Really excited to see what the touch controls are like.

I have no idea. We are told, though, that the iPad 1 is a very low spec and that we may not be able to support it. But, we haven’t tried, so we don’t know.

Yes, though I don’t know how the game will run on the specific specs you name — mainly just because I have no idea how fast a Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 7 Go are. At this point there have been just too many CPUs and GPUs with essentially random numbers for names and I just can’t keep them straight in my head any more.

There are a lot of different Core 2 Duos; the later ones were on a 45nm process which is a huge difference over 65nm. No idea which one you have. Anyway, we will just see! I suspect that if the game will run on an iPad 2 it will run on an older PC.

I read an article about you in The Atlantic a few months ago, then I played Braid. I purchased the game and played it all the way through. I was fascinated with this game; still am. It’s marvelous. The mechanics alone are enough to make the spine tingle, and both the artwork and music is gorgeous — but there’s something else. Something that produces that feeling that’s being simply fun…

I don’t wish to make more out of it than it is. I don’t know exactly what it is. Braid is simply one of a few games that actually has me interested in games — and their potential — again.

I would like to do simultaneous on as many platforms as possible, but ultimately it will just depend on what we are able to do. We are a small studio.

Very interesting; thanks for the reply, Andy. I’ve been meaning to poke at the Cg compiler at some point. I’d love to see that blog post someday, too, when you get the time!

Just because I know that is Jonathan’s favorite comment.

Based on what we’ve seen of the core “maze tracing” gameplay – I think this is a definite purchase on iPad.

We’d like to get it running on as much hardware as possible, and as far as hardware features go, the engine is compatible with the iPad 1. Once I’m further along with the port we can better gauge how it’s going to stack up in terms of performance and memory use.

Also I guess we need to get an iPad 1 from somewhere :)

Our shader processing is quite involved and really deserves a blog post of it’s own (I apologise for never posting, I have a few almost-finished posts I’ll try to get up here soon!). The short version:

We compile the HLSL .fx files with the D3D compiler library, and pull out render state and parameter information. Using that, we preprocess the vertex and pixel shaders and write out new versions with various changes, such as parameters that will be set at the same time rearranged to be in contiguous blocks (i.e. per material vs per draw-call) .

Then we compile those shaders; with the HLSL compiler for D3D, and the Nvidia Cg compiler for OpenGL. Currently the iOS version picks a GLSL substitute shader based on some of that information we pulled out of the original .fx file.

Cg will also compile to GLSL (I haven’t tried this), but as Jon said, it’s not worth converting our PC shaders for iPad because they’re way too expensive. I’m working on refining that shader-choosing step and having it directly in our asset processor.

But… We need to stand still and see sometimes, right? We are gonna have o walk towards and object stop and inspect it from all sorts of angles since this is still a 3D game in the iPad, right? How will we walk around and look up, down, left and right to register what’s going on…

Well, implying the game is what I have in mind. The truth is that we still have no idea what this game is going to be! We don’t know what we’ll have to do in the game so I can’t image how this will have to go down.

The part that is not the mazes. You talk about a part of the game that needs buffing up to justifies existing. The part that is not the touch screen mazes is the part about “seeing” and “witnessing?” things in nature or subtleties of objects or shadows or reflections. Can you still explore in such detail with touch controls?

Again, we have no idea what the game is or what it’s trying to do. so I can’t tell if what i’m trying to say even matters. When that part of the game doesn’t exist anymore… I can remember someone saying shapes taking form in the union of the shoreline and the water’s reflection. Touch would be awesome for the touch screen mazes but is that all there is to the game? Just touching mazes?

Could you make a video…

Capcha: Achieve trust (?)

See my other comment in these replies. It’s not virtual buttons / joysticks, as I think those are always terrible.

Maybe at some point I will make a little video.

Indeed. The current control scheme is 1-finger tap / hold for almost everything, and 2-finger motions for subtle sidestepping movements that you might rarely want to do.

I just mean streaming from disk / flash to main memory. Not from the internet.

Good luck and I hope the game releases soon. I also hope that the iPad versions releases at the same time or not too long after the Steam PC version.

Epic Citadel did an okay sort of “tap where you want to walk,” I can imagine it’s something along those lines rather than the horrible virtual analog that so many games try to pull off.

Initially console games got this wrong too. It wasn’t until Halo that I considered it to be “decent”, but for me Halo nailed it.
As for the touch devices, I don’t think it’s impossible, and considering the work Jonathan has made I’m pretty sure it won’t disappoint.

Looking forward to play The Witness on my iPad. In fact I’m pretty sure that’s the platform I’m choosing to buy it.

Will it work on iPad 1 or is it too soon to tell?

Cheers and good luck