Thanks for a great game.

Another vote for Mac OS on Steam – I don’t get my games on apple store either – cause there aren’t really any that appeal to me. I imagine you’ll find that indie game buyers use steam.

Agreed – I avoid the Mac App Store at all costs, both as a consumer and as a dev.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’d gladly take out a bit of my spare time to assist with a port :)

(for the time being I’ll just have to marvel at the game’s beauty from the confines of my flagging desktop)

I’m also a Mac enthusiast getting my games on Steam. And I can confirm I have at least 8 friends who own only Macs (we’re all animators and designers) who would like to play the game.

In fact, I bought the game on Steam anyway — to support it — hoping that one day it comes to SteamOS…

Another Mac user who only buys games through Steam here :) Will definitely purchase The Witness if it becomes available for Mac.

coming up on 5 months, i guess i was wrong, though i could wait another 7 years for the game

Jonathan, when you get closer with the Witness, please open up a pre-buy account so all of us can assist you in funding your next project. It could get you a nice infusion of funds to get it rolling.
Keep up the good ideas and inventiveness that keeps real gaming alive.

DB

I am also curious about pricing strategy for a game like this.

Braid caused a big stink by coming out at $15 (pushing the upper limit of XBLA games at the time). Even before I played the game I thought $15 sounded fair. After buying it, I felt that $15 was a bargain. Yet people didn’t hesitate to complain.

It’s fun to speculate about The Witness:

Are there mandated pricing considerations from Sony?
Is there a marketing plan to justify a higher price?
Is DLC part of the plan in the future?
Does the game have a super secret “twist” or is otherwise easily spoiled? I often wonder if the Let’s Play videos decrease sales for games like these.
How are the various platforms (to include iOS later) matched up in terms of price?

I would love to see any post mortems after launch about your game. Have fun finishing it up!

There are many games that you could take to make a comparison for game extent and price tag. For example Batman Arkham Origins is 20 euro and if I recall corectly it has been the same on release. And I would consider that as an AAA game. So I don’t think its fair to say that the witness (as an indie game) would be in no way 20 euro (because it possibly could be). I personally expect it around 25 euro. I’m not a specialist with market trends in gaming industry, but I feel like the game will make more profit if they price it lower.

I would pay $50. It’s digital (very convenient) and an Indie game (yay! supporting indies!) so I think $50 would be fair.

it will probably be more than 20 for sure. Theyve spent alot of time on this game and I know they had to get loans to finish it so 20 dollars wouldnt make sense. I don’t know if 60 dollars is a good price point either though considering it is an indie game, most people don’t know what this game is and wouldn’t want to spend 60 on a unknown game. That being said I think it will be about 40 dollars which seems like a fair compromise between the two.

Agreed :)

2035, probably :P

Ach, I wish I’d just written something like ‘thanks for letting us know, Jon. May the rest of the process go really well for you all’.

*dreams about The Witness*

Usually there is some delay as we go through certification on consoles. But usually that is a matter of weeks.

thank you for the hard work!

That´s easily my most anticipated game. Can´t wait.

Stay awesome.

I think maybe you haven’t really tried to connect with the puzzles, I think if you try to engage with them more critically, you’ll relate to them more. First of all, the puzzles that they have shown are .5% of the game or something. Second, even at the simple level with which they have to start out, the puzzles each seem to convey a little narrative. With the puzzles of separating the black dots from the white dots, there’s an element of segregation and a desire for homogenity. With the dots you have to go through, there’s an idea that a situation where you could normally approach from multiple angles is limited. That’s a little phony, though and not what I really feel. With the symmetric puzzles, I have nothing to say despite that those look like they would feel really nice to play around in.
That’s all that’s on the internet so far, and it’s only an extremely tiny portion of what it has to offer. The game first appealed to me because of its sense of mystery, scale, and percieved simplicity.

Looks gorgeous but the puzzle part doesn’t seem particularly interesting from what they’ve shown. I wasn’t a fan of myst but I love braid so hoping for the best. Regardless of how fun it ends up being, I have a lot of respect for the level of craftsmanship evident in Jons work, so even if it’s not my cup of tea I’m sure it will be worth checking out. Good luck with the final push guys, there’s only one way to end the pain. Ship it! ;)

my guess is it’ll come out anywhere from 1-5 months.

Is it actually “Coming Soon” or will we have to wait more than a few months yet? I really can’t wait to play your game and I hope it comes out ASAP! :)

I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it off just because we have been “Coming Soon” for so long!

WHAT IF THE WITNESS IS TERRIBLE?

… nah – IMMPOSSIBURU!

I think a game like The Witness needn’t be on the App Store for people to be interested.
The success of the Humble Bundles (the earlier ones at least) on OS X is an indication that there is definitely a market.
Personally I am desperately hoping the game will make it to OS X but I can understand the uncertainty.

In theory this would increase difficulty, but in reality our puzzles are very different from those, so it isn’t a factor.

