Category Archives: Uncategorized

Poster Ideas

By Jonathan Blow | Published: May 7, 2013

We were kicking around ideas of what a Witness poster would look like if we were to make one. We eventually came up with one that we really liked, and we’ll release that at some point in the future. But in the meantime we thought it would be nice to show some of the runner-up [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 50 Comments

Peter Thiel on Secrets

By Jonathan Blow | Published: May 11, 2012

Peter Thiel is teaching a class at Stanford about how to start a technology company. One of the students is posting thorough class notes online. In this instalment, Thiel takes the question of what kind of company to start and reframes it in terms of secrets. Thiel’s point of view reminds me of the way [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Island Update

By Jonathan Blow | Published: April 25, 2012

We’ve done a first pass at changing the shape of the island terrain, and here’s the result: The changes are a little bit drastic in some spots, but overall not as drastic as I had expected. I had been worried about some issues in the natural flow of where players would naturally end up going, [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 49 Comments

Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe

By Jonathan Blow | Published: November 2, 2011

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 lead? By inspecting the structure [...]

Also posted in Development, Other Games | 71 Comments

Interview on GameSpot’s HotSpot podcast

By Jonathan Blow | Published: September 14, 2011

GameSpot’s podcast, HotSpot, had Jonathan Blow as a guest for the September 14th episode. There’s a bit of an interview, and chatting about various game topics; some discussion of Braid, some of The Witness, and what makes a good puzzle? Here’s the link.

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments

A podcast with some background details…

By Jonathan Blow | Published: August 30, 2011

Back during the press tour, Michael Abbott invited me to come onto the Brainy Gamer Podcast, and the resulting episode is now live. It’s got some inside-baseball stuff that hasn’t been talked about in the press coverage. So that’s something. See also the previous episodes with Manveer Heir and Matthew Burns.

Posted in Uncategorized | 32 Comments

Previews of The Witness are now out there.

By Jonathan Blow | Published: August 8, 2011

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been showing a preview version of The Witness to various folks in the press who were interested. Typically I just have them sit down and play for a couple of hours, from the beginning, with no guidance from me; afterward, we talk about what they just played. Previews [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 40 Comments

Tree Update

By sgalvin | Published: July 6, 2011

I’ve been trying to refine the trees to look better, and I’m fairly happy with the results so far. All too often, game trees are using many tricks to make em look good. Because of that, the geometry often looks like a mess (unless it’s really high poly). One thing I tried to do is [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

The Jeffrey Roberto Concerto on Social Games

By Jonathan Blow | Published: November 20, 2010

Now, for the social game developers out there – let me help. You know that bad feeling you have in your stomach? …

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

A new lecture about game design.

By Jonathan Blow | Published: October 22, 2010

This talk is called Games and the Human Condition; it was given at Rice University on September 27, 2010. It’s about “best practices” of modern game design that I find unsettling, and the way in which “social games” and “gamification” are destructive. A full video is available from this page at Rice University. Here’s a [...]

Posted in Uncategorized | 44 Comments