There's one other place where fog snaps right now, and that is in time -- it is probably pretty easy to fix, though the explanation might be a little unexpected so I am Ccing it to the team as a general knowledge transfer thing.

In general, with floating point numbers, there is a problem with loss of precision when you do computations involving large numbers added to small numbers; the small numbers tend to get dropped and go toward zero. This is a general thing about computers, not just graphics (it is the price we pay for being able to pretend we can store real numbers in small amounts of memory). Most of the time it's not an issue and programmers don't think about it, but there are some times when it can be an issue.

In shaders, we often want to have a time variable, controlled by the CPU, that we can use to help generate effects. That time variable counts upward, maybe from the time the level started, or the time the game started. If that number is measured in seconds, then after 10 minutes it will be around 600, after 2 hours it will be 7200, etc. If someone leaves the game running for 3 days (a certification requirement on consoles!), it would get up over 250,000.

Those numbers don't seem super big, but at the same time, we also deal with numbers that are small. If the game is running at 60fps (which on PC these days is considered maybe a slow frame rate!), that's 0.017 seconds per frame, and we might be doing math that involves both this dt and the current time. At which point the ratio of the current time to the frame time is like 250,000 / (1/60) = 15 million. That is really very high and a recipe for all kinds of numerical problems you don't expect -- if you add the delta time to the current time, in a 32-bit float, the delta time is almost completely destroyed because there is not enough precision in the number. Long before this time, you'd start to see jitteriness in animation, things not matching up to where you'd expect them to be, etc.

One way to solve this is not to let the current time grow indefinitely -- at some point, you reset it to 0. You could pick a fixed amount of time, like I don't know, every minute, and at the end of the minute the time is back at 0 and you keep going. But if you want your effects to be seamless, they all have to match up exactly at the 1-minute boundary, which makes tuning things difficult and annoying. For example, if you want to make a cosine wave that is seamless across time, you can make the wave with a period of 1 minute, or half a minute, or 1/3 a minute, etc, and firstly this is annoying because when designers want to tune stuff, they have to know this, and it's unwieldy and confusing, and secondly, these numbers cannot be represented exactly in floating-point numbers either, so you're adding imprecision that way.

But there is an old graphics programmer trick that solves this very cleanly, that I think has been around for a long time (I first heard of it from Ignacio when we were working on The Witness).

For our cosine wave example mentioned above, we are going to be evaluating some function like cos(freq*time*2*PI), where 'time' is just the wall clock time according to the game, and 'freq' is some parameter controlling the frequency of the cosine wave, that we want it to be very easy for designers to adjust without introducing problems.

The constraint you have to meet, for your cosine waves to match up when the timer resets, is that they all have to evaluate to 1 at whatever the max time is -- because when you reset to time = 0, you will get cos(freq*0*2*PI), which is 1. So cos(freq*time_max*2*PI) also has to be 1, in other words, the cosine has to have gone around the circle an integer number of times. Since we have a factor of 2*PI in there, this means that our wave will be flawless any time freq*time_max is an integer.

How do we ensure that, easily, in a way that people don't have to think about? Pick, for time_max, a number of seconds that is 10 to some integer power -- for example, 1000. Then, any number you type into a tweak file, that has no more than 3 digits after the decimal, will result in an integer number of times around the circle. For example, if freq = 9.876, we get cos(9.876*1000*2*PI) == cos(9876*2*PI) == 1. This works for any number you pick with 3 digits after the decimal. If you need 4 digits, make time_max 10000, and so forth. If we are reading values from a tweak file, we can round them to the nearest 3 digits before sending them to the shader (and maybe output a warning, that the digits aren't being used, if the rounded number is appreciably different from the input number, to remind people of this system).

This works with any periodic function, we just used cosine here as an example. For linear shifts, like scrolling uv coordinates or whatnot, it's similar -- if you have uv coordinates from 0 to 1, you just need to make sure shift_rate*time_max is an integer in order for the scrolling to be perfect when the time resets. Similarly for the time parameter used to index a flipbook animation.