In answer to Jonathan’s question below: YES! Make it happen, Cap’n Blow! :)

I get all the games I can on Mac. There are way more mid-sized developers making mac games now. It’s getting to the point where I’m mildly annoyed that I have to go boot up my PC to play a new game. (I will for The Witness, but I’m looking to get away from PC stuff.)

Personally, I don’t use the Mac store at all, and I find it annoying and constraining. Steam is great, and so is direct download from a website.

my birthday is also in march, but this is the first year that I’ve known about this game

The question is not if you have to wait one more but if you have to wait one or two more. :(

I have waited for this game for many birthdays.

Will I have to wait one more, I wonder?

I have a question about the puzzles that I haven’t seen asked: I am a huge, huge fan of “Japanese”-style grid logic puzzles, many of which involve drawing a path/loop through a grid (like, for example, Masyu. One of the benefits of doing these on paper is that, while solving your grid, you are free to draw non-consecutive parts of the loop/grid and then work logically to connect them eventually.

From what I have seen, it looks like the user is expected to draw many of these grids from start to finish as one unbroken line. Were there any talks that this might artificially increase difficulty, since a more “logical” solution might not be one that is linear from the start of a path to the end? Or were puzzles designed with the knowledge that players were being forced to get from Point A to Point B, and so the logic was *made* more “linear”? In that case, did you find that limiting?

Or am I just making huge assumptions based on what might be a small subset of all of the puzzles?

I’m completely lying and just trying to sound encouraging. I wish this was released yesterday.

omg! me too. After reading this and seeing The Witness on the “coming soon” section, I thought it was released. :?

I think if you tried hard enough you could imagine it. ;)

I can hardly imagine that anyone here fits this criteria… lol

I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HATE AUTO CORRECT!

DUN DUN!

THE***

TONIGHT’S THEORY NIGHT WERE GONNA MAKE IT HAPPEN!!

DUN DUN!

TONIGHT WE’LL PUT ALL OTHER THINGS ASIDE!

DUN DUN!

One of these days/weeks/months (it seems we can discard “years”?) we’re going to get the best news: a release date. Good luck to the team finishing the game.

You should release a nineties style limited physical edition with a big cardboard box, a map, a thick manual and a jewel case as a reference to Myst. People would throw a lot of money at you.

If it is anything like I’m expecting it to be (and the chances are very, very high), it is going to be my favourite game ever made.

spoiler, there is a boat that was in one of jon’s very short streams of the game, I think that’s a sort of quick-travel system, but it might not be, maybe it was just some sort of debugging feature, though I doubt that

I don’t know. We need to assess. OS X has some weird issues caused by Apple. For example, we probably won’t release on the Mac App Store, because that requires your program to be sandboxed and go through weird contortions. We’ll look at it, but I suspect we may not do it. At which point we have to look at whether anyone is going to ever play the game (relatively speaking) if it is not on the Mac App Store. I haven’t done research on this lately, so maybe there are lots of people getting games off the Internet/Steam/etc on Mac. We need to look at it.

Hi Jon, I’m really looking forward to the game. I hope you can at least support SteamOS then it will probably work fine on other sane distributions. Is OS X in the same league, or will it be easier to release for that?

There are a lot more puzzles in this game, so there is a lot more spread. Some puzzles are easy (but interesting). Some are hard. A few are really *really* hard. We can make them really hard when because we don’t require a 100% solution to get to the end of the game.

I am pretty sure this game will be a rival of portal game even may beating it.
Awesome graphics.
Awesome puzzles.
Awesome sounds.
Cant wait to play it on my PS4.
Just want to know when this ******* game will come out!, I hope Q1 or Q2

I actually really like his idea. You’re right that the game is about epiphany, but JB said in an interview that different people get stuck on different things. There might just be a section that no matter where else you go in the game or think about it, the epiphany’s just not gonna occur. If I may make a quick comparison to some AAA games, think about open-world games with collectibles (bobbleheads in Fallout, Hidden packages in GTA, etc.) It’s always more fun and rewarding to find them on your own, but sometimes there’s those last ten or so that you just can’t find. You finally guiltily look them up, and realize “I would have NEVER found that”. There might be sections like that for people in this game, “I would have never figured that out”.

So then, wouldn’t it be better for the developers themselves to incorporate a semi-rewarding hint system rather than just have us cheat and look it up? Because of this games open world style, we may be stuck on the desert, for example, and while looking for the solution to a desert puzzle, we accidentally see something from the swamp that we haven’t even visited yet, and it’s ruined. An in-game hint system could help avoid all this.

Just a thought, if it’s not already a part of the game and it would add a lot more time to the development I’d agree it’s not worth it, just wanted to throw my two cents in that it’s a pretty solid idea.

Ah well. Can’t say I’m not disappointed, but I understand. I don’t know what you guys are thinking for pricing once the game comes out digitally, but if it’s in the $19.99-29.99 range, I’d definitely be willing to pay a full 59.99 for a retail version. That way the publishers could still keep the difference and feel like they won, and you could still make pretty much the same amount you charged for each digital download. Just a thought anyway, I of course have much less knowledge on the subject and could be completely wrong. I’d be interested to hear if you guys start to reconsider the subject.

