… when even your barest rough drafts seem like they’d be interesting to explore. Current puzzle count: 528.
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. [...]
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 of the objects in the [...]
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 interface yet, though. It is [...]
A while ago, I wrote a post about package sorting in order to minimize diffs when patching on Steam. I ended up running a straightforward test where we would change the game minimally and build consecutive patches. The patches turned out to be quite large, but upon investigation, it was clear there usually wasn’t a [...]
(Here’s an internal email that Ignacio sent today that may provide some flavor on what we’re doing lately.) From: Ignacio Castaño Date: 24 August 2012 I just checked in a few changes to the water shader. Note that this is still work in progress, there are some artifacts and unfinished features. From the art point [...]
As you see in the previous post, lately I’ve been getting the game set up on Steam. Now that it’s in there and working, there are still things to think about and make better. A couple of months ago I was playing Super Monday Night Combat; a much-anticipated weekly update came along, but its file [...]
Last night I put together a test build of The Witness for Steam. I’d been wanting to do this for a while, but the game’s ability to run in full-release mode had been broken for a while. From day to day, we run the game with unpackaged data files, because we change them a lot. [...]
Quite some time ago, Ignacio put some color grading features into the engine, so that you could tell the postprocessor to tweak colors in particular ways. For a while these features were very experimental; we just had them on a debug menu and there wasn’t a way to save the settings. We didn’t really use [...]
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, and the like). Here’s a [...]