So the reason the fog is snapping after you play for a while is that the time sent to the shader system gets reset to 0 every 1000 seconds but the fog doesn't know about this. And the reason for the resetting is to make sure we maintain good precision in the time-based effects in the shaders.

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!

The Witness requires Metal for rendering. Metal is a graphics technology from Apple that allows faster and more fluid graphics. These are the Mac computers that support Metal:

• MacBook (Early 2015)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
• Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
• iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013 or newer)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205073

It's possible to build custom Mac systems with Metal support, either using an old Mac Pro and upgrading the graphics card or building it from scratch using compatible parts (Hackintosh). These configurations are unsupported, but some customers have found them to work.

If using an AMD GPU, the only supported add-in card with Metal support is:

AMD Radeon 7950 (Tahiti Pro) Sapphire card.

If using an NVIDIA GPU, any GeForce 6xx or newer should work, but it is necessary to install the latest drivers from:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html

System Requirements:

Minimum:

* OS: El Capitan 10.11.6
* Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 1.8 GHz
* Memory: 4 GB RAM
* Graphics: 1 GB of video memory
- Intel: HD Graphics 4000
- AMD: Radeon R9 M290
- NVIDIA: GeForce 640M
* Storage: 5 GB available space

Recommended:

* OS: Sierra 10.12.4
* Processor: Intel Core i7 @ 2.4 GHz
* Memory: 8 GB RAM
* Graphics: 2 GB of video memory
- AMD: Radeon R9 M390
- NVIDIA: GeForce 780
* Storage: 5 GB available space

The list of Apple systems with AMD graphics that support Metal is:

Mac Pro 6,1 (Radeon FirePro D300, D500, D700) - cylinder
iMac 15,1 (Radeon R9 M290, M295X)
iMac 17,1 (Radeon R9 M380, M390, M395, M395X)

MacBook Pro 11,5 (Radeon R9 M370X)
MacBook Pro 13,3 (Radeon Pro 460)

The list of Apple systems with NVIDIA graphics that support Metal is:

MacBook Pro 9,1 (GeForce GT 650M)
MacBook Pro 10,1 (GeForce GT 650M)
MacBook Pro 11,3 (GeForce GT 750M)
iMac 13,1 (GeForce GT 640M, 650M)
iMac 13,2 (GeForce GTX 660M, 675M)
iMac 14,2 (GeForce GT 755M, 775M)
iMac 14,3 (GeForce GT 750M)

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

To celebrate, the game is on sale for 50% off on Steam, here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/

Braid is also on sale, and if you already own it, you get an extra discount on The Witness: http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2501/

Meanwhile, we are working on The Witness for MacOS, and it should be done pretty soon. iOS is also coming up but is a bit further in the future.

Happy 2017!

(That is all!)

If you have an Xbox One, you can play The Witness there! Unless you are in Australia or New Zealand ... in which case we need to get the ratings stuff pushed through. We are working on that.

The Witness already runs at a consistent 60fps on the base PlayStation 4, so rather than increasing frame rate, our patch is about visual quality. Please don't take the specifics mentioned here as absolute promises; things might change by release. But here's what we are aiming for:

When you start up the game on a PS4 Pro, it will go into one of two modes, depending on the current display device:

* When using PS4 Pro with a 4k display, we will render at 1440p or possibly higher, all while keeping a consistent 60 frames per second. This image will then be upscaled to 4k, and we will draw text, menus, and other UI at native 4k resolution. (This is similar to what happens on the base PS4, where we render the 3D scene at 900p, then upscale to 1080p and draw UI at 1080p). We might be able to achieve resolutions higher than 1440p based on various engineering tradeoffs (for example, if we boost the resolution of the main scene to a greater degree than we boost the resolution of the reflections in water, which tend to be distorted anyway. Also, we'll evaluate checkerboard rendering -- we're not sure if it's the right way to go for this game, but we'll see.) We'll post again when we finalize these specs.

* When using PS4 Pro with a display that is 1080p or lower, we will render the scene at 1080p (instead of the old 900p), and increase antialiasing quality from 2x to 4x MSAA, again while keeping a solid 60 frames per second. We are exploring additional visual quality increases, like increased streaming distance for high-resolution meshes, or decreasing the noticeability of the fade-in between faraway LODs and high-res close-up meshes. Again, we'll post details when this is finalized!
We're also working on HDR support. Here in the office we just got a new LG B6P television, which is very bright and has low black levels, providing a lot of dynamic range, and it's been fun so far tweaking the look of the game on HDR displays like this.

