There’s so much more to our surroundings than we realize, and when that’s forgotten, it’s quite tragic. I’m glad you sought out real architects to help you, it really elevates this from a mere design problem to solution story, and into something truly genius.

As as side question I wanted to ask, is this a prevailing attitude in the industry? I know the director of Tron Legacy was a former Columbia architecture graduate, and the there have been many students of architecture within the industry. But “architecture” itself is never the highlight of any video game. It is also distilled into “art assets” and “level design”.

Anyways, keep up the great work! And looking forward to see all the new iterations from your architectural design.

I like this better: https://the-witness.net/news/wp-content/gallery/concepts-1/color_palette_progress1.jpg

The original concept just looks awesome! Now the house and its ground (“the compound”) look ugly IDK why but it doesn’t say much…

“in morning see the sunrise, look in the water see the blue skies, as if heaven has been laid there at our feet”

Its a beautiful aesthetic.
the song is “sausalito” by conor oberst and the mystic valley band. (not that the rest of the song truly fits)

What you’re asking doesn’t really make sense. This is a super-complicated game that is constantly under active development, and has for much of its life been in a very rough state. It’s not like something was done and then the architects came along and wanted to change it. So either saying “yes” or “no” would be wrong. The question just doesn’t make sense. We are figuring out the game as we go along, as happens with all games.

From what I understand, Devin’s asking: Did the aesthetics proposed by the architects require you to substantially change the surrounding environment or was it some other reason?

From what I understand from your post, it seems that both your own ideas and the ideas of the architects were factors in this substantial change.

Is what I said accurate? I’m very interested in having a clear understanding of the answer to Devin’s question.

Yeah, and we actually work pretty hard to eliminate the “almost” thing. Like if some ledge comes a little bit too close to something else that you might want really hard to get onto, we trim that stuff back. It’s important to keep a wide margin around these things.

I think, generally speaking, that “why can’t I just do [X]?” feeling comes up when [X] is both reasonable in context and *almost* possible within the current game’s mechanics.

So, waist-high obstacles do annoy me in something like, say, a Half Life game, where I am madly fighting for my survival in an apocalyptic scenario and my character can jump but arbitrarily not quite high enough.

The Witness on the other hand is not AFAIK apocalyptic (so social norms that would normally prevent me from vaulting such a meticulously sculpted hedge could still apply) and more importantly doesn’t seem to feature jumping at all, so the player wouldn’t have any “maybe I can jump it?” ambiguity on encountering the hedge.

No, its not just you. I feel the exactsame way, is just I couldn’t articulate it as well as you did, but you put my feelings into words. Thanks, I feel relieved now!

I don’t often have problems where I’m imagining solutions to puzzles like “well, if I could pick up that plank over there and lay it across that gap, I could just climb over” when none of that is part of a game’s vocabulary. I’m aware of the abstraction inherent in any sort of simulation, and in fact really enjoy learning and then accepting the rules of the game world.

But when I’m thinking hard about a puzzle, trying to figure out “how do I get there,” and I notice that the place I am trying to reach is only separated from me by a unremarkable obstacle shorter than I am… it suddenly feels silly. Despite my usual willingness to accept game-world rules for what they are, waist-high obstacles tend to shake me out of my immersion when I sorely want to get past them.

I can accept a short fence marking the “edge of the play area”, because I unconsciously know that there’s nothing worthwhile over there anyway. But when it’s key to preventing me from continuing in the game, it starts to stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe that’s just me.

