Well, I think we will post a little more frequently, because we'll have increasing amounts to say about the game as we get closer to release. In the meantime, here's:

(It is longer than Long Screenshot #1!)

Voiceover

This week we just finished recording the majority of the final voiceover. We're going to do a little more in early January, but most of it is in the can. After New Year's we'll make some postings where we announce who the voice actors are (you may know some of them from other recent games!)

Physical Box Release

We've had some people asking us whether there will be a physical retail release of The Witness. It's seeming likely, as we have been in talks with a couple of parties for a while about that possibility. *However*, it looks like if there is a retail release, it won't happen until a little bit after the digital release. The reason is just that we need all the time we can get up until the release date in order to get all the finishing touches into the game; but because of the lead-time involved in physical manufacturing and distribution, we would have to freeze the game right about now in order to have it on store shelves for the release date. *Or* we could delay the digital release date in order to wait for the physical. But I don't see a good reason to do either of those things. I would rather just focus our energy on making the game as good as we can make it, and a retail version can lag behind by a little bit.

What Else is Going On

We've gotten the bulk of the translations into the game for all the languages mentioned in the previous blog posting. There is a small percentage of text that will come in a little later, but for the most part those languages are in. Also, we will be adding Hungarian to the list of languages suppoorted at release.

Here are some screenshots of Arabic and Russian:

Of all the languages, supporting Arabic took by far the most programming work, and as you can see from some gaps between the letters, and a couple of cases where letters are too close to each other, it's not quite done yet. I will be working on that as soon as I finish with this blog posting! But I think even with these issues it is starting to look nice.

We're doing *lots* of little gameplay fixes all around the island, like, what does collision feel like in this area when you bump into things, what happens if you are standing in this doorway and the door tries to close on top of you, all that kind of thing.

Visuals are mostly locked down at the moment; we are no longer changing big things about how the game looks, we're more making spot-fixes here and there every time we see something we don't totally like.

It will not only show the game in a further state of visual development than the previous trailer (which is two and a half years old now -- wow!), it'll also show lots of scenes you probably haven't seen before.

The trailer isn't done yet, but here are a few stills:

Ignore the debug text in the upper-right (including the frame rate; these were taken on a monitor that's locked at 30Hz; the game runs much faster on higher-end PCs.) Also, the actual trailer will be produced at much sharper image quality and higher resolution. These are just snippets of the non-final footage we are using to figure out the composition and flow of the trailer.

Last week, as you could see from previous screenshot, we got  a rough layout of the area in the engine and tried to find answers to any remaining issues.

Today the goal was to sort out the design  and navigation of the main entrance and the small towers.
This is one of my first mockups that didn't look quite right.

The architects took a look at it and provided some 3d models of how castle stairs are usually assembled as well as sketches of how it should look:

After, I tried to figure out the details from references and what "pieces" I would need to build the structure.
Two years ago I went for vacations in Portugal and tried to see some castles. One of them in Guimaraes struck me as very similar to the entry yard. I made sure I got some pictures and now they are proving to be useful with angles that would be hard to get from online research.

Here is the current result using different modular stairs/floor/battlement pieces:

And the current overall look by the end of today:

Tomorrow I'll be tackling  the rest of the exterior walls and the 3 other towers.

This is of course a very crude mockup of what the new starting area will be. It's smaller than the old one and should work a little better play-wise. We have yet to reshape the terrain around it, so there are huge holes. Our deadline to have this area fully rebuilt is the 6th of June!

Current puzzle count is 627.

Luis has been doing a lot of work lately on the mountain and especially the stuff at the top.

Other folks have been doing a bunch of work on things that are not as obvious in this picture!

Current puzzle count: 595

Normally I would post an Island Snapshot, but the viewpoint we have been using for Island Snapshots is a little bit unfortunate lately, since the main thing taking up the view is the mountain, which is an area we haven't worked on modeling-wise lately. (It is a big area so we are going to do a concentrated push on it in a little bit, when some other things get locked down.)

So, here are some screenshots of other stuff we have been working on lately. Both areas are in progress and will look better than this in the final game!

A lake that's central to the island...

A swampy area with light buildings and walkways. The vegetation you see here is temporary! But I am happy we are finally starting to work on this area; if you look at it in the trailer, for example, it's obviously very much more temporary.

