The Witness

[Toams]

The witness is a puzzle-exploration game, which basically means you have to solve puzzles to advance in the game and find out more about the story. It's made by Jonathan Blow and his theme, who also made Braid. A week ago (or something) a trailer for the game emerged, showing in-game graphics and gameplay. This happened during the PS4 announcement. This means that The Witness will be PS4 exclusive for a while, but they're not staying that for long.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brd0F7rlXCI

Work in progress screenshots:

iPad gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXuPKOy_PXU

The story so far seems like one where you get placed on an island, and you have to figure out what you're doing there, and what the thing is with all the constructions on the island, much like other well-known games that feature puzzles and islands. There is no narration, nor human interaction. There seems to be no musical soundtrack either. The design team has put much focus on sound design, since some of the clues to solve puzzles will rely on sounds too.

The project has an extensive blog: http://the-witness.net/news/, which I've followed from the near-beginning. Inside are lots of interesting articles about game development in general, but also specific problems that arose during the making of this game, and how they have been tackled. It's also very cool to see the development of the game environment in so much detail.

I'm looking forward to this game, especially since I enjoyed Braid so much. Though looking at the trailer the movement of all the objects in the game seems very static to me. The environment is gorgeous though.

What do you think?

 

[Xilef]

Reminds me of Myst but with the same puzzle appearing over and over.
In fact, it's pretty uncanny to Myst, wouldn't be surprised if it's an inspiration.

 

[Perihelion]

I'm definitely looking forward to this. I enjoyed Braid a lot.

 

[Daxis]

The PS4 exclusivity amuses me; it doesn't feel like something even touches upon the powers of the PS4, maybe not even the current generation. I'm wondering if the developer was paid to port it to it? Either way, it's prolly really good, based on how braid was and how much design thought the guy puts into it.

 

[Toams]

The PS4 exclusivity amuses me; it doesn't feel like something even touches upon the powers of the PS4, maybe not even the current generation.

I thought I read somewhere that this game is too heavy for the ps3/xbox360. Or they used shaders not present in those consoles idk.

 

[Xilef]

You can see quite clearly that this is a shader intensive game and there are a lot of high resolution textures there, it would be a shame to reduce the quality to make it run on the 360/PS3

EDIT:
These artifacts are really bugging me, everyone knows that water with refraction shaders should be rendered last but they've put the alpha mapped textures last (Which would be sensible if the water wasn't there).

 

[Toams]

They did a post on the water before, which doesn't explain about the alpha put last but is a nice read anyway. I even made a somewhat faulty comment in there.

http://the-witness.net/news/2012/08/regarding-water/

 

[Daxis]

Hmm. A lot of shaders, yes. The texture (style) might have made it seem less intensive that it would be in reality - the other ps4 exclusive, some actiony - block guy game, was similarly texture, but its intensiveness was much more obvious there.
Of course interaction between high level texture, shaders, and player actions in real time is exponential in resource usage so *shrugs*
I'm not really a big OMG GRAPHICS fan, so it still sorta amuses me - I hope the game design utilizes the graphics in a meaningful way. (similar to how he's doing the sound)

 

[Xilef]

They did a post on the water before, which doesn't explain about the alpha put last but is a nice read anyway. I even made a somewhat faulty comment in there.

http://the-witness.net/news/2012/08/regarding-water/

This has just inspired me to do some research in water effects of the 90s and write my own shader that captures that visual feel but with the modern refraction and reflection