The Witness: Recent Episodes
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(I was sending an email today about a simple trick we use in the shader system, and it seemed easy and useful to share that email publicly, so, here you go!) There's one other place where fog snaps right now, and that is in time -- it is probably pretty … Continue reading
We are pleased to announce that the grant recipients have been selected! Congratulations to the following creators: Anastasia Kuznetsova - Raison AWK - Harmon:i:c Dario Zubović - QBCO 29Games - RocketPuzzle Asriele Aestas - Our Sky Cyathea Tree Team - Out of Bounds Exception David Rhee - Sticky Blocks Nico … Continue reading
As the company grows with projects beyond The Witness, we thought it'd be nice to show progress on something not too secretive. For those folks into technical posts, I'll discuss how we used our new programming language to create an automated framework to test the language itself. --- Jon wanted … Continue reading
In case you haven't heard the news, after nearly a year of optimizing, refining touch-controls, etc., we finally released The Witness on iOS! You can find it on the App Store, and carry around the full game in your pocket...which is pretty crazy if you ask me. The game will … Continue reading
We released The Witness for MacOS a little while back, and we felt it'd be a good idea to post the system requirements somewhere so we could link people to them when they ask. So... The Witness requires Metal for rendering. Metal is a graphics technology from Apple that allows … Continue reading
If you are looking for 2-3 months of straightforward contract work, are excellent at optimizing art assets in Maya, can pick up workflows quickly and have good attention to detail, then we are looking for you! We are planning on shipping The Witness on iOS in a few months, but … Continue reading
The Witness was first released a year ago. To celebrate, the game is on sale for 50% off on Steam, here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/ Braid is also on sale, and if you already own it, you get an extra discount on The Witness: http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2501/ Meanwhile, we are working on The Witness for MacOS, and … Continue reading
Previously, I made a post listing the technical details of the PS4 patch. That was a work-in-progress, and I said at the time I'd post final specs as soon as we know them, which we now do. We are definitely supporting HDR, on both the PS4 Pro and the base model … Continue reading
I should have posted this several days ago, but we have been busy with launch stuff! If you have an Xbox One, you can play The Witness there! Unless you are in Australia or New Zealand ... in which case we need to get the ratings stuff pushed through. We … Continue reading
Now that the PlayStation 4 Pro has been announced, we can tell you that we are working on a PS4 Pro patch for The Witness. The Witness already runs at a consistent 60fps on the base PlayStation 4, so rather than increasing frame rate, our patch is about visual quality. … Continue reading
Edit: We found our animator! Job post changed to reflect our current needs We are looking for a senior character artist, full time or contract, who excels at both designing and modeling intriguing characters in any style, and can also help out with environment art if the need arises. We would … Continue reading
Hey there! Lately I've been seeing a lot of requests from people who want to buy framed panels, like the ones we have hanging in our office. We talked a little bit about how we might sell these with Jon, but decided it would be best to just release the images we … Continue reading
If you don't know what that is, it means people can ask a bunch of questions and I type furiously to answer them in the time allotted. This will be Friday, February 12th, starting at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific) and going for ... a while? I have made a new … Continue reading
The Witness has now been on sale for a week, so it seems like a good time to post a financial summary. Often, independent developers find these kinds of numbers useful in making their own plans, and the general public can find them interesting too. There is a wrinkle, which … Continue reading
It should go up on Steam this morning around 9 or 10am Pacific time. I made a posting on the PlayStation Blog: https://t.co/ChsVlBzhVw Continue reading
... and this is just preorders, the game isn't playable until tomorrow! Thanks to everyone who's been following along on these forums, and everyone who's been interested in the game generally! We'll see what happens tomorrow! Continue reading
If this works we will put it on the front page pretty soon. This is for getting the game from the Humble Store. Continue reading
A lot of people have been asking about the price, so: The price of the game on both Steam and PSN will be $39.99 / €36.99 / £29.99. A lot of people have been asking about preorders too. Preorders will go live on Steam and the Humble Store (and on … Continue reading