It's been revamped by Alex, who is new on the team, helping us with the huge amount of modeling we still need to do to finish the game. Hopefully we'll get a bio paragraph for him soon on the About page.

The current puzzle count is 590.

The current footstep count is 1756.

P.S.: Last week we showed The Witness at E3. This was the first time we have ever shown the game running on the PlayStation 4. We got some nice write-ups about the game; here are just a few:

Steven Hansen from Destructoid really enjoyed the game!

Tara Long from Revision 3 really enjoyed the game! (She also gave us an award at the show!)

Darren Franich from Entertainment Weekly put us at #1 on the list of most exciting games of E3.

Matt Miller of Game Informer seemed to really like the game, and put together a list of defining features.

Chris Leggett of Gameplanet says The Witness was his personal favorite game of E3. (The folks at Gameplanet who chose the photos to go on the article used some unfortuante, super-old development photos though!)

Tom McShea and Shaun McInnis of Gamespot gave a video summary from the show, seeming to like the game a lot as well!

... which doesn't look too much different from last time's. Partially this is because we've been working on things that you don't see from this angle.

Here's a shot from a different angle:

We still have so much to do!

On my end, I've been working for the past couple of weeks on UI-related things. For a week I was doing better touch controls (perhaps we'll post a video of this soon), and for a week I was somewhat-rewriting the code that implements tracing lines on panels. This can get surprisingly complicated, and I've rewritten it a few times. I think this is close to the last time, though.

The game tells me the current puzzle count is 574, which is higher than I expected, but hey.

Most of what we've been working on lately is not visible in this shot, though! The biggest obvious changes are probably in the forest and beach on the left-hand side.

Well, you got a pretty good look at the island in the trailer we recently released in conjunction with the PlayStation 4 announcement. That version has a lot of new modeling compared to the January snapshot, because we were working on the trailer pretty hard. But some new modeling has happened since then, and there are some subtle but nice things to see here.

Since someone is going to ask: The current puzzle count is 499.

(Watch it in HD + fullscreen if you have the bandwidth!)

Current puzzle count: 505.

The current puzzle count is 497. (This is lower than last time; last time was an overcount, as we had some temporary duplicates in the world that were being counted mistakenly.)

Today we shipped an update, still to the same limited group. We have some initial tech issues to work out before we go wider (game packaging issues, graphics card incompatibilities, and the like).

Here's a desktop screenshot from one of the testers, with someone chiding him about what he's playing:

(The Witness window in this shot is artificially resized to make room on the desktop; by default we launch at 1280x720.)

I know that the impulse is to think "oh wow they are almost done!" Don't think that, it's not the case. We still have a gigantic amount of work to do and it'll be a while before the game is done.

Random Trivia Q&A

Q: How many footstep sound effects are in The Witness?

A: 1,119 so far. They sound really good! We will probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the game with the most footstep sounds...

Current puzzle count: 528.

They may not look tremendously different from this off-island vantage point, but when you are down there moving around, the difference is substantial. I feel a lot better about the layout now.

One of my primary design goals, all through development, has been to keep the island spatially small, so that there isn't a lot of wandering through empty or pointless spaces. The idea is to take the best parts of an open-world game, involving choice, exploration and discovery, but compressing these into a maximally dense experience.

That has been going well, but there's an interesting phenomenon where, as we add more detail to the world, it starts to feel a lot bigger. When something is a mostly-featureless plain it is easy to feel like it's small, but once you are passing tiny rocks and plants that are set up very carefully, your brain has more scale reference. So there have been a couple of times during development where we stopped and said "Hey wait a minute, things are just too big."

Last week that happened again; we were looking at two different parts of the island on the same day, and both of them seemed much bigger than we needed. So, we decided to go back to the overall island plan and try to compress it further. We had a discussion about this on Thursday, then the architects talked it over; you see the result of those discussions in the image above. These maps are a handy guide to helping us figure out what we can cut and how we can scoot existing areas around to pack them a little better, and to better-define the areas between them.

This is a little painful, since we almost had the island back into playable shape, and this knocks it back out of playable shape for a little longer. But my hope is that we can just make a mess and then clean it up very quickly.

In other news, there had been a puzzle that I needed to design for two years -- in the sense that I knew I needed to build the puzzle in order for a certain area to be complete, and I knew what that puzzle vaguely had to be about, but didn't have any good ideas on how to build it. Last week I had a breakthrough on that and built it very quickly; it's now one of the best puzzles in the game. So things are coming along well!