If the corruption in the chain is the issue, you could do a semi-limited run and just sell them from this website. I don’t know how much work that would be, but I’m sure there would be a lot of interest if you did.

Myself, I’ll be buying digital. Game boxes just take up space I don’t have

Windows PC and Xbox One are NOT the same. The biggest difference is to ship on the Xbox One a developer needs to go through a painful certification process that is largely arbitrary and a waste of the developer’s time. (This is true to some extent on PS4 as well; it is the nature of console systems for some reason).

It is not at all an easy port. It is a painful port.

<3

Hello,

you know, Windows PC and XBOX ONE are almost the same, see DX12.

When will we see an XBOX ONE Version of the game?

From a Business Point, this really makes sense, because its easy to port from Windows to XBOX.

Thanks in advance.

Thank you.

Please do it anyway, Jon.

It almost definitely wouldn’t run on my current system (I had to send my busted Radeon HD 6670 back and am now sitting here forlornly with the old Geforce 6200TC amongst other rubbish) but I’d still buy it day one, or pre-order, whichever comes first.

(Obviously if SteamOS becomes consumer-ready and launches and gets a lot of people using it, that may change the balance of things. Or other surprising things might happen. Time always bring surprises.)

I don’t know. We have to assess the situation.

Right now we have an OpenGL version of the game — it’s not 100% maintained currently, but it basically works — and we would use that on platforms like Linux and OS X. The question is just whether it makes sense to release the game on Linux. Technically speaking, desktop Linux seems to be a lot less robust and stable than it was even 5 years ago. So the amount of headache involved in releasing a game is higher than before, and becomes Really A Lot Higher since The Witness is a much beefier game than Braid was (it hits the GPU a lot harder, with a lot of shaders, a lot of textures, etc). Under those conditions driver issues really matter a lot.

Meanwhile, we have Linux versions of Braid up on the Humble Store, Steam, and the Ubuntu Software Centre. However, not many people buy the Linux version of the game, so from a purely financial standpoint, it doesn’t really make sense to make a Linux version. So if we do it, it’ll be more for idealistic reasons: because we want to make the game available on as many operating systems as possible, and because Linux being a Free operating system is a good thing and one should support such things (especially looking at where Windows has been going lately in terms of trying to turn itself into a walled garden).

But, I just don’t know if we can reasonably sell the game as a professional product on Linux. The number of support issues will be *huge*, including many many many complaints of “the game just doesn’t run on my system”, and because Linux is so fragmented with so many weird cases, there is no Right Answer that we could just implement to fix this. So a flood of problems is inevitable. We are a small team and can’t really deal with that.

But yeah, we might do it anyway, for idealistic reasons. We’ll see. I can’t commit to anything until we get the game done on the launch platforms (Windows PC and PS4).

*passes out due to excitement*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iwBM_YB1sE

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I want to play this game !!!

Isn’t this game different, though? It’s about epiphany; If you’re stuck on one puzzle, go to another one, and you may have a sudden realization about how to solve the previous one.

My 2 cents.

How about https://theindiebox.com/ ?

I’d be very interested to read a blog post on the subject. If you have time.

There is more to considering a version ‘definitive’ than technical excellence. Obviously the PS4 version will out perform a tablet version, at least for the foreseeable future, however for a game in which a character is drawing lines on tablets the whole time (is it the whole game? Initially those puzzles were the first half, but that no longer appears to be the case), for the player to also be drawing on a tablet may be a preferable interface.

I would say the bigger concern for a tablet version is just player attention. I imagine tablet games are more generally consumed casually, the TV on in the background, or on thirty minute commutes, etc.

Sales might be tougher there though, I’d be surprised if there is a significant audience for iOS games priced how The Witness presumably will be. There are iOS hits that suggest otherwise, Square Enix for example have published ‘expensive’ games and seen great sales, but I imagine The Witness’ audience are the more engaged gamers, and they’ll lean towards the PC and console versions.

You could limit this to 1000 units and sell them directly through this website. I’d imagine margins on this kind of thing could be quite high as you can charge a premium price. Many people would pay $100+ for this kind of thing if they are big fans.

Bummed that there aren’t 666 puzzles in the game.

Jon – have you considered a progressive hint system (or a standalone website) where people can get non-spoiler hints that nudge them towards the solution?

I’m thinking along the lines of those Infocom books with the hints in invisible ink or the Universal Hint System: http://www.uhs-hints.com/

I’m still kicking myself that I looked at YouTube videos of three Braid puzzles and would have killed for a more subtle way to inch towards a solution.

Thanks for your help – looking forward to the release date.

Considering that notch bought one of the only physical copies of caustic window by aphex twin for 46,000 dollars, maybe you could make only one physical copy of the witness and start an auction for it, maybe notch would buy that for 6 figures.