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 …
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 …
(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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Lately I have been doing some difficult puzzle design. Today I woke up and wanted a break from that, so I decided to nail down one of the loose ends that hadn’t been thought about yet: displaying subtitles during the in-game voice recordings (of which there are a lot). Originally …
Every week we have a meeting with the architects where we plan the structures and landscapes on the island. Most of the week, the architects are generally off thinking about this stuff while we are building the game. During the weekly meeting we get together, talk about what concepts the …
It’s now been over 5 months since I joined The Witness team as an artist and I would like to share a bit of my experience on the project coming from a “big studio” as well as the most recent work I’ve done. Just before I left my last job …