We're a couple of weeks away from our release date, and we've just finished recording the last of the voice acting, which means it's a good time to tell you about the actors! The Witness deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design, and one of those elements is … Continue reading
We've been averaging about a blog post a month -- not by design, it just works out that way -- which means if we stick to that pace, then in just one more posting, the launch of the game will be imminent. Well, I think we will post a little … Continue reading
Music and Sound Effects Once in a while I get a question, from someone who really liked the music in Braid, what the soundtrack in The Witness is like. The answer to this question is that there isn't one. There is (almost) no music in the game. This is not … Continue reading
Deanna Van Buren, who worked with us designing the buildings for The Witness, has a blog posting on Gamasutra about video games seen through the eyes of an architect. You can read it here. Continue reading
Hey look! A new trailer! Here's my update on the PlayStation Blog. Also, we have some interviews and previews of the game: Gamespot Ars Technica Polygon Wired PlayStation Blog The PlayStation Blogcast had a nice ten-minute discussion of the game. Continue reading
This week we have been working on a new trailer that we hope to release before too long. It will not only show the game in a further state of visual development than the previous trailer (which is two and a half years old now -- wow!), it'll also show … Continue reading
We are in full bug extermination mode. A few months ago, only a few of Jon's friends were playing the game and checking for major problems, but now we have Francis as a game tester, and we have an other guy starting later this month as a tester too. With someone testing … Continue reading
We have this depth mode in the editor, that I've never really used for anything other than taking neat screenshots for fun. It's been a while since the last post, so I thought it might be cool to share some. It's difficult to find interesting new screenshots to share lately, since … Continue reading
In the last few weeks we’ve been adding the final art touches to the island. Now that we have all the content locked down, Deanna, one of the architects, is reviewing all the structures we created and make sure they are as correct as possible. Even though they previously designed … Continue reading
As some of you may have noticed in old screenshots, we had a few placeholder statues around the island. I designed these when I joined the project almost four years ago, and a while back Luis sculpted a couple of nice final ones. However, as we were finalizing some areas, we … Continue reading
It seems like a good time to do one of these, since the island is pretty much all figured out! We have been wrapping up a lot of big tasks, working on some cool effects, and doing a bit of polishing and bugfixing. While we still have some things to … Continue reading
Last Sunday morning was exceptionally beautiful and sunny, and so I decided to spend the day reorganizing the office. When we moved in two years ago, we just pulled things out of the moving boxes and shoved them here and there so we could get to work as quickly as possible, … Continue reading
On Friday we officially reached the Puzzle Complete milestone. This means that all puzzles that will be in the game when it ships are in the game now. It does not mean that the game is done. We still have a lot to do! But it does mean that the nature … Continue reading
Last weekend, Jon, Andy and Luis headed to Vegas to show the game to the public for the first time! We spent over a week play testing, bug fixing, designing the booth, printing banners, and re-designing the website. It was encouraging to see that the game was already in very good … Continue reading
We are all working hard, hence the silence on the blog. Always appreciate the kind words in the replies, so I wanted to at least add a quick new wallpaper to say thanks. Hope you like it! Continue reading
Some spoiler free architectural detail shots of a place I've been working on: Continue reading
We built a DirectX11 rendering backend for our engine, which is likely to be the default when running on Windows. Up until now we had been running on DirectX9, which made sense when we thought the game was going to be done a while ago. But these days, DX9 is … Continue reading
We just finished porting The Witness to D3D11. It took a little longer than I was hoping and one of the unexpected difficulties was getting our D3D9 HLSL shaders to work in D3D11. The D3D shader compiler provides a backward compatibility flag (D3DCOMPILE_ENABLE_BACKWARDS_COMPATIBILITY) that I was hoping would allow us … Continue reading
Just wanted to do a quick post saying that we are all working hard on the game, figuring out some of the last unknowns and polishing things up. We are definitely in finish-the-game mode, that's why the posts have gotten more rare. Here is a shot of the finalized hub … Continue reading