I am an Architecture student finishing off my degree at RMIT, I keep saying that game design is the most interesting form of architecture at the moment.

i always come back to the shadow of the colossus demo build, for example, because it was given to the public as the same quickly gutted, unfinished and partially broken preview of the game it started as. this made testing its limits a fun game in itself, which only added to the mystique of its world. and since shadow’s wasteland is one of the great video game worlds, it meant a lot to me. i’d give my pinky to play all the wip builds of the game that exist somewhere

so yeah, it’d be neat, but i can imagine reasons for avoiding it, so it’s really not an issue either way. but i guess i am disappointed to hear a confirmation of no jumping. i figured as much, and i agree with the frank lantz point you brought up, but i also feel even when it’s not central to the game design at hand, human acrobatics are central to establishing a connection with the world. it’s why, say, half-life 2 is more enjoyable to play on a basic level than f.e.a.r. is, even though f.e.a.r. has the better encounter design. and, sure, you can jump and crouch and all that in f.e.a.r., but it has no conservation of momentum where half-life 2 does and that makes all the difference. dreamfall, terrible “game” that it is but game that i love, would be instantly more engaging and tolerable with robust play control. it’d even make a few puzzles more memorable and make up for some of the disappointment in the rest. so movement is important, even in a subdued puzzle game such as the witness.

This makes me think Jonathan… So there are things in the world that you can notice right? I don’t know how to artivulate this thought but: Some this are going to be there permanently, static, there for ever, right? But my question is: Will The Witness have some stuff that just happens “like in the air”? Things that are not just there but things that you have to catch. Events instead of shapes, shadows and reflections… Where yopu have to be in thre right place at the right time?

Like in a preview I read that Shadows make shapes and there are statues and reflections can make images or maybe an object look at trough a filter or a mirror (water) is different or something is different looking at it trhough bounces or something. A preview said that at a shore line the sand, the clif and some rocks with its reflection on the water made a figure. Things like these are seen in man made islands and stuff like that. (remember back when the island was very weird looking still and I said it looked man made? Maybe this is a desired effect) but anyways there was no mention of events or knowledge to catch “in the air” by WITNESSING spontaneous things were you have to be in the right place at the right time doing something…
Just like witnessing a “fleeting world” with the help of A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream

It would be cool if it had more subtle stuff like these!

Justin, the quote is in plain English. You simply need to overcome your limited attention span and use your brain a little to think about what it means.

I understand that The Witness scenario is tightly coupled to the game design and puzzles. Wouldn’t refraction/light transport phenomena fit in somehow? I’d love to see some caustics and stuff.

Also, are you planning on doing something about the edge aliasing issues? What do you have in mind?
How is the temporal coherence of these things?

Part of it is color choice, but also, Ignacio implemented a fur-shader-esque thing for it, which is why it doesn’t look starkly polygonal and flat.

Other than that, great job, looking good.

I really like the visual style of the labyrinth bush-things. How did you do that?

I wish people would talk about important or interesting stuff, rather than this kind of thing.

We’ll launch the game on some platforms, and bring it to others later. Ultimately we want the game to be on as many platforms as we can reasonably put it on.

We have good reasons for platform decisions, and they are made after a great deal of consideration. I have explained a lot of the reasons in public before (probably in comments on this very blog). But then, as always, reasons (and therefore decisions of what seems like the right platform to launch on) change over time as our development situation changes.

Generosity only applies to mechanics which made the cut and keep the game focused and fun.
I am pretty sure the player movement will be similar to Myst/ Google street view approach. Click somewhere on the screen, if clicked area is valid, camera will move there in cinematic fashion.I will be shocked if player will be actually able to navigate using left/right/up/down inputs for movement. I might be wrong, but i think as the game presented right now, it is important to keep “integrity” of the game world intact. If player is allowed to navigate freely then tonnes of stuff will have to be blocked out. For example if player is able to walk up to the edge of the cliff but there is no swimming or dying in the water, then Jonathan will be stuck with putting up invisible walls all around island which will absolutely suck for the player.

Hmm, this is interesting. The picture that I was most intrigued by and thought had achieved the most progress was exactly that bunker. I did not think more of it, I just thought it looked fitting.
I now realize that it might be that subconscious effect of recognizing architecture, as I am from Copenhagen too. (Blow talks about it in the post: “Even if you don’t know the first thing about architecture, you have been in enough buildings in your life that the deeper parts of your brain have distilled plenty of patterns about those buildings.”)
I guess that’s one small success right there!

