We brought The Witness to the Game Developers Conference and had the game playable privately in a hotel room to select members of the press. We had to do a lot of work to get the game back into playable condition; a lot of things had been broken since the …
Here’s how the island looks today: The current puzzle count is 440. As expected in the previous update, over the past week or so I went back and worked on the endgame again. I built an original version of the endgame last summer; I had one friend playtest it, and …
Here’s how the island looks right now. It is a bit crazy and messy, especially the stuff nearest the camera: This is because this corner of the world is one of the last areas that we haven’t really figured out, in terms of what goes where. There is sort of …
This summer, we began working in earnest with architects, to bring further sophistication to the design of locations in The Witness. Before this time, we had a game that was fully playable, but buildings and the areas around them tended to be placeholders, developed only enough to make the basic …
I am working hard on puzzles right now. We’ve had figured out, for a while, the basic set of locations you can travel to on the island, and what the puzzles are in each. These locations were defined to varying degrees of specificity, though. Sometimes we know what the puzzles …
This talk was presented by Jonathan Blow and Marc ten Bosch at Indiecade on October 7, 2011. Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions …
Hi everyone. We haven’t posted anything in a while, but this is just because we have been working intensively on the game. These days we are doing a lot of working with the architects, integrating their designs with the gameplay. The result is coming out really well — the architectural …
It’s been a little bit since the last post. We have been busy doing a lot of good things with the game. Here’s one of them: Ignacio just got back from vacation and implemented a simple lightmap encoding idea that improves the color resolution of our lightmaps, removing banding, like …
On April 1, 2011, I was invited by UC Berkeley’s Computer Science Undergraduate Association to come give a speech. This was pretty interesting because that’s where I went to school, and I was once a member of the CSUA. I approached it this way: if I were going back to …
Hi, I’m Shannon and this in my first blog post about The Witness. I’m currently the only 3D artist working on the game and this post is about game trees… both the ones I’m making and game trees in general. I’ve worked on trees for games over the years, and …