September 2011:

August 2012:

You can see Ignacio's new water in this shot (which will continue to improve, and already we have a lot of control over water visuals that we are not using yet). There's a bunch of new audio in the game. Art folks are working on revising various areas and getting them into fully playable shape. Lately I have been thinking hard about how to improve various puzzles (a couple of puzzles already just got *way* better this week), and I have also started rearranging the jungle area, which you see in the left foreground. We've had a lot of discussions with the landscape architects, and they've given us a detailed topography for the island that helps define some of the features we think will be good to have, like this river you can see to the left of the mountain (solid blue for now; it's temporary!).

Also, a couple of us have been on vacation!

Lately, Ignacio and Salvador took the features all the way so that we can use them easily in normal workflow. (This happened over some period of time, but the last parts came together this week). Now you can take a screenshot, screw around with the colors in Photoshop, and load it back into the game to control the grading. I am pretty sure this is not our idea, and we got it from the Uncharted guys or someone like that (Update: The idea was developed by Naty Hoffman and others; see the comments to this article).

Here's how it goes. First, I find an area the look of which I would like to change:

Next I hold down the control key while taking the screenshot, causing it to be saved with a special color bar along the top of the image:

Then I go into Photoshop and screw around with the colors. Here I am using the Hue/Saturation tool to shift the palette away from red:

Or, instead, I may wish to shape the histogram of the image:

That color bar at the top of the screen acts as a look-up table. The game doesn't need to understand what operations we have performed in Photoshop; it just knows what that color bar looked like when the screenshot was saved out, and, by comparing it to the colors in the result, knows how to transform any color in the rendered scene.

In the game, you can now attach these grading operations to spatial markers, so that color grading kicks in when you are inside specific areas. Here I am setting up some markers in the editor (the marker is the big white box):

After setting up two of these boxes, one for each of the two weird color operations I created, then I can walk around in the game and have these operations apply to everything:

This gives us a really nice degree of control over how the game looks. We plan to use it to help with the color theming that will tie together specific areas.

As you'll notice, we are starting to work on that big mountain that is closest to the camera. (Finally!) This is still an early concept; it will change a lot.

Ignacio recently implemented a clean way to print an overhead map of the island, in flat colors, which is probably useful for marking things up:

On the modeling side, Eric has been refining an area that's far from the camera in these shots (you'll see some screenshots of the interior soon). Luis has been working on the style of our outdoor scenes; we have interesting problems that involve maintaining a visual style that is good for gameplay while also creating images that are most striking. Orsi has been working on refinements to a few particular areas, particularly, adding some deeper puzzle complexity to the area with the tall trees (off to the right in the screenshot image).

Until recently I had been bothered by some unanswered questions regarding the endgame. There were things I wanted to do that didn't fit together and that felt clumsy. But thankfully, after taking a relaxing weekend where I barely worked on the game at all, on Monday solutions to most of these problems just popped into my head. So that's cool.

There are still some questions about the gameplay but I think the biggest ones are now nailed down. Over the next couple of weeks I will be implementing the remaining parts of this endgame.

Tech-wise, Andy is pretty far along with the OpenGL renderer, which will help us hit other platforms, and Salvador has tied up the basics of asset streaming and is doing some rendering optimization stuff. Ignacio is refining the LOD system in addition to many miscellaneous tasks.

The current puzzle count is 415 (I think we have been over-counting a little recently; this is a more-accurate count).

In case you missed it, I did a live Q&A with Chris Hecker of Spy Party today on Kotaku.

In terms of world-building, lately Luis, Shannon, Eric and Orsi been doing a few things: (1) revisiting the most complicated areas in the game and making them playable with something resembling shipping art assets [until now they were playable only with placeholder pieces]; (2) starting to figure out what the game will look like, outdoor-wise; (3) stuff I can't spoil in a post like this.

On the tech side Ignacio is working on optimizing the game, as often. A big part of this has been working on the mesh LOD system, but he's also looking at performance issues related to specific subsystems like grass rendering. Salvador has done a bunch of work on asset streaming, which seems to be pretty solid so far. Andy made a number of improvements to the collision system and audio system, and has now started work on an OpenGL port of the rendering, which, when done, is a big foothold toward portability to other platforms besides Windows.