Doesn’t this agree with rule 8 in making a puzzle game “generosity” “why should we limit a mechanic?” Lack of generosity discourages exploration.

either way, I eagerly await it!

There’s no jumping in The Witness. Controls are as minimal as possible.

It seems like the point isn’t if the player can climb over a hedge but that they understand right away that they can’t and that that isn’t the solution. Are you going exclude the player’s the ability to jump? I hate when games allow you to do things that are unproductive because you waste a lot of time trying combinations of things that were put in there to give you a more “immersive” experience put are useless in terms of gameplay.

I don’t even know what that means… In layman terms please!
I can deal with not running and always walking. Not jumping, not garbing objects and not swimming. I think I can deal with not vaulting… But it makes me think is not real of course is not a real place, is a fucking video game but do you know what I’m saying?

You better have a good “gap where the magic is” or some good “magic” in that “gap”
-Frank Lantz (guy who has never and will never make a real game)

…but shit nigga I haven’t make a game either so I’ll just start preaching:

Skyrim, GTA, RDR, new Fallouts and stuff like that are “go everywhere do everything” games and they are complete inane, assine and infantile useless shit. I trust Jonathan, nuff’ said.

Braid is my favorite game ever and you couldn’t fly or get into cars or ride the dinosaur or feed the rabbits and it is my favorite game of all time!

Here is what I have to say about that, in short:

Why does the phrase ‘the player will be able to go anywhere and do anything’ sound like nails on a chalkboard to me? It’s based on a very naïve and unsophisticated understanding of how simulation, how representation works. You have a thing, a part of the world, and you have a simulation of that. There’s a gap in between, the gap is made up by all the differences, the way that this is not this.. the immersive fallacy is this idea that computer simulation allows us to close this gap and makes these things identical. But this gap is an essential part of how this representation works, this gap is where the magic happens.
-Frank Lantz

Full text of Frank’s short speech here: http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2006/03/gdc_game_develo.html

I was playing through the original Prince of Persia recently, and the environments intrigued me in a way that I couldn’t quite put into words. I think one of the reasons is that the game didn’t take this slap-dash approach to level design. There were secret corridors that wrapped to the beginning of the level, deep dungeons full of traps that only lead to skeletons, drops that spanned several screens, and many other areas that fluidly wove around the main route through the game. As a result, the palace somehow felt alive and real, despite all the obvious technical limitations.

4.If you are not careful you might put a detail in that is meaningless and have people examining it for years while its of no use. Like the cloud in Braid. Be careful, all must have a meaning to be or it will break the feel of the place being real like Oblivion and Gothic. be careful.

Is it possible to have a mirror somewhere? (cuz water at shore looks like mirror. import for puzzles)

I have been to Copenhagen a few times, and a good friend of mine lives there. It’s a nice place to visit.

It’s not that something like this hasn’t been done before or is particularly special in itself, but it’s the “cleanliness” of it that makes this interesting, and in a subtle way more appealing than many other games.

I hope your work will inspire people to pursue game experiences that are wholly more memorable.

It seems so obvious, and yet… :-)

I guess the hard part is acknowledging which details are actually *present.* The recognition that people have deep familiarity with buildings – not as students of architecture, but as users, and that’s sufficient – isn’t obvious to many people, I think.

Read the Game Informer article, was very excited to see it there and gain some more knowledge from it.
I’d love to ask you some in depth questions one day, as im currently preparing for my own indie game and studying you, I have a journal with notes of all your lectures that I could find.
Peace

I’m not sure what you are asking. The version from “before” is basically a box with a window and some puzzles inside, that hadn’t had much work put into it. The version from “after” started with a design of the architects, then I came back to them with a different-but-related idea that I thought reenforced part of the theme of the location in a very interesting way. Then we worked on that one until we got where we are now. The structure of the building and its new location inspired a couple of puzzles that I hadn’t thought of before we did this.

Fixed. Thanks for catching these things.