We thought we were working on HDR support only for the PS4 Pro, but yesterday Sony announced that they will be enabling HDR support on all PS4s via a firmware update. Sometimes Sony even surprises developers! (Back when the PS4 was originally announced, we were surprised by some of the final specs too ... and I was on stage in that show!)

We think it's great that Sony are doing this. We don't know the technical details of how it will work, yet, but provided that nothing prevents us, the Witness patch will use HDR on all PS4s when available. (You will, of course, need an HDR TV or monitor for HDR mode to kick in!)

If all goes well, this patch will be downloadable on November 10 when the PlayStation 4 Pro is released.

We'll keep you posted as we continue work on this patch!

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:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

 (Alcohol Reference)

This will be Friday, February 12th, starting at 1pm Eastern (10am Pacific) and going for ...  a while?

I have made a new reddit account with the fabulous name of "Jonathan_Blow" for these purposes. (Note the underscore! There are some other accounts with similar names!)

Maybe we can also get some other people from the team in there answering questions.

The thread is now up.

Thanks to everyone who's been following along on these forums, and everyone who's been interested in the game generally!

We'll see what happens tomorrow!

A lot of people have been asking about preorders too. Preorders will go live on Steam and the Humble Store (and on this web site) today at noon PST. Unfortunately we won't have preorders on PSN, because apparently developers have to set those up months in advance and we didn't know that!

The preorders are regular price! They contain an amazing bonus pack-in: the warm fuzzy feeling that you have pre-ordered the game. (And that's all). So it's exactly the same as buying the game at launch, except earlier.

If you buy from the Humble Store, 10% of the price goes to the Against Malaria Foundation. For a lot of us in developed nations, malaria seems like a far-away thing that you only think about when you go on a really adventurous trip, but in many parts of the world it's a serious problem. The good news is that we are making great progress in reducing incidence of malaria, see this report:

The Against Malaria Foundation is rated one of the most cost-effective charities in the world by both Giving What We Can and Givewell, two organizations focused on ensuring that charitable donations do maximum good in the world. Giving What We Can has a good high-level description of the philosophy behind this movement.

The Witness deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design, and one of those elements is the classic audio log, where you are wandering along and you find a recording that was placed there by someone before. The Witness has recordings like this, but let's just say they are done in a highly non-traditional way. When you first encounter them you won't find much in the way of answers, but, if you keep looking, you will eventually be able to piece together what's going on.

These are the folks whose fine voicework you will hear in these recordings:

Ashley Johnson, who you may know as Ellie from The Last of Us, or from her roles in Tales from the Borderlands and Infamous First Light. She also plays the smartest person on the hit TV show Blindspot. You can find Ashley on Twitter.

Phil LaMarr, who I best know as Marvin from Pulp Fiction, but who you may know as Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4, or as Ratbag from Shadow of Mordor. He also played Hermes in Futurama and Ollie Williams in Family Guy! You can follow his random musings here.

Matthew Waterson, who played very English person Sir Lucan in The Order: 1886, an has recently acted in Fallout 4 and Halo 5. Check out Matthew's amazing Sean-Connery-themed profile picture.

Terra Deva, an oft-performing musician, including recent hit single "At Night" with the swiss group Shakedown (though she doesn't play music in The Witness because we don't have music in The Witness! She is acting!) and veteran of... The Mickey Mouse Club!!!! (Among many other places!) Terra's Twitter page is here.

We recorded these sessions at Warner Bros. Studios. Our voice director was Liam O'Brien, who has also done quite a bit of acting in games himself. Pierce O'Toole acted as the great force of organization throughout the process and many things would have gone worse were it not for him!

Having said all this, I will warn you that the story in The Witness, such as it is, is fairly subtle and happens mostly implicitly. You really have to explore and read between the lines to know what's going on. So do not expect a traditional game story like The Last of Us or The Order! All that said, we are very happy to have these actors lending their talents to our game, and I look forward to release when you'll see what we've been up to.