... ... Ignacio has posted the conclusion of his series on irradiance caching -- at long last! -- and released the source code. This code is a significant chunk of what makes lighting in The Witness as nice as it is. Continue reading
Final day and a lot more little things to polish than I expected. Every time I got something fixed another problem would pop up. We got everything in a good state for E3 but there are quite a few more ideas we want to try for the castle visuals, probably 2 or 3 … Continue reading
Getting close to the end of the week. Most of the key detail has been added to the walls and I feel, if we had to send this build to E3, it wouldn't be terrible. We managed to get in some really nice framing details that I won't spoil here but … Continue reading
This was a very productive day but visually less noticeable. A lot of "invisible' stuff got done like collision and occluders to make the area decently playable: The center building is now complete and we got the layout for the ruined walls so the major task for tomorrow is to … Continue reading
Here is the progress for today. Detail has been added to the rest of the walls and towers as well as windows and other smaller features. We've had some discussions about the style of the battlements so those might change tomorrow or after. Here are the new modular pieces that were … Continue reading
Since we have only one week to get the entry area ready before E3 I was thinking it could be interesting to have a post at the end of each day to show how we are progressing. It will balance out the high programming post count we've had the past few days and … Continue reading
E3 is happening in under two weeks, so what better thing to do than to completely destroy the part of the game everyone at E3 will play, and rebuild it from scratch in very limited time? This is of course a very crude mockup of what the new starting area … Continue reading
Sometimes people ask me for advice on how to program, and I have to say that Casey's advice here is right on: http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html Meanwhile, we've had a lot of Witness Wednesday posts in a row on this blog. I'll have to stop slacking and write something about the game. Continue reading
He's put up another very informative blog post, leaving the specific topic of grass planting, venturing into more general territory regarding interpolation. And there's a video, from which it is possible to learn a lot of this is a new subject. Here's the blog post. Here's the video: Continue reading
Casey Muratori is back, with more details about planting grass when you really care about how good the results are. Update: And here's another post, complete with a video showing in detail how the grass planting works in the actual game. Continue reading
Casey Muratori has made new postings about the work he has done on The Witness: Working on The Witness, Part 5 Working on The Witness, Part 6 In this one he talks about how to distribute grass. Legally. As well as the different colors of noise one might want to … Continue reading
Last week was the Game Developers Conference (GDC) here in San Francisco and we were invited to talk about the art of "The Witness". I decided to shift the talk from any technical aspect, since there are already plenty of those, and tried to focus instead on our thought process, … Continue reading
The marsh had been left unresolved for a long time, so we decided to tear it apart and finish it as a team. Eric updated the main structures, Alex adjusted the catwalks, Luis took care of all the lowest structures, and I handled the vegetation and general colors. Color was … Continue reading
Around Christmas time, Jon surprised us with a bunch of new slab buildings full of puzzles in the center of the island. Previously, there were only some empty ruins here, so the whole area was redesigned by the architects to accommodate the new puzzles. I attacked it first, … Continue reading
Last November I made a somewhat-mysterious posting which some people speculated was hinting at stereoscopic rendering in The Witness. Indeed it was, and Now It Can Be Told. Last year I was pessimistic about VR systems in the near future, since the ones I had tried didn't seem to offer … Continue reading
... so here one is. Luis has been doing a lot of work lately on the mountain and especially the stuff at the top. Other folks have been doing a bunch of work on things that are not as obvious in this picture! Current puzzle count: 595 Continue reading
The PS4 launched last week and, though I still barely believe my luck, I got the chance to accompany Jon to the launch event in New York! As it turned out, I was a bit too shy to help him out too much with the questions, but it was still … Continue reading
About a month ago, I gave a speech at Creative Mornings in Portland about the way the Free-to-Play business model affects game design. I compared games to television, looking at the way television business models have drastically affected the composition of those shows. (I didn't name this speech; the … Continue reading
