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 …
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 …
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, …
… 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 …
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 …
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 …
The iPad is one of the major platforms The Witness will appear on. Andy has been working on the iPad port and it is coming along. You can’t actually play the game yet, but we probably are close to that. The gameplay doesn’t know how to respond to a touch …