You can find it on the App Store, and carry around the full game in your pocket...which is pretty crazy if you ask me.

The game will work with iOS 10 and up, on:
iPhone 5S (or newer)
iPad Air (or newer)
iPad Mini 2 (or newer)
iPod Touch 6th Generation

Oh, also, it's only $9.99!

If you are looking for 2-3 months of straightforward contract work, are excellent at optimizing art assets in Maya, can pick up workflows quickly and have good attention to detail, then we are looking for you! We are planning on shipping The Witness on iOS in a few months, but still have a lot of optimization work to get done.

Familiarity with The Witness is obviously a plus, as it is a very intricate game with a lot of gameplay-relevant details. Being able to work in-office in our San Francisco studio would also be nice, but is not required if you are really good at communicating long distance.

Please only apply if you have shipped games before and have a good idea of the optimiziation process, we do not have time to bring someone inexperienced into the fold!

Send resumes/portfolios to jobs@thekla.com

We are looking for a senior character artist, full time or contract, who excels at both designing and modeling intriguing characters in any style, and can also help out with environment art if the need arises.

We would prefer applicants who are very comfortable making 3D games from white box to polished product, in Maya/Max and in-engine. If you apply, you should be someone who can work in interesting, creative styles, and have the imagination and self motivation to take an abstract mockup and turn it into something stunning and meaningful, while also paying close attention to gameplay limitations.

Good communication skills and the ability to take and incorporate critique is a must, a generally pleasant and chill nature is a plus.

We would prefer someone who is based around San Francisco and can work in the office.

Please send portfolios to jobs@thekla.com

Hey there! Lately I've been seeing a lot of requests from people who want to buy framed panels, like the ones we have hanging in our office. We talked a little bit about how we might sell these with Jon, but decided it would be best to just release the images we used to print ours for free, and that way peeps can print their own however they like.

An important suggestion would be to print these on semi-glossy or glossy paper, as the colors tend to turn out completely faded on regular paper. Back when we were printing these, Luis tweaked the colors for some so they look better printed, so they might not be completely accurate on a monitor, but should look nice on paper.

Also, we just went to a nearby art store and picked out a bunch of square frames. We got mostly 8x8 inch and a couple of 12x12 inch ones. Most of the frames were just minimal black plastic, and only cost about $6, if I remember correctly, but we got nicer ones for a couple of the 12x12 ones, like the boat panel. You could probably even make Witness monitor style frames for them if you are crazy enough, that would be fun to see!

Here are the files we used:

A few months ago, only a few of Jon's friends were playing the game and checking for major problems, but now we have Francis as a game tester, and we have an other guy starting later this month as a tester too. With someone testing the game full time, the bugs are really piling up. This is great because we are getting the game in shape for release, but it's also wearing us down a bit because it's non-creative, discouraging work, since for every bug we solve there are usually more that appear on our list.

There are many different kinds of bugs, some really major and a ton of minor things that can be solved fairly quickly. We are finding errors of all sorts, in lightmaps, shadows, collision, grass planting, reflections, mesh placement, modeling, materials, sound, etc. Not to mention a bunch of weird things that sometimes take a while to track down. We also have to check the game in High, Medium and Low quality, because different errors can happen at the different settings.

The biggest bugs involve spoilers, since they are usually finicky and gameplay related, so I can't share those, but here are some minor ones that wouldn't generally take too long to fix:

-Here we have a bit of collision randomly hanging out in the desert. If you tried to walk through it, you would be blocked and have no idea why. Things like this were really difficult to find, until Casey added some tools to visualize the collision:

-Sometimes, we just get bugs of areas that look unfinished, or wrong, like this corner over here. Francis is supposed to tell us not only about serious errors, but also notify us about things that generally feel wrong to him as a player. By fixing these areas, we hopefully get rid of some potential immersion breaking moments.

-In this shot, some of the little modular rocks were not receiving any sunlight:

-And here we have two separate bugs, the turret that is getting black lightmaps, and an open rock mesh below:

-This is a shot of the player being able to walk into a rock, and seeing through it:

-This is a pretty one, some error with the clusters of the modular catwalk meshes:

-There are tons of cases where the grass is clipping through things:

-And little lightmap errors that mean there is a back-facing triangle somewhere in the mesh:

-In this area the dynamic lights create some really ugly shadows:

-And finally, the bug that haunted us for at least a year, the giant colorful grass bug. It would happen almost always when replanting grass, and would not disappear until you restarted the game. Insanely large, colorful versions of the grass would appear and wave in the wind, blocking you from doing anything. Still not sure if we ever figured this one out:

These are only a tiny sliver of all the different kinds of things that we run into while testing the game. It's a huge island and a lot of things can go wrong, so to make sure we ship a great game, we have to do a really thorough job. However, this and some optimization is pretty much all that's left to do!

And now, here is a bonus a picture of Jon doing something weird with a tape measure taped to a mug:

We managed to find Andrea Blasich, a most excellent artist skilled at both traditional and 3D sculpture. He is blowing through the statues and continues to wow us with his stuff. He just finished this giant lady sculpted into the mountainside, and it turned out so beautiful, I wanted to share it:

When we moved in two years ago, we just pulled things out of the moving boxes and shoved them here and there so we could get to work as quickly as possible, so the mess was only getting worse. We spend most of our waking lives here, so I thought it was worth a few hours to make it a more pleasant space. I moved some furniture around to create a more convenient place to test the ps4 build, threw out a giant pile of old things, put up some of the decorations we made for the Play Station Experience booth, etc.

