Just before Christmas break, I fixed a bug in the transform manipulator and checked it in. Having a transform manipulator is a nice addition to any editor, and we were all happy to have it working. But shortly thereafter, I had to leave for a cross-country family Christmas trip. This …
This week we’ve been having discussions about how it’s almost time to move into full-on Production Mode and start cranking out final-ish 3D models and textures … following schedules, and all kinds of organized stuff like that. Up until now we have not been in that kind of work mode, …
Current puzzle count: 505.
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 …
This is a little mystery about a rock that refused to move. The rock lives off the coast of The Witness, just beyond the desert cliffs: I do not know who made this rock or how long it has been there, but when I first happened upon it, I found …
The great thing about programming on Windows is that it is the only commercially viable platform where you can ship software to users without getting approval from a giant bureaucracy (well, perhaps I should say it used to be). The not-so-great thing about programming on Windows is that, well, the …
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.
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 …