August 2010: September 2011: August 2012:
You can see Ignacio’s new water in this shot (which will continue to improve, and already we have a lot of control over water visuals that we are not using yet). There’s a bunch of new audio in the game. Art folks are working on revising various areas and getting them into fully playable shape. [...]
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 [...]
It’s time for another island update: As you’ll notice, we are starting to work on that big mountain that is closest to the camera. (Finally!) This is still an early concept; it will change a lot. Ignacio recently implemented a clean way to print an overhead map of the island, in flat colors, which is [...]
Here’s how the island looks now: The current puzzle count is 415 (I think we have been over-counting a little recently; this is a more-accurate count). In case you missed it, I did a live Q&A with Chris Hecker of Spy Party today on Kotaku. In terms of world-building, lately Luis, Shannon, Eric and Orsi [...]
Here’s how things are looking now: In a strange twist of fate, the corner of the island that I chose long ago to be closest to the camera is the place that has taken longest to develop. As you can see, we are continually modifying this area but it’s still in a very rough state. [...]
Here’s how the island is looking right now: But today we are going to have the first in a series of meetings wherein we think pretty hard about the topography of the island and what the flow of natural curious investigation will tend to be from various spots. Expect the island to look pretty different [...]
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 it worked out pretty well, [...]
Island Snapshot two-for-one