The audio guys, Andrew and Geoff, have done some really nice stuff in terms of sound. The audio aesthetic for the game is starting to come together. We have lots of rad footsteps and are doing some very interesting things in terms of environment sounds.

This is not a comprehensive account of everything everyone's been doing; it is just what leaps to mind!

In a strange twist of fate, the corner of the island that I chose long ago to be closest to the camera is the place that has taken longest to develop. As you can see, we are continually modifying this area but it's still in a very rough state. Most other areas of the island are further along.

Lately I have been doing a little bit of playtesting and high-concept discussion (more on this later in the week). I've also been doing more work on the endgame. The modelers have been cranking away at making areas look better. I think we have another engine technology posting coming down the pipe.

But today we are going to have the first in a series of meetings wherein we think pretty hard about the topography of the island and what the flow of natural curious investigation will tend to be from various spots. Expect the island to look pretty different in the next update! (Or maybe it will turn out that things are mostly fine...)

Lately, I have been working on some of the more sophisticated puzzles in the game. These are things that were at least sort-of done already, but I wanted to revise the designs to improve them -- to ensure that the puzzles are as interesting as possible and built as closely as possible around the core themes of the areas that contain them. I am happy with the way these are coming along so far, but there is definitely still some work to do here.

The art team has been working further to nail down the style of the game, now focusing on cliffs and plants and other natural things, as well as control panels and other bits of machinery. We're also taking a few buildings that the architects have finished designing, and starting to build out the geometry as one really would for a video game. (The architects give us buildings modeled in SketchUp, and they tend to come into the game a bit messy, but also, not modeled the way an experienced video game modeler would do it).

On the programming side, we've got lots done lately. Andy has added a software occlusion culling system, which should help with frame rates in the game. He's also been playing with culling for water reflections. Salvador got animations working in the exporter and in the game, so now we can play animations on entities, which is very useful. (We worked on the game for years and built something fully playable without this ability!) I have been going back and doing the gameplay work for animated entities, as some things have to change in the gameplay logic. In all it is a very nice improvement. Salvador is now working on asset streaming, which will help the game start up faster and run better (and help it run at all on lower-end platforms like the iPad). Ignacio's been doing a whole lot of fixes to various systems and hammering away at the todo list. One of these things has been better control for the tone mapping process. We now get a graph of tone mapping curve:

And we also get the ability to export screenshots into Photoshop that have a color key on them; then the colors can be tweaked in Photoshop and re-imported into the game to alter tone mapper settings. This is in many cases more convenient than playing with those sliders.

The current puzzle count is 440.

As expected in the previous update, over the past week or so I went back and worked on the endgame again. I built an original version of the endgame last summer; I had one friend playtest it, and it worked out pretty well, though I felt it wasn't quite epic enough. I didn't know what more to do with it at the time, so I just let it sit, and went to thinking about other parts of the game.

Lately I had more ideas for the endgame, so I went into personal crunch mode and rebuilt into something more epic. This was one of the most productive periods of my working life (maybe the most productive) and I think this area, all taken together, may be the most interesting thing I have ever designed. However, it may be a little too difficult for the player, at the moment! Today I playtested this endgame and one other area of the game, with a game designer friend of mine, and it took nine and a half hours to play through these two areas (6 hours for the endgame, 3.5 hours for the other area). I think this is a little long, so I am going to be tuning these areas and cleaning them up a little bit. This weekend hopefully I can get in some playtest time with Jeff and Casey of Jeff and Casey Time, so if that happens we will see how it goes.

(It's interesting; I haven't done a playtest of The Witness for a while, but I was still thinking of it as a 10-15 hour game, and that's what I tell people when they ask. But if these two areas by themselves, even after being cleaned up, are 6-7 hours of playtime, that means the whole game is ... ... much longer. Sometime in a month or two, I'll do some playtests with people who have never seen the game before, and we'll see how long it really is.)

Meanwhile, on the art side, we've been working on the style of the game; expect a future blog post as we come to conclusions on that.

Tech-wise, Andy has been working on performance stuff. First he made raycasting much faster; til now the game had been relatively lazy about spatial organization. Andy implemented a quadtree for finding entities in the world and enabled k-d tree generation and serialization for casting rays against individual meshes. (We had k-d tree code already as part of a library but weren't using it.) Salvador is working on in-game animation playback, as well as exporting; until now we have been making do without animations, but once this is in the game it will help us with a number of issues.

