We brought The Witness to the Game Developers Conference and had the game playable privately in a hotel room to select members of the press. We had to do a lot of work to get the game back into playable condition; a lot of things had been broken since the …
Here’s how the island looks today: 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 …
[This message is crossposted from the Indie Fund blog.] Our gift to you, on this very special Valentine’s Day, is the worldwide release of the long-awaited game Dear Esther. If you haven’t heard of Dear Esther, watch this: (Or hey, watch the trailer even if you are quite familiar with …
Here’s how the island looks right now. It is a bit crazy and messy, especially the stuff nearest the camera: 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 …
If you’re interested in arty games that push the boundaries of what games are doing, you may be interested in Dear Esther, which will be released on Valentine’s Day of this year (much sooner than The Witness will be!) The trailer has just been released: See more about Dear Esther …
Summary A small team with limited manpower, we wanted a low-effort way to use our existing version control system (svn) to facilitate concurrent world editing for our open-world 3D game (i.e. we desire that multiple users can edit the world at the same time and merge their changes). We developed …
This summer, we began working in earnest with architects, to bring further sophistication to the design of locations in The Witness. Before this time, we had a game that was fully playable, but buildings and the areas around them tended to be placeholders, developed only enough to make the basic …
From time to time I take screenshots, to send in email to other team members, or for the architects’ reference, etc. Today I glanced at my desktop and noticed it looked pretty cool. So here it is (with some shots, that seemed a bit too spoilery, redacted):
In addition to working on The Witness, I am a partner in the Indie Fund, a group of successful indies who finance imaginative indie games under developer-friendly terms. Our fund has been around for almost 2 years now, and I am happy to announce that our first funded game is …
I am working hard on puzzles right now. We’ve had figured out, for a while, the basic set of locations you can travel to on the island, and what the puzzles are in each. These locations were defined to varying degrees of specificity, though. Sometimes we know what the puzzles …