Just stay away from slide 23; that looks like the heaviest spoiler-wise. All the other slides are mostly pictures of the island from different angles.

Chris

Now I really want to look, but at the same time, I’m trying to stay as spoiler-free as possible. Can anyone who’s looked at the slides give a sense of how spoiler-heavy they are and/or if the spoilers are easily avoided? I’m desperate for more information about this game, but I don’t want to ruin anything. Such decisions! It’s killing me!

Not really a surprise that they got a lot wrong. Most enthusiast press really don’t understand anything about how games are actually made. They fool themselves thinking that because they had xyz class at university that they totally know how it all works. I hate to be cynical about it, but it’s frankly embarrassing.

Those slides are very nice, but ooh ahh plot spoilers! I averted my eyes a bit there. :P

Thanks for posting the link Orsi.

Oh my gosh! thanks for sharing that!

Luis has the slides on his blog for now: http://artofluis.com/2014/03/21/gdc-2014-the-art-of-the-witness/

That article got so many things horribly wrong…

I think they are puzzle panels. They just aren’t active in the screenshot.

Being colorful doesn’t mean being ugly. I think it could have fit another color.

Is the engine yours???

Thanks. And put on bookmarks.

Number None is no more. That was just John, in Braid.
Thekla Inc. is the company/team behind The Witness now.

I saw Number None somewhere else in reference to this game recently and it made me wonder: didn’t the company used to have the name Thekla? When did it switch to Number None? Or am I confusing something here?

Though it is merely my second time posting here, I have nonetheless been visiting rather frequently – Monthly, Weekly and in the last year or so even daily. Suffice it to say that my excitement level for this piece of software cannot easily be comprehended. I am sure that I am not alone in saying it.

Anyway! Thanks very much to the WHOLE team at Number None and to everyone, everywhere, anywhere that had something to do with this project. I cannot wait to ‘feel’ my way through this assured masterpiece of design, logic and beauty.

Everything that I have seen to this game looks preposterously gorgeous and elegant. When taken from afar (island snapshots) everything just looks so wonderfully compartmentalized and simple, yet upon a closer look we see that every area has a life of its own and is so varied in a biome or niche of its own. I cannot wait to cross the blended boundaries of Emerald Forests, Sandy Beaches, Snow Capped Mountains and autumnal hued locales. I haven’t seen a game with artistic design and merit such as this since I last spent some time with Journey… and that game holds fast to the top spot of games that I have been privileged to experience in my lifetime, perhaps with Braid following within the top 3.

Wow. 4 years! It really seems to me that this project was taken at the right pace and seems to be ramping up into a damn fine crescendo!

Good Luck Everyone!

Postscript: I would gladly put my life on hold to Beta test this thing. However I fear that I have a monumentally greater chance at striking the winning lottery numbers than I do of that. At any rate, I will be right there with everyone else day 1 when this thing goes live!

I hope you dudes and ladies sell copies into the most copious of amounts. Something along the lines of 100,000,000 copies should make me happy. :)

I vote for Hide-and-Go-Seek multiplayer DLC for The Witness.

Good question. I wonder what could legs look like in this game. Probably something odd – like shiny black dress shoes and grey pants (like Tim had).

The biggest thing that irks me about the old picture-by-picture adventure games like Myst and Rhem was the inability to look down, so hopefully full view will be a thing.

This! You’ve read my mind. I wonder if you could look all the way up and all the way down too!
Can you see your hands and all or hear sounds coming from you?

I wonder if you could look into the water or if glass reflects. I wonder if you ever get to see yourself.

Well, I know we’ve seen screenshots with the player’s shadow! Maybe we encounter a mirror later in the game!

Also, keep up the great work. The game looks amazing, and I can’t wait to lose myself in it.

Lol, I think “have no willpower” is an understatement. I imagine you were going through the trailer frame by frame. :P

I can usually figure out a few of the early puzzles from a sequence in my head just by looking at the panel, but they very quickly become strange. So I think generally that’s the progression in the game. The first few in a sequence should be easy enough to figure out without really trying, but then it escalates and changes to test your understanding and comprehension.

Great movie! My favorite game developer is Jonathan Blow, and my favorite filmmaker is Shane Carruth.

If you watch the trailer closely, you can probably figure out what these puzzles are about. I think I know how to solve the puzzle in the second to last picture just from the trailer.

Which makes me kinda sad, I have no will power when it comes to spoilers :( I hope there are a lot of different kinds of puzzles that haven’t been revealed yet.

Great work. I am really looking forward to this.

Again, whoa!

Okay. Thanks for the info. I had figured it was something like that, but it’s nice to know for sure. Sadly, the constraints of game development never really allow for being totally happy with everything. Just gotta prioritize the most important things and get it out the door.

Well, I wish you the best of luck. :)

Conceptually, it seems more ideal for a consistent style.

I agree with you, unfortunately, my original plan for these trees would have involved adding some polys, and now that polycount became a serious issue and we are trying to optimize everything, it’s not really an option anymore. I might find some quick way to make them look a little nicer, but it’s not at all high priority.

Oops, reCAPTCA failure moved my reply out of where it was supposed to be.

I do have an observation about the trees though. I’m not sure if they’re the eucalyptus trees you had mentioned in an earlier post or some kind of willow, but I’ve always kinda thought they looked a bit more “sprite-y” than the other trees. Each little tuft really sticks out in a blocky way. I hate to be critical since I know it’s all WIP and even still I think all of the other trees and plants look great, but I did wonder if you were hoping to go back over them to make them blend a bit better. You had mentioned doing so previously because of what you’d learned from the wisteria vines, (which look fantastic) but it has been some time and I wondered if it was just something that had to be left on the cutting room floor.

I know…I know.

Fixed!

On a secondary note, the first image here doesn’t have a link to a larger version. Would be a good fix for those of us who like collecting or have a wallpaper rotation of Witness screens. :)