This is because this corner of the world is one of the last areas that we haven't really figured out, in terms of what goes where. There is sort of just some random stuff dumped there right now. That will change pretty soon.

Expect the next few island snapshots to show a lot of big changes. We've reached the point where the basic gameplay is settled, I'm refining many of the specific puzzles, and we've got at least rough drafts of many of the architectural layouts. That means we can start planning the island a bit better. Over the next month or so, we're going to be changing the shape of the island to something a little more geologically plausible, something that carries more information. It's going to be interesting to do this without disrupting the gameplay layout of the island too much.

The current puzzle count is 427. In January I scrapped and re-designed an area and its 60-or-so puzzles. The previous area was inside dark caves, which is a bit cliche, and the gameplay hook that motivated my setting that area in caves, which I had hoped would be cool, didn't work very well. In addition, I felt that the puzzles themselves, while fitting into the rest of the game, were the weakest part of the game. I'd been feeling this way for a long time, but I didn't have a good solution for it til late December. I moved the location and redesigned the puzzles. Now the theme of the location is totally different, has a gameplay hook that works way better than the cave thing, and is very cool. The puzzles situated in this area are also much stronger than before, because I found a way to change the rules of those puzzles to make them much tighter. They'd felt wishy-washy before (people would play through that area and, after finishing, lack clarity on what the puzzles were saying. That's no good.)

We certainly could have shipped the game with the old area in the caves with the old puzzles, and probably shipped the game at least a month sooner, but an important skill in building a beautiful game is knowing when something just isn't good enough.

Next I am going back to the endgame, which I did my first pass at last summer sometime; I've got a gameplay hook to add which I think will bring it over the top and make it extra-good. I'll be working on that over the next few weeks while also working with the landscape architects on the island revision.

Also, we've got a new programmer starting soon (this week or next!) Combined with our other new addition, who's been here a few weeks (Andrew Smith, ex-Zipper and -Oddworld; hi Andy!) we will have quite a bit of tech manpower to bring to bear on finishing this game.

When we sat down to start working with the architects, one of the first things we did was put together a history of the island where The Witness takes place: how long has the island been there?  What groups of people lived there, and what kind of structures did they build?  How did later civilizations use the structures built by earlier groups?

Quickly we developed a running theme of sites that are old and have over time been used in two or three different ways.  When entering a new location, you probably first notice the most basic elements of its structure: where you can walk to easily, versus where you can't; what puzzles or goals are calling for your attention, and what walls or doors might be preventing you from getting to them.  If this is all you care about, you can then play through the area in a very utilitarian fashion.  But if you have an eye for detail, you may notice the elements of modern construction shoring up the design of an older structure with a different purpose.  The design of the new structure tells you something about what the newer guys were doing there, and how it differs from what the older guys were doing there.  And if you look really closely, you can see traces of the original footprint of the site (perhaps these are very subtle, some bricks just rising above the dirt in a few places), and infer the purpose of this very old site too.

If you see the different civilizations that came to this island as embodying different philosophies; and you see the structures they built as representative of the way these philosophies led them to interact with the world; and you see further that when they replaced a site, it represents the rejection of some older worldview that they consider no longer useful, then perhaps you start to get some idea of the amount of backstory that can be encoded into the world, nonverbally.

All of this backstory is also directly relevant to the main story -- who you are, why you are on this island, how you may get back home.  So, to put it another way, the game is constructed so that the more you pay attention to tiny details during your travels, the more insight you will have to the central story, even though it may not be obvious at any given time what a particular detail has to do with that story.

The most-recent issue of Game Informer printed an article that showed some of the first screenshots of the newly-architected areas appearing in the game engine.  It is an interesting article; pick up the issue if you haven't!  They also put up a companion article online (but which not as extensive) here:

(Summary article at Game Informer)

The area featured in this article is the one that we have taken furthest so far in terms of modeling and texturing.  Here are some other shots of it:

The Keep, before and after

The Keep, close-up 1

The Keep, close-up 2

The Keep, close-up 3

We've done basic planning for some of the other areas, so I thought it would be nice to show some screenshots of work in progress.  For each of these, there's a 'before' version (when we had a fully-playable game, but basic placeholder structures) and after (once we have incorporated the architects' designs, revised the site plans and in some cases even the puzzles, etc):

 

