Jon,
I know nothing about the limitations of game design, from my limited experience it appears to be medium not very different than poetry and prose, both of which have the ability to convey great meaning and beauty but often used as a tool for simple entertainment. Can a game be created that isn’t a game, but a path to something else? Can a designer, such as yourself, move beyond logic or design complexity as tools of creativity? Could you get away with frustrating players without loosing them, by not adhering to the rules of fairness, right or wrong? Can you give them puzzles that are not meant to be solved but explored? Can you strip the player of their sense of control yet keep them engaged? Can you be god like?
Kind regards,
Fred

Because it is a puzzle game, we are being careful about spoiler leaks, so I don’t want to do this. On a different kind of game, though, it would be fun.

I found it rather funny and harmless. Did it upset you Mr. Anonimous?
Why wouldn’t he post it here? If you’ve been folloeing the blog you’ve been following this character Justin. He always does things like this for unknown purposes. Mr. Blow must have thick skin and he has the personality of a buddisth monk.

Some people have commented they believe Justin is Jonathan.

Now that the island’s topography is being reworked, would the team mind catching some time lapses as they work? Being a level designer myself, it would be awesome to see the team’s thought process in laying out the world and how it will correlate to the whole experience.

If you think this might give away a little too much of the game, don’t sweat it; don’t mind waiting for the finished game.

Yes, the game is very non-linear and where there are blockages we try to do as good a job with them as possible.

We are starting to firm up ideas around release date and platforms. I expect we will announce something there before too long.

I certainly do aspire to things very much like this. However, it’s easier said than done. (Perhaps the more one knows about game design, the harder it looks).

Just out of curiosity, why did you feel compelled to provide a link that makes fun of Jonathan Blow (or, at the very least, of the Atlantic article) on the page run by Jonathan Blow? I suppose what I’m asking is whether you were being humorous or provocative?

Also, do you have a rough idea of release time. Like late this year, or do you think it’ll be pushed into next year as you strive to polish it more? When did you come up with the idea for the game?

Nice. Thanks!

Whenever I look at screenshots and see that brightly lit scenery, it brings back memories of a warm, summer day. Is it summer in the game?

Also, for me personally, one of the best moments in a game is right at the start, when I have the sense of the unknown and a lot to discover. Like reading a good book, sometimes after playing a game, I wish I could experience it again for the first time.

Do you specifically aim at keeping the player’s curiosity high? If so, how do you do it?

Best regards to the development team from a fellow programmer!

448.

What’s the current puzzle count, if you don’t mind me asking, Jon?

Gary.

xx

Naah, those are the luminance of the frame buffer at different levels of resolution (so the tone mapper can measure how bright the screen is).

No, not the curves, the L0, L1, L2, L3? Those look like neural net layers outputs…

No, I am not worried about that. The point of the puzzles is that they are intrinsically interesting. If someone wants to try and approach this game as if the activities in it were not intrinsically interesting, but rather filler activities to do just to get to the end, then they are not in the frame of mind that this game is made for.

I think the attitude you are describing to me is one that is maybe a little bit too conditioned by linear video games.

That’s not a neural net activation sigmoid; it’s the tone mapping curve. Totally different!

I notice on the second screen shot you have some neural net image processing going on. I can’t figure out what you might be using this for. Would you mind sharing some insight into it’s use or is that a trade secret? :-)

Hi Jon, are you not worried that people might be disillusioned if they complete X number of puzzles only to later discover they did not need to solve them all to complete the game?

I would personally want to feel like everything I did in the game contributed to my success. If you mean that certain sets of puzzles will enhance your understanding of the world but it is technically possible to finish the game without doing them, I would also feel slightly disappointed that I had missed out sections and still completed it.

I suppose it’s like walking through a maze, coming to a fork and choosing the left-hand path, always thinking in the back of your mind that you will come back and explore the right-hand path eventually, only to discover the left-hand path leads to the end of the game. You’ll always be left wondering, “what was down the other path?”

I tend to have some idea of how a player will approach a puzzle, how hard it will be, etc, but these ideas will invariably be wrong, so the key is to construct the game so that it is robust in the face of the player having a very different experience than you expect.

In this game that means a great deal of openness and player choice about what they are going to do next, as well as some leniency in how many puzzles must be solved to finish the game.

I can hardly wait to play it :)

The game is about natural phenomena, rite? I just think it’s a cool excersice and something new no one has ever tryed. Not only floaters but maybe the new FarCry has something like that, having to do with allucinations because of drugs you take in the game in the form of vegetation that you pick up. In Enter The Void alot of parts are from first person and you can see the guy’s chest and shoulders and his blinking and this turns cery cool when he gets high and starts seeing fractals and stuff.

Humans, which most living things that play games are human, unlike me have eyes and these eyes blink and all already but what if being under the sun so much in the island makes your blood pressure go up? What happens to sight when you have high blood pressure or when it really low or when you are blacking out. Those trippy sighthings are very hard to reenact but this example is silly. LET ME GIVE A GOOD EXAMPLE OF MY DREAM PUZZLE.

So you have ipad like touch pannels all over the world, the game is about tracing the right path to “win” the puzzle and understand somehting key about the world that will help you in the real world after the game is turned off. To know the right path to trace you must see or notice “Look what happens when” (as opposed to Braid’s “Look what happens if”)things in the world, and some how practicing seeing will give you the knowledge to solve the problem. *Long tangent, forgot the puzzle* it was something like: Its afirst person game. you see with your eyes. your eyes do weird shit. need to know path on a panel, but pannel is not blue but cristal like glass and see-trough. How do you know what to do. there is weird art near by. Look at it with the character’s eye long enough go back to the pannel. your eyes now have and after-image of the path and some how this communicates many things at once since the after imgae was the original and the one you saw the inverted.

IS LIKE: WHY ARE SCRUBS GREEN? BECAUSE DOCTORS LOOK AT BLOOD! silly humans are wising up!

Why would you simulate floaters and blinks etc when the player already has eyes that behave that way?

Or maybe this confirms what I have long suspected, justin; you are not human!

Regarding, “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” — have you read “The Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch? It might be something you’d be interested in. It’s a seminal text on urban planing and spatial design from 1960. Interestingly, I knew about this book way back since my dad was a city planner, however it wasn’t until I met Brian Upton that I realized its implications on level design. Upton gave a great GDC talk back in 2007 on how Lynch’s deconstruction of spatial elements ports over wonderfully for games. You can find a high level breakdown of the book here: http://discoveringurbanism.blogspot.com/2008/05/book-image-of-city.html

Looking forward to future updates!

(apologies if this is a dupe; my first attempt at commenting seemed to disappear)

I’ve heard that writing about music is like dancing about architecture… so can we have at least a little achitecture dance?

Nevermind, staying tuned either way. Please hit us with it when you feel it’s post-worthy.

We have some interesting work in progress for the sound but not too much to say about it on the blog yet. It is hard to talk about sound!

The visual effects of dark at the edges while in first person also looks cool. Will the character blink while in first person or are you able to see floaters or the squiggly lines from the eyes?

In Enter The Void, a movie that is mostly from a first person eye point of view, this happens and it looks cool. Interesting that no video game has done it considering there are so many in first person BUT NO NATURAL PHENOMENA OF THE EYES OR SIGHT OCCURS. Like after looking at the sun and being outside and going in doors you look green! really green!

Do you have anything to share about music & sound, Jonathan? Braid soundtrack is one of my all time favourites, so I’m looking forward to reading about what you’re planning for The Witness.