Island Snapshot
Current puzzle count: 505.
What I Did on My Christmas Vacation
I apologize in advance that this posting is a rambling mess. The Background Way back in 2008 when I came upon the core idea of this game, the design was the exciting part. Though I started in games mainly as a technical person who was excited about technical challenges, I …
Island Snapshot
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.)
Collecting Playtest Data
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 …
Very Limited, Very Closed Beta
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, …
You know the game is coming along…
… when even your barest rough drafts seem like they’d be interesting to explore. Current puzzle count: 528.
Post-Shrink Screenshots
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 …
We are going Map Crazy.
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 …
Island Snapshot two-for-one
iPad Victory Shot
For the past few weeks Andy has been working on the iPad port of the game, and we now have the engine running on that device: The colors are all funny because we haven’t written the shaders for the iPad yet, so what you are seeing is the surface normals …