The Compound, before and after

Glass Factory, before and after

Peninsula, before and after

Vault, before and after

Don't regard these "after" images as representative of what the game will look like!  They are still works in progress, and the final game will look substantially better: scenes like these will feel richer due to the placement of detail objects, further care put into the texture mapping and lighting, refinement of the still-rough-drafty terrain features around these structures, and many other bits of subtle game development magic.  But I wanted to show these now since they provide a good taste of the game's flavor, and they show how much structural intelligence is brought to the table by working with the architects.  Yes, we could have started with the placeholder structures and made them more elaborate and better-looking, in a general video-game-level-design way, but that's different from having well-thought-out ideas subtly embodied in the structures of the areas, which is what we are going for.

The current puzzle count is 350.

Some parts of the island are pretty messed up in this screenshot. For the press tour, we made sure the whole game was more-or-less solid and playable. Just after that, though, we were free to tear things apart, move things around, change the sizes of areas, add new areas, and all that. We're still in the middle of that process and not everything has been made playable again.

Sun beams. These are accomplished with a radial blur centered on the sun, during postprocessing. The nice thing about this effect is how dynamic it is -- as you walk beneath the trees, the shape and intensity of the beams are changing all the time.

Due to the way the effect works, sometimes beams are drawn that are a little bit unphysical. You probably have to be looking closely to see that, but I am a little bit uncomfortable with it given that the game is all about the opposite of that. We'll see how this evolves. We've been talking about augmenting this with other effects.

A revised water reflection effect.

Softening of the shoreline, so that it doesn't look like one big alpha-blended water polygon intersecting the ground.

Here's what the island looks like now:

It's fun to look at this compared to another shot of the island, say, from about a year ago:

The current puzzle count is 328.

Much denser and more visually interesting; it's starting to look like maybe a good game!

Here are some close-ups of different areas now.

Autumnal:

Desert:

Foresty (there is a lightmapping problem on some of these trees so they are brighter than they should be!):

But now we are thinking about how to create colorful scenes, like in the previous post, and this style of blend-mapping did not seem like a very good idea. In order to create gradients across the scene, we would need to have a lot of blend layers; this would be slow and use a lot of texture memory (since now we are storing a lot of individual blend maps). Even once we did that, it would be laborious to control, and it's unclear that it would look good.

Ignacio mentioned that the Wolfire guys were just dropping one color map across their whole terrain. That seemed like a good idea to me -- I have done that before, but in contexts where we were trying to really crank up the resolution to levels that were ridiculous at the time, like 8192x8192 texture maps back in 2001. Rather than doing that, the idea now is to just use what is a reasonable-sized texture on a modern machine, and see what it looks like. So Shannon painted a 2048x2048 texture of the island (of which we are only really using less than half right now) and here's how it looks from up high:

Immediately this strikes me as much nicer, and much more in-tune with the art direction we want for the game. The buildings and other meshes now stick out like sore thumbs, but that is just what happens when you improve only a part of the scene. We'll be working on this.

Here's a scene from closer in:

As you can see, we have less detail close-up on the ground; things look a bit blurry. However, the colors are a lot better, and I think if we can adapt this scheme into something that permits sharper details up close, we will be able to make something that has a lot of character and looks special. In these shots, we are still using the old blend map system to tile high-detail normal maps across the terrain; that helps, but by itself it's not enough. (In recent videos for Overgrowth, like this one, you can see that they are doing something that provides close-up details, maybe just intensity maps that are being modulated by the color map). So we'll keep working on this and see how it goes.

Meanwhile, Ignacio has been revising the shadow map rendering. We used to have very speckly shadow maps, as I was using a 4-sample Poisson disc to sample the shadow map. Ignacio recently switched this to a Gaussian that has more taps, then applied some math tricks to reduce the number of taps. This results in softer shadows:

At some angles, shadow map jaggies still show up pretty clearly:

This is something we might work around in the final game by changing the scene when this happens! Or, it's possible the shadows will be modified further so that they look smoother in cases like this. Who can say?

The puzzle count is now 285.

This means I am getting closer to my Gameplay Complete milestone. The bulk of the game design is now more-or-less there, in the sense that you can go and solve all the puzzles and they are basically the body of puzzles that will be there for the final game (though in the final game they will be refined, and more will be added -- but if we had to ship with only the puzzles that are in there now, we could do that, and it would be a good game). However, there's no endgame or winning condition, so I will be working on this next.