You can read it here.

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!

The center building is now complete and we got the layout for the ruined walls so the major task for tomorrow is to get them all detailed (very time consuming!)

And finally some new interior spaces that you can't really see from the previous angles.

Orsi is in charge of the vegetation (she is amazing at it) so that is one big chunk of work I don't have to worry about!
I'll be aiming to have everything done by tomorrow so I can use Friday for polishing and any major issues that I might have missed.

Here are the new modular pieces that were done for detailing:

We just finished the day by meeting with the architects and discussing the interior layout of the space so tomorrow I'll start on the interior building and ruin walls.
Here is how it currently looks:

http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0019.html

Meanwhile, we've had a lot of Witness Wednesday posts in a row on this blog. I'll have to stop slacking and write something about the game.

...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:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Discussion on PlayStation Blogcast (Witness talk starts around 26:25):

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/10/18/playstation-blogcast-094-witness-the-daylight/

(From the way the PS guys talk, it sounds like it is all me making this game, but as always on games of this size, there is a whole team making it happen!)

Interview with Gametrailers, also from the PlayStation event (you may have to sit through a commercial with army dudes to see it):

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/aeeuwu/the-witness-the-puzzle-of-making-puzzles

The Witness was among the games being shown! We were the only third-party game there. Also shown were a whole lot of Killzone: Shadow Fall, Knack, PS4 versions of Sound Shapes and Flower, and Resogun.

I did some interviews and talked to a number of press people who are very interested in The Witness. I also took some photos.

Brad from Giant Bomb playing The Witness:

The room we were in:

Flower at 1080p and 60Hz, with the new, more-sensitive controller, feels nice to play:

Sound Shapes:

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.

In the olden days of The Witness art development, our visual “style” for the game hadn't really coalesced yet.  Or, to be more accurate, we knew what our objectives were (from a purely theoretical, gameplay-based perspective) but we hadn't really grasped what the ramifications would be in terms of our production process.

For instance, on an early attempt at adding a rough-stone wall, I approached it like most modern game artists would: using the full spectrum of art tools and tricks...  normal mapping, edge-distress, enhanced details, etc..

But the problem with this approach is that it’s sort of at odds with one of our prime directives from Jonathan:  to build a game world without unnecessary visual clutter.  “Noise” was our enemy.  But that’s kind of an interesting riddle, since most game engines and art techniques are so often all about adding extra levels of noise, grime, texture, detail, (realism!), etc.

So we began an exploration of different techniques we could use to achieve a sort of stylized realism.  We needed to be able to capture the “essence” of our reference imagery while not being quite so literal.  It also had to be free of gratuitous visual noise, plus appealing to look at and explore.  So what follows is an early effort to break down and re-think that art process in a different sort of way.

In this case, my objective was to figure out how to attack a medium-sized cliff face while avoiding an overwhelming amount of noise/detail.  First off, reference.  Starting with some photo reference, I wanted to isolate the primary features, and not worry at all about the small, noisy stuff:

Then, an attempt to stylistically sculpt those simplified shapes:

 And finally, breaking those forms down into modularized, reusable meshes that could be combined to form a cliff:

One of the biggest lessons we learned from this experiment was that if we give the engine nice clean, simplified geometry (not worry as much about the texturing - just keep it understated and focus more on the overall color and balance), the lighting results we get are gorgeous.  In a way this is extremely freeing, as it lets us concentrate on the overall form of objects, rather than obsess over details like perfect seamless, UV mapping, limited texture resolution, normal mapping issues, etc.  We also learned very quickly that hard edges are not evil....  In the absence of heavy texture detail, the faceting had become a powerful tool to help define the form in a clean, almost graphic style, with minimal noise, but lots of subtlety.

That process of “analyze, deconstruct, simplify” became our new way of approaching complex surfaces.  And so, as we built out more areas of the island, this visual language began to take shape,and you can now see it deployed across most of the rock forms in the game...

