It’s been a while since we did one of these: The current puzzle count is 350. Some parts of the island are pretty messed up in this screenshot. For the press tour, we made sure the whole game was more-or-less solid and playable. Just after that, though, we were free …
Lately we started thinking about making the game look better, finally. Ignacio has been working on some graphical effects to this end (though he’s been putting forth a lot of effort on performance as well). Here are a few things he’s been working on: Sun beams. These are accomplished with …
As mentioned in the previous couple of updates, we are starting to take steps toward establishing the visual style of the game. This past week while I was on vacation, Shannon did a bunch of world editing, with the primary goal being to draft out a few areas of the …
Until now, we had been using Uncharted-2-style blend mapping to color our terrain. This is a way of using a low-resolution texture map to control the blending of high-resolution textures; this gives you the ability to maintain fine pixel-by-pixel detail while also blending between multiple textures in order to create …
In a previous post I mentioned that we had done a bunch of playtesting at the GDC. As a result of that playtesting, I ended up heavily restructuring some areas of the game world. On top of that, there were a few areas that had been incomplete at that time, …
This month was time for the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco [this has been its official name for a while now: the completely ungrammatical “Game Developers Conference”. Whatever.] We used this opportunity to have game designer friends come and playtest The Witness. We did somewhere between 40 and …
Toward the back you can see some of the stuff that was being worked on in the previous post (but from a different angle!) The current puzzle count is 251. That’s pretty good, but on top of the increase from last time, another 25 of the old puzzles were rewritten. …
Today I was deleting an old area of the island, which had about 25 puzzles in it that I wasn’t happy with. I took to wondering how many puzzles would be left on the island after I deleted those, so I added a console command to count puzzles: So, there …
The past week has been a very productive time in terms of world-building. The island has been shrunk further, with several of the locations that used to be further to the right moved inward. The white-walled location from last time used to be a standalone structure, but is now built …
Here’s your Island Snapshot for the end of January. Recently, we’ve been mostly working on things you can’t see, but you may notice some subtler differences in terms of buildings / structures. The most obvious difference from the previous shot is the thicker atmosphere. Ignacio changed the fog model; the …