I think the endgame is going to be a bunch of work -- the original idea was ambitious, and I need to do a bunch of redesign on it since the game as a whole has evolved since the time the endgame was originally conceived. We'll see how it goes.

The visuals are still placeholder. In a couple of weeks we have some architects coming in to start designing buildings and terrain; at that time our production pipeline will change and we'll be moving a little closer to "the real visuals".

As a result of these sessions it immediately became clear how to redesign some of the areas to improve pacing. So I started radically restructuring three of the major areas, as well as rearranging the relative positions of areas on the map. That process isn't done yet, but it is starting to converge (just one more area left to redesign). I am very happy with the two areas already redesigned; they are obviously far better than the original versions. It feels very rewarding when you feel good about a game already, and then do something to improve it so much.

Also, I've shrunk the island again. Here's what it looks like now:

The current puzzle count is 275.

Also, we are hiring.

Toward the back you can see some of the stuff that was being worked on in the previous post (but from a different angle!)

The current puzzle count is 251. That's pretty good, but on top of the increase from last time, another 25 of the old puzzles were rewritten. So a bunch of stuff has gotten done!

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be hammering on the puzzles even more, as we get the game to a new level of completion and playability.

So, there are 222 puzzles left in the game (I just deleted about 10% of them).

Many more puzzles are going to be added; I would guess that by the time the game is done, there will be over 400. We'll see; I think this will be a fun statistic to watch, along with those screenshots of the island.

In comparison, Braid has about 76 puzzles in it. So that tells you something about the relative sizes of the games. That said, the puzzles in The Witness are often intended to be bite-sized and quick, so it's not really a direct comparison. (On the other hand, some of the puzzles are most definitely not bite-sized and quick!)

The past week has been a very productive time in terms of world-building. The island has been shrunk further, with several of the locations that used to be further to the right moved inward. The white-walled location from last time used to be a standalone structure, but is now built into the side of that plateau nearest the camera, and has a new structure next to it. One of the prominent garden areas has been redesigned; you may notice it a bit to the left of the center of the map. On top of all this, a new underground area has been added, and I really like some of the puzzles in there.

When the new area gets finished gameplay-wise I will post some shots of that.

Up next: adding more puzzles!

The most obvious difference from the previous shot is the thicker atmosphere. Ignacio changed the fog model; the fact that we have a bit more fog, combined with the art style we've converged on, should help us do high-quality LOD handling for distant objects.

Your bonus picture for today is part of an indoor complex that I am very happy with. This room is all white with a bit of colored glass. Note the lovely lightmapping, even on such slapped-together geometry:

One interesting change, compared to the previous shots: you'll notice that the lake that used to be in the center of the island, with the windmill on the edge, has moved over toward the left side and become a bay.

This is one of those interesting area where design and technical constraints interact heavily. We wanted the water of that lake to be reflective, but the way 3D graphics works, you basically need to render the entire scene an extra time in order to make a reflective surface. For outdoor scenes this is very expensive. Now, we also wanted some of the water out at the edge of the island to be reflective. If the inland lake and the water near the beach were at different elevations, this would mean we need to render the entire scene twice, all the time, to generate water reflections, before rendering the main scene. This can be optimized somewhat, but in an open-world game, there is only so much you can do.

The workaround to this was just to keep the inland lake at sea level, so that we can use a single rendering pass to generate all water reflections. Technically this worked fine, but design-wise, it meant that we had to have this big spot in the middle of the island that was at sea level, while also having everything at the edge of the island being at sea level (by definition). This gives the island a doughnut kind of shape, and given that the island is so small, this ended up severely restricting how many elevation changes can be introduced -- the island was being artificially influenced to be flatter than it ought to be, because of this constraint of being sea-level in the middle.

So I moved that lake off to the side and connected it to the ocean. This involved moving a couple of other areas as well. The gameplay is preserved, and the new position is actually better for certain gameplay purposes. The island is still pretty flat, but I think you'll see it getting less flat over time, now.

A few of the many, many ideas we looked at:

Here's David, looking like he's at the top of his game:

We'll be working on that ugly green area soon...

Today I took a step in that direction by moving some areas around and compacting the island, changing its shape a bit:

Here's a shot from the other side of the island, where you can see that there is plenty of empty space left:

So-me of this will be filled with new gameplay, some will be removed or reshaped, etc, depending on how things evolve.