Take note that foliage has a different language [see Orsi’s previous post on trees], as does rolling terrain, and hard architectural surfaces.  But this style contrast is extremely useful from a game design perspective, as it helps inform the player as to what materials the surfaces they are looking at are likely made from, without having to resort to overtly photoreal textures.

Even older areas of the game (that were suddenly “out of style”) were able to be refreshed using this new lens, and brought in-line alongside the cleaner, less-noisy artwork:

And here’s some additional rock shots from around the island, just because...

Luis’ awesome sculpted sandstone cliffs:

Orsi’s awesome lakeside steppes:

And a bit of mysterious tunnel:

That’s all I've got to share for now.  Have a great September!!!

-eaa

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.

If you watch carefully and don't blink, and look past all the balloons that are blocking it, you can see the poster (in different proportions) starting around 0:57 in this commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdW1OuZ1U0

Hey, it is what it is.

Because we picked this one as the final, we have it in a much higher resolution than the other options. If you like it, feel free to use it as a desktop image, or whatever!

Feel free to use these as desktop images or whatever. Unfortunately we didn't mock these up at high resolution; what you see is all there is!

In this instalment, Thiel takes the question of what kind of company to start and reframes it in terms of secrets.

Thiel's point of view reminds me of the way I think about games in general. Quite often I go out and give speeches about game design or business, and I say things that some think are overly idealistic, or oblivious to the necessities of recipients' situations, or just plain wrong. Certainly my advice usually runs counter to conventional wisdom. (Yet somehow, by following these principles, I seem to do okay.)

Thiel begins with the question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" and goes on to define secrets, in this context, as "unpopular or unconventional truths". If everyone knew these things and believed them, they wouldn't be secrets.

I recommend this write-up to anyone who wants to think unconventionally about game design.

The changes are a little bit drastic in some spots, but overall not as drastic as I had expected. I had been worried about some issues in the natural flow of where players would naturally end up going, especially early in the game. It turns out we were able to solve these without changing too much. So between last island update and this one, for the most part, some areas were moved laterally or expanded, and some new elevation changes were introduced, but areas were not shuffled around; they are all more-or-less in the same place with relation to each other. So for the most part, things are converging, which is a good sign.

And, oh yeah, we are making that mountain a lot bigger. It is the messiest part of the island right now, and has been for a while. There are still a few things gameplay-wise to figure out here, then it will start to come together. My biggest questions in the area have to do with that white building near the bottom of the image; the puzzles inside that building will determine its overall structure, which will determine how it is worked into the surrounding terrain of the mountain. We have some proposals from the architects on what this building will look like, but it is waiting on me to finish the puzzle design.

Because we haven't done it in a while, here's the island from a different angle:

The current puzzle count for the whole game is 450.

Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions lead? By inspecting the structure of a system in this way, we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe. We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in general.

Here's a link to the Indiecade page, on which there's also a presentation by Richard LeMarchand, and more to come.

Thanks very much to Ida C. Benedetto for recording the talk!

Here's the link.

Previews of the game are now being published, and readers of this blog have been asking for gameplay details for a while. So it seems like a good idea to list the previews here. I'll keep updating this post as I find more.

on Kotaku, by Stephen Totilo
on Joystiq, by Ben Gilbert
on Gamespot, by Sophia Tong
on IGN, by Anthony Gallegos
on Gamasutra, by Christian Nutt
on 1UP, by Matt Leone
on GamesRadar, by Charlie Barratt
on Giant Bomb, by Ryan Davis
on Giant Bomb, by Patrick Klepek (interview-ish)
on Time Techland, by Evan Narcisse
on IFC, by Evan Narcisse (interview)
by Dan Griliopoulos on Rock, Paper, Shotgun

interview with GamesRadar
interview with Cory Cohen of OXM
long interview with Dan Griliopoulos of Rock, Paper, Shotgun (contains a bunch of stuff not elsewhere)

interview with Christian Donlan of Eurogamer

(Sometimes these previews, from the way they are worded, make it seem like I made the entire game with my own bare hands. That is not the case; it's just how this kind of article tends to sound. There are a number of people working on this game, who have creative input in various ways; see the About page for a partial list!)