I figured I'd put up some pictures, so you guys can see where The Witness is getting finished (because it's getting finished, yo!):

You can use Oswin, a.k.a. The Witness Dog, for spatial reference.

We spent over a week play testing,  bug fixing, designing the booth, printing banners, and re-designing the website. It was encouraging to see that the game was already in very good shape and nothing major was broken...getting it ready for the event almost took less effort than getting decent prints of the banners from a print shop.

Here are some images of the booth:

People loved the game! Even those who came in with doubts ended up playing for long periods of time, and we got all very positive comments. The line in front of the booth was huge, it would have been great to have a bigger area with more PS4s.

We made some new posters while preparing the booth:

• Play
• Fullscreen

If you wanted to print your own posters or bookmarks, you can download the huge versions here.

Jon also did a short Twitch stream, it's on YouTube here.

We are all working hard, hence the silence on the blog. Always appreciate the kind words in the replies, so I wanted to at least add a quick new wallpaper to say thanks. Hope you like it!

...can't say, but it sure was fun to build!

Around Christmas time, Jon surprised us with a bunch of new slab buildings full of puzzles in the center of the island.

Previously, there were only some empty ruins here, so the whole area was redesigned by the architects to accommodate the new puzzles. I attacked it first, about 3 weeks ago, adding a couple of puzzles myself and starting to model the three buildings on the right. Now, the entire art team is working on it. Luis is taking care of the entire left portion, which is still mostly low ruins, Eric is tackling the tower in the middle, and Alex is working on the building behind the tower, with the orange box sticking out of it. There is still one slab building up for grabs, but it's coming together very quickly for such a huge area!

The interviews happened somewhat randomly. A whole floor of the Standard Hotel was dedicated to indie games that would appear on the PS4, and the press wandered around, peeking into rooms and sitting down to play the games when they were available. I snapped a picture of the room where The Witness was shown:

We spent two days showing the game to many journalists. They usually played from the beginning for a while, then Jon took them on a guided tour of an area where the puzzles were starting to get a little crazy, explaining the thought process behind them. It was so great to finally see the game being played! Everyone seemed to love it, too!

During the nights, we were invited to a few events. Sony took the indie developers out for dinner, where I met Shuhei Yoshida, and chatted with the guys from Secret Ponchos about goldsmithing and tattoos. It was a good opportunity to get to know the other developers, and a nice gesture by Sony. The next night there was also a bigger, louder party in the penthouse of a tall building, to which local developers were invited as well. It was so full we could barely move, so I just stood around trying to piece together conversation through the incessant club music.

By Wednesday we were done with the interviews and I had some time to explore New York and feel totally lazy while Jon got some programming and design done in a cafe. I ended up spending most of the day in the MoMA, where there just happened to be a special Magritte exhibition going. Love Magritte! Oh, and I also got to see Sleep No More, which was a really amazing experience!

The most unbelievable part of the trip for me, however, was seeing our artwork displayed on the side of the 17 story hotel. It was difficult to decipher right up close, since it was displayed on huge sheets of LED lights, but it was wonderful to be right there to see it happen! We took a few pictures but they turned out very blurry, so here are some taken by Kevin Geisler:

Only Alex's windmill and my autumn forest and orchard made it onto the building, but I thought I would include all the original images we submitted, since we put some effort into getting them together. These are pretty high res, in case you guys want to print your own posters or crop them down and make some wallpapers:

The process for building this ship was interesting. We have architects helping us with building designs, but even the architects were not entirely familiar with the structures of ships. We spent a lot of time looking at reference images, talking about the materials and how the entire structure would decay over time. They gave me a base design for the hull, deck, bridge, and the inner beams of the ship. I modeled that whole, then split it up into five pieces.

The front, middle, and back pieces were kept somewhat intact, the rest was split into scattered rubble to dress the scene. Next, it was time to figure out the gameplay and decide what parts of the ship would be accessible and what parts would be rotten away. Because the ship was so huge and I was modeling it alone, I had to be careful about limiting what would be navigable and what would be seen, since I wanted to keep my workload to a minimum while still having very interesting, believable areas. I spent a long time cutting holes, bending floors and ripping out beams.

Then, I had to figure out how to make a decaying heap of metal with our simple, clean style, as described by Eric in the last post. My first attempts had minimal detail in the geometry, with a lot of noise and contrast in the textures. It was exactly the opposite of what we usually do, but I was trying to develop a process for detailing the entire ship quickly, and it's a lot faster to use blendmaps to add noise than to tediously cut and shape geometry. It looked terrible, but I was at a loss for how to make it better quickly. Fortunately, Luis and Eric encouraged me to just reduce the contrast in the textures, and let the small details in the modeling stand on their own. It took ten seconds to lighten some textures, and all of a sudden I had something I was finally happy with. At first it felt wrong to leave large surfaces so plain, but the other artists were right. With our beautiful lightmaps and simple style, a little detail and a few modular rubble and rust pieces were all that was needed to make the space feel like it belonged to our game.

This shipwreck is still not quite finished, but it is the last huge project on my plate before moving on to the many smaller projects and tasks we still need to complete to ship the game.

My hope is that at some point we will add a media section where we can put more wallpapers, posters, screenshots and such.  We are all working hard to finish the game, however, so it's not exactly a high priority.