Gary

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Jonathan Blow: Making a huge amount of progress in world-building and refinement today, in preparation for a playtest/story-powwow

please please please! take picture or video and post them here… or try doing some sort of analysis of what happened… and it would be really cool if you explained all you did in the world and how people reacted… a cool idea is to put a camera in the play-tester’s monitor and record their face while they play so that when that “Aha!” moment happens you have it and can use it to explain or talk about the game, since you have explain that this will be difficult and happens in people’s head. you should also talk to Pinchbeck for help. b/c he did an exploration game set in an uninhabited island somewhat like The Witness. good luck in the event and getting the island ready for the testers. don’t forget: take pictures!

Right now the power cables are just Catmull-Rom splines with waypoints set by hand. I might add in something to auto-adjust them to the surface of the ground or floor, which may save some work when we are trying to make things precise.

Also, out of curiosity, how are the ‘power cables’ laid out? Do you spline those yourself, do they come in prebuilt shapes, or have you got some sort of relaxation scheme to get them laid out naturally?

Can You tell how close it is game being done? Can’t wait :)

Jonathan, why not make a function of coordinate who could change during the time ? By this way, the fog would be more thick or thin by playtime. It would be more realistic than a constant quantity of fog according the coordinates.

Arnaud.

Oh and in regards to people who are thinking the game is just gonna be about solving blue mazes. I have faith and i’m positive all your true fans do aswell, which accounts to over thousands of people.

PS: Even if the game was just about solving blue mazes, i’d still love it coz i love mazes :P

I’m curious, I get the impression from some of the other posts that there’s some massive twist at a late point in the game. Will this be one of those games that require completely abstaining from reviews/spoilers/etc to get the full effect, or will it be more along the lines of Braid (in that there’s a definite twist at the end that makes you reevaluate what has come before, but not so much that it’s integral to the gameplay itself)?

The fog probably is a bit cooler in color than we will eventually want. We’ll tune that later. I also want to see if we can make the fog a simple function of worldspace coordinates, so that it feels denser out near the shores.

The engine will have to resolve the AA samples post tone-mapping with such high-contrast objects.

The fog thing also reminds me of a technique that I’ve always liked in WoW, where objects don’t just fade out into the fog, but instead they slowly blend into a silhouette. ( http://goo.gl/KqOLU )