Here's some screenshots I just took. Here is a group of trees without a lightmap. As you can see, the underside looks pretty flat and boring, and it's hard to see which limbs are in front of others.

Here's the lightmap just by itself. While you can see a few lighting artifacts (like where the cross trees cross), overall the trees look pretty good even without diffuse textures.

And here's the final. As you can see, the underside has a lot more definition to it.

Once I get some LOD's I like, I'll write up another update.

This talk is called Games and the Human Condition; it was given at Rice University on September 27, 2010. It's about "best practices" of modern game design that I find unsettling, and the way in which "social games" and "gamification" are destructive.

A full video is available from this page at Rice University.

Here's a link containing just the slides (ppt format).

Here's a long and wordy abstract:

Video games have evolved tremendously over the past few decades; they're much more entertaining than they used to be. That is not by accident; we, the community of game designers, have been continuously refining our techniques. The most common way we do this is by testing out our games on you, the players, and optimizing for the "best" result (where "best" is defined by us). As this process is ongoing, what kind of relationship exists between the designer and the player? Is it artist/audience, experimenter/subject, entrepreneur/customer, or tycoon/resource? Invariably it's some admixture of these things, the particular ratios for a given game being chosen by its designers (usually without awareness that a decision is being made). Today, due to the way the Internet is widely used, and because game designers are becoming more serious about certain aspects of their craft, the iteration time of this game design optimization process is shorter than ever before: designers can observe their players much more thoroughly, and more quickly, than they ever have in the past. At some point a quantitative change becomes a qualitative one: the result of all this competency may be heavily destructive. Some aspects of the current notion of "good game design" may in fact be very bad, or at least indefensible, from an ethical standpoint. Today's "better" video games spend a great deal of effort to undermine defenses that took you tens of millennia to evolve. They tend to be successful at this. As designers keep evolving their craft and gain greater analytical power, what will happen?

A movie can give you a satisfying experience in 2 hours.

A painting or a sculpture can give you a satisfying experience in 10 minutes.

A song can give you a satisfying experience in 3 minutes.

What is it about certain kinds of linear-experience games that makes players feel they need to play them for hours upon hours in order to accrue a satisfying experience? If it really takes that long, doesn't that mean the medium is somehow deficient in important ways?

Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn't that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome? If you spend 20 hours playing a game, but the good parts could have been condensed into 3, then didn't you just waste 17 hours?

If you waste 17 hours a month for the rest of your life, what is the cost of that, socially, quality-of-life-wise, economically, or however else you want to measure?

I am not saying that all games should be short. Certainly there's a place for long-form games, just as there's a place for long-form TV shows like Deadwood or Lost. But if we lived in a world where all cinema had to be the length of Lost, and films like Inception were criticized by cinema fans, and given lower scores in reviews and such, for being too short... wouldn't that be perverse? Certainly the people in that world would be ignoring a big chunk of the potential of that medium, for arbitrary and weird reasons.

This post is part of an industry-wide commentary by indie developers on the subject of short games. Other participants:

Ron Carmel of 2DBoy

Chris DeLeon

Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games

Matt Gilgenbach of 24 Caret Games

Michael Todd
Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games

Cliff Harris of Positech Games

Chris Hecker of Spy Party

Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games

Noel Llopis

Peter Jones of Retro Affect

Lau Korsgaard

Martin Pichlmair of Broken Rules

Greg Wohlwend of Intution Games

Jeffrey Rosen of Wolfire

Steve Swink

The Chaparral High School Alumni Theatre’s production of Braid: A Movement Piece during the summer of 2010. Using a unique combination of content movement and contact improvisation dance techniques, Braid follows the story of young scientist Tim on his quest to find a Princess.

We don't yet smoothly interpolate between the maps in the shader; we just switch the maps outright.  Interpolation is coming soon.  But in screenshots you can't see changing conditions anyway, so it's time for some screenshots.

First is the house with the door closed, then with the door open.  After that comes the sculpture room, with two light sources toggled in various ways (see the captions on each picture). For now you'll have to forgive the light leaking in the corners and the shadow speckles on the walls; they are due to issues with the dynamic shadow system (which is not really related to what is being shown here) and those issues have yet to be resolved!