![]() Later on, it’s more about modeling and making places look nice. You want people to be able to find puzzles without wandering for hours. Early in development, it was about very abstract - just putting puzzles in an engine that looks really bad, not worrying about graphics, mapping out the island, and making sure these locations aren’t that far from each other. Development has changed its nature a lot. GamesBeat: How do you go about creating a game like this? Do you come up with the puzzles first?īlow: The game’s been in development a long time - five years. This is about removing the confusion and only leaving the good part, that circle of seeing a problem and solving a problem. But in a classic adventure game, the flow is blocked because you spend all your time being confused. I see a problem, I think about how to solve it, and I do the solution. In an adventure game, the flow is supposed to be this problem solving. In a fighting game, I’m timing button sequences, so I can get through the guy’s guard. In a racing game, I’m staying on the track and trying to go fast, but not go too fast, or I’ll lose control. Different genres have this idea of what the moment of gameplay is. Adventure is a really old genre, going back to when nobody knew what they were doing with video games. That gives us a framework where we can get rid of the bad parts of adventure games and give you more of a flow in gameplay. The line becomes almost like a secret code, where you have to know the right shape for it. You need to solve subtler, more lateral-thinking problems to figure out what to input. In the beginning it’s pretty straightforward, but as you go further into the game, you start needing to pay attention to more environmental cues. The way that you solve it is by drawing a line.” You just don’t know which line to draw. You have these things in the environment that tell you, quite explicitly, “This is a puzzle. What I’m doing here is streamlining that process. ![]() GamesBeat: You get the urge to cheat, right? And just look up the solution.īlow: Yeah. Do I activate this with that? That’s the gameplay of most adventure games, and it sucks. Is this even turned on? What am I doing? You drag out all of your inventory items. You might point and click at different things on the machine to figure out what to operate, and most of it doesn’t work. You play a Myst-style game, you walk in a room, and there’s a weird machine there. One, it gets rid of all the ambiguity and confusion that characterizes adventure games. Then, you get out into the rest of the world and more sophisticated puzzles get built around this interface. It’s about acclimating you to the interface. There’s two ways you could go, and one of them doesn’t work. This one on the screen now is about as hard as it gets. In the beginning, the things to solve are relatively simple. It’s up to you to notice things and solve things. GamesBeat: Yeah, I had Myst in my head while I was playing.īlow: Yeah. This game hearkens back to games like Myst and whatnot. What the rest of the game does is it uses that as a basic element to build general puzzle solving and exploration. Before you go out, there’s an area that acclimates you to operating these funky LCD panels that are kind of like iPads mounted around the environment. Once you get that down, you can go out and wander the whole island. What you played is most of the tutorial area. Jonathan Blow: It’s a big and complex game, so I’ll hit a few points. ![]() GamesBeat: Can you tell me what you’re trying to do with The Witness? ![]() He is targeting it first for the PlayStation 4, and then it will come out on the PC and iOS after that. With luck, Blow said that he’ll be able to finish his latest experience by the holidays. He earned a 90 out of 100 rating on review-aggregator Metacritic for Braid, and the sales from the game financed The Witness. But he scored big time with his first major release, Braid, which debuted in 2008. As an independent developer, it takes time to finish his titles. It seems simple enough, but Blow has been working on The Witness since 2009. And then you’re free to roam around an island. You solve increasingly complex puzzles to open more doors. The door opens and it leads to a single passage, which then leads to a garden. You open it by completing a very simple task, drawing a line with your mouse or controller from one point to another. In the puzzle adventure, you start out in a room with a door. When Jonathan Blow demos his new game, The Witness, he lets the player drive - alone. ![]() Connect with top