Here's a close-up of a new area; there's something going on there with a lot of wires, and stuff:

We are starting to tinker around with the sky (this one is way too dark). Also, moving around a bunch of locations and adding some new ones.

I'm doing a couple of weeks' worth of serious map organization / reorganization in order to get the game to a point where we can playtest it at pretty much any time, and whoever sits down to play will have a reasonable experience. The game was in this kind of shape back in January, but we had to do a lot of work on game internals in order to get things where they needed to be, interactivity-wise, for the mid-stage of development. Now that most of that stuff is done, it's time to put the world/content back in playable shape; from there, new stuff can be added in a way that continuously fills out the world. Once I feel like the world is "full enough" we can leave the preproduction phase and start going into production (which is where we start caring about what the graphics look like, start seriously doing voice recordings, etc).

One area I've been working on for the past few days is the start of the game. It is meant to be a semi-guided experience that clues the player into what the game is about. (If you remember the beginning of Braid, it's something like that.) You may have seen the interior of the house (the white building on the left) in earlier blog posts:

The area just outside the house is a constrained path, but very soon the player exits this area and can freely roam an open world.

Most open-world games want to impress you with the hugeness of the world, and the corollary to that is that you spend a lot of time walking / riding / driving between places. The Witness takes the opposite philosophy: it wants the world to be as high-density as possible, just packed full of interesting things. As the island develops, we will be placing areas as close to each other as we can, within constraints. (Braid had a similar high-density philosophy -- though it manifested in a different way -- and many people appreciated that).

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

It may not look tremendously different from the last one, aside from the translucent water and added objects at the near corner.  However, a number of locations have been worked on in the past few weeks, which happen to be either far across the map or underground, so I figured I'd post some highlights.

Keep in mind that all of this is placeholder graphics; because we consider gameplay to be very important, we are planning out the gameplay carefully before we go into full production.

This area is an old ruin carved from stone; as the world gets developed, the area around it will become more deserty.  In a later blog update I'll show this area more extensively:

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

Here's  a cave at a junction of underground tunnels, lit by colored lights so that you know which tunnel is which:

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

A cathedral, built on a hill; its walls are old and crumbling, but it's been well-cared-for:

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

At the edge of the forest, near a bridge across the river, someone has been cutting down trees.  What was going on here?  Why did they just leave these logs laying around?

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

We've also been working on rendering for grass, bushes, and trees.  Here's a shot containing some of our new grass:

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

Trees and bushes used to cast overly-dark, jagged shadows, because the shadow system didn't know how to look at their texture maps to figure out transparency.  That's been fixed, and now shadows cast by leaves are the shapes of the leaves:

[See image gallery at the-witness.net]

Much of the other work that I personally have been putting into the game is about the user interface for the puzzles.  As I mentioned, gameplay is the utmost concern; this being a puzzle game, you spend a long time solving puzzles, so it's important to make that feel good, even at this early stage.  There is still plenty of work to do there, but a very important aspect of the user interface has improved drastically this week, and I am very happy with the results.

More news as it comes!

]]> https://the-witness.net/news/2010/07/location-development/feed/ 10 https://the-witness.net/news/2010/06/island-snapshot/ https://the-witness.net/news/2010/06/island-snapshot/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:47:47 +0000 https://the-witness.net/news/?p=370 Continue reading

]]> The addition of the recently-discussed terrain editing code means that we can start giving the island more shape and character, in a natural way.  This is early yet...

]]> https://the-witness.net/news/2010/06/island-snapshot/feed/ 5 https://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/the-island-this-week/ https://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/the-island-this-week/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 17:31:20 +0000 https://the-witness.net/news/?p=337 Continue reading

]]>

]]> https://the-witness.net/news/2010/05/the-island-this-week/feed/ 18 https://the-witness.net/news/2010/04/the-island-so-far/ https://the-witness.net/news/2010/04/the-island-so-far/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:25:55 +0000 https://the-witness.net/news/?p=328 Continue reading

]]> I figured it would be fun to post occasional screenshots of the island so people can see it gradually come together over time.  Here's the first one.

Keep in mind that this is all a rough draft for gameplay purposes, and none of this is supposed to look remotely like final game visuals.

Despite not looking fancy yet, there's already more than 5 hours of gameplay.  So that's pretty good.

(Click image for full size.)

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