![\"\"](\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/shot_2012.02.24__time_12_07_n02.png\" "\\"shot_2012.02.24__time_12_07_n02\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe current puzzle count is 440.<\/p>\n
As expected in the previous update<\/a>, 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, though I felt it wasn't quite epic enough. I didn't know what more to do with it at the time, so I just let it sit, and went to thinking about other parts of the game.<\/p>\n Lately I had more ideas for the endgame, so I went into personal crunch mode and rebuilt into something more epic. This was one of the most productive periods of my working life (maybe the most productive) and I think this area, all taken together, may be the most interesting thing I have ever designed. However, it may be a little too difficult for the player, at the moment! Today I playtested this endgame and one other area of the game, with a game designer friend of mine, and it took nine and a half hours<\/strong> to play through these two areas (6 hours for the endgame, 3.5 hours for the other area). I think this is a little long, so I am going to be tuning these areas and cleaning them up a little bit. This weekend hopefully I can get in some playtest time with Jeff and Casey of Jeff and Casey Time<\/em><\/a>, so if that happens we will see how it goes.<\/p>\n (It's interesting; I haven't done a playtest of The Witness for a while, but I was still thinking of it as a 10-15 hour game, and that's what I tell people when they ask. But if these two areas by themselves, even after being cleaned up, are 6-7 hours of playtime, that means the whole game is ... ... much longer. Sometime in a month or two, I'll do some playtests with people who have never seen the game before, and we'll see how long it really is.)<\/p>\n Meanwhile, on the art side, we've been working on the style of the game; expect a future blog post as we come to conclusions on that. <\/p>\n Tech-wise, Andy has been working on performance stuff. First he made raycasting much faster; til now the game had been relatively lazy about spatial organization. Andy implemented a quadtree for finding entities in the world and enabled k-d tree generation and serialization for casting rays against individual meshes. (We had k-d tree code already as part of a library but weren't using it.) Salvador is working on in-game animation playback, as well as exporting; until now we have been making do without animations, but once this is in the game it will help us with a number of issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2026<\/p>\n