Interview with Adam Sessler at last week's PlayStation event: Discussion on PlayStation Blogcast (Witness talk starts around 26:25): http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/10/18/playstation-blogcast-094-witness-the-daylight/ (From the way the PS guys talk, it sounds like it is all me making this game, but as always on games of this size, there is a whole team … Continue reading
Sony had an event today at their offices in Foster City to give the press some hands-on time with upcoming games running on the PlayStation 4. The Witness was among the games being shown! We were the only third-party game there. Also shown were a whole lot of Killzone: Shadow … Continue reading
During the last several weeks I've been polishing and optimizing the shadowing system and I think that at this point it won't undergo any more significant changes. In the process I've been reading a bit and looking up references and I'm appalled by how inaccessible is all the shadow mapping … Continue reading
The shipwreck is an area of the island that has not been shown before, because up until recently it was one of the barest, most undeveloped areas we had. It grew bigger and bigger over the years (like most things on the island), from a little slab mockup Jon had … Continue reading
What’s up, internet? I’m Eric - one of the artists working on The Witness. I figured what better way to celebrate more than two years on the project than by making my very first post on the development blog! (plus, Luis and Orsi hassled me!!!) So here goes: In the … Continue reading
It's been a long time since the last posting! Time flies. Normally I would post an Island Snapshot, but the viewpoint we have been using for Island Snapshots is a little bit unfortunate lately, since the main thing taking up the view is the mountain, which is an area we … Continue reading
Since a lot of you have been asking for them, I put together a few wallpapers based on those poster ideas from a while ago (most of which were created by Luis, who has a great eye for composition. Hopefully I didn't butcher them too badly.) My hope is that … Continue reading
Once again, we have been mostly working on things you can't see from this angle. The most-visible changes are probably the peninsula on the left in the foreground, which has undergone extensive work lately: It's been revamped by Alex, who is new on the team, helping us with the huge … Continue reading
In May, we wrote about a bunch of ideas for posters for The Witness. We couldn't say so at the time, but we were prompted to do this by the inclusion of such a poster in a PlayStation 4 promotional video. Of all the possibilities we ran through, here's the … Continue reading
Hello! I'm Orsi, the girl who ended up modeling most of the trees for this game. When I joined the team two years ago, I didn't think I would be doing much serious environment modeling. I was fresh out of school, hired to develop some interesting, hidden things around the … Continue reading
... which doesn't look too much different from last time's. Partially this is because we've been working on things that you don't see from this angle. Here's a shot from a different angle: We still have so much to do! On my end, I've been working for the … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
It's been a while since the previous post, so here's a new island snapshot. Most of what we've been working on lately is not visible in this shot, though! The biggest obvious changes are probably in the forest and beach on the left-hand side. Continue reading
Andy's got the iPad port far enough along that you can sort of play the game now. Here's a short video: There are some basic hacks going on; for example, right now, we are not drawing the real sky; it's just solid blue. Also, right now we are just loading … Continue reading
Can it be that we haven't posted an island snapshot since January 3rd? Well, you got a pretty good look at the island in the trailer we recently released in conjunction with the PlayStation 4 announcement. That version has a lot of new modeling compared to the January snapshot, because … Continue reading
There has been worry and speculation on the internet about the PS4 exclusivity that we announced during the press conference, so here are some details to help answer those questions. Our deal with Sony is a limited-time exclusivity that applies to competing console platforms. Basically it is that you will … Continue reading
as seen in today's PlayStation 4 announcement: (Watch it in HD + fullscreen if you have the bandwidth!) Continue reading
(This is a crosspost from WabiSabi Sound's blog). I didn’t think Witness was going to be an easy project by any stretch, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be one of our biggest creative challenges. I’ve worked on nearly 80 projects spanning feature film, games, ads and other sorts, … Continue reading
On January 31, 2013, Tom McShea of Gamespot interviewed me as part of their Break Room Interview series. It was an interesting conversation! Here's the interview. Continue reading
... you may wish to see Antichamber, which has just been released on Steam. The game's web site. The Steam page. The game is primarily the work of one designer, Alexander Bruce, who has been working on it for six years. Players seem to be really into the game, and … Continue reading
Just before Christmas break, I fixed a bug in the transform manipulator and checked it in. Having a transform manipulator is a nice addition to any editor, and we were all happy to have it working. But shortly thereafter, I had to leave for a cross-country family Christmas trip. This … Continue reading
This week we've been having discussions about how it's almost time to move into full-on Production Mode and start cranking out final-ish 3D models and textures ... following schedules, and all kinds of organized stuff like that. Up until now we have not been in that kind of work mode, … Continue reading
Last week, Jeff Grubb from VentureBeat emailed me a question for an article he was writing, prompted by Apple's rejection of Endgame: Syria. Sometimes questions like this are good excuses for me to figure out what I really think. Jeff asked me about this part of the iOS App Store's … Continue reading
I apologize in advance that this posting is a rambling mess. The Background Way back in 2008 when I came upon the core idea of this game, the design was the exciting part. Though I started in games mainly as a technical person who was excited about technical challenges, I … Continue reading
This is a little mystery about a rock that refused to move. The rock lives off the coast of The Witness, just beyond the desert cliffs: I do not know who made this rock or how long it has been there, but when I first happened upon it, I found … Continue reading
The great thing about programming on Windows is that it is the only commercially viable platform where you can ship software to users without getting approval from a giant bureaucracy (well, perhaps I should say it used to be). The not-so-great thing about programming on Windows is that, well, the … Continue reading
Despite not even being finished, The Witness is already one of my all-time favorite games. I’ve been playing it since Jon started developing it several years ago, and I could not be more excited about its upcoming release. Unlike Jon’s previous game Braid, the asset and programming scale for The … Continue reading
We haven't done one of these in a while. Here's what the island looks like currently: The current puzzle count is 497. (This is lower than last time; last time was an overcount, as we had some temporary duplicates in the world that were being counted mistakenly.) Continue reading
In The Witness, when progress in your game is saved, we also save a thumbnail that shows you where you were. This makes it easier to load a particular game later if you had multiple saves. Here is our current, very unpolished load screen: Right now, we save the thumbnail … Continue reading
Last Wednesday night, just before Thanksgiving, we shipped our first extremely closed beta over Steam to a few limited testers. Today we shipped an update, still to the same limited group. We have some initial tech issues to work out before we go wider (game packaging issues, graphics card incompatibilities, … Continue reading
I really like the scope(exit) statements in D. They allow you to keep the cleanup code next to the initialization code making it much easier to maintain and understand. I wish we had them in C++. Turns out this can be implemented easily using some of the new C++ features. … Continue reading
... when even your barest rough drafts seem like they'd be interesting to explore. Current puzzle count: 528. Continue reading
As mentioned in the previous post, we shrank the island a bit. Here is what things look like now. They may not look tremendously different from this off-island vantage point, but when you are down there moving around, the difference is substantial. I feel a lot better about the layout … Continue reading
One of my primary design goals, all through development, has been to keep the island spatially small, so that there isn't a lot of wandering through empty or pointless spaces. The idea is to take the best parts of an open-world game, involving choice, exploration and discovery, but compressing these … Continue reading
For the past few weeks Andy has been working on the iPad port of the game, and we now have the engine running on that device: The colors are all funny because we haven't written the shaders for the iPad yet, so what you are seeing is the surface normals … Continue reading
The iPad is one of the major platforms The Witness will appear on. Andy has been working on the iPad port and it is coming along. You can't actually play the game yet, but we probably are close to that. The gameplay doesn't know how to respond to a touch … Continue reading