extremely closed beta over Steam to a few limited testers. Today we shipped an update, still to the same limited group. We have some initial tech issues to work out before we go wider (game packaging issues, graphics card incompatibilities, and the like). Here’s a [...]
… when even your barest rough drafts seem like they’d be interesting to explore. Current puzzle count: 528.
As mentioned in the previous post, we shrank the island a bit. Here is what things look like now. They may not look tremendously different from this off-island vantage point, but when you are down there moving around, the difference is substantial. I feel a lot better about the layout now.
One of my primary design goals, all through development, has been to keep the island spatially small, so that there isn’t a lot of wandering through empty or pointless spaces. The idea is to take the best parts of an open-world game, involving choice, exploration and discovery, but compressing these into a maximally dense experience. [...]
Thoughts about App Store ‘Curation’
Last week, Jeff Grubb from VentureBeat emailed me a question for an article he was writing, prompted by Apple’s rejection of Endgame: Syria. Sometimes questions like this are good excuses for me to figure out what I really think. Jeff asked me about this part of the iOS App Store’s Developer Terms of Service: We [...]