You have a vision, and then a means of realizing it. If you’ve ever visited Jonathan Blow’s website, you’ve seen that he’s devised plenty of innovative solutions to common problems. But I don’t think that’s why he made Braid, or why he is making The Witness.

There are plenty of tech demos available if you want them. Here: http://www.siggraph.org/

So sure, 10 year old techniques, but which in combination produce something which felt very fresh and knocked at least my socks off.

Comparing to Love again, voxels isn’t really anything new either, but together with the shaders and the curved world, the combination is equally clever.

Just now I saw the Monocle engine, with the way it stretches and blends 2D graphics and it’s just amazing. But perhaps it’s 10 years too early to ask to see similar developments in 3D?

We can have overhangs if we want… we just use a mesh for that, and figure out how to blend it into the terrain (this latter step is TBD but we have a basic idea of how we’d do it).

I’m kind of disappointed to see this very old and crude technique applied in this game, since Braid seemed so elegant and used 2D graphics in a very innovative way… you know, the way you assume the background is a static painting the first time you see it, until you notice that the brush strokes seem to move, and finally you discover that the “painting” actually consists of a whole bunch of pseudo-3D layers when you start to move in it…

Here? Nothing you haven’t seen 10 years ago already.

Hopefully, the graphics aren’t the only placeholders, but the modeling technique too. I know Mr. Blow doesn’t want to do what is expected, but I must admit I though this game was going to look like Eskil Steenberg’s Love, which at least I get a Braid vibe from.

Anyway, some people disliked the art direction in Braid, and here I am dissing The Witness before it’s even out.

Anyway, you seem to have figured out another solution that suits you. :)

But the reason I don’t do it this way is that I need these things to cover really broad areas. Like, if I am a point at the bottom of the chasm, I don’t want to be influenced by any of the points at the top. So to accomplish that I would have to build huge boxes up there. But then, I would also have to mark up those boxes somehow as only affecting the bottom of the chasm, because otherwise, how are guys on the top surface, near those boxes but outside them, supposed to know the boxes don’t apply to them? I think it would get complicated pretty fast.

The terrain itself in The Witness just has one elevation (no floor-above-floor) but if we want that we can just put a mesh object in the game.

Potential problem: What if the result of the discontinuity is to move that plane out of the brush? You’d have to either prevent that in the editor or clip the terrain to the boundaries of the brush.

By the way, does the terrain system in The Witness allow for floor-above-floor, or must everything pass the vertical-line test?

link: http://tinyurl.com/46jrxs4

or (maybe) click on my name

sorry to keep bothering. Is The Witness based on any of the prototypes you have on your site?

Thank you

Jakub

P.S.I noticed something very interesting when I kept watching the gameplay video of the game on youtube. When you get close to the touch panel, something appears on the screen which wasn’t there before – some kind of white rectangular thing (on the left side of the screen, for instance). Very interesting…

It’s possible The Witness will be released on OS/X, but who can say? Honestly I don’t like these kinds of platform questions, because they don’t seem very important, ultimately.

is there a connection between The Witness and Oracle Billiards?

Thank you for answering

Jakub

My inclination would be to bend the terrain to meet the mesh, rather than to bend the mesh to meet the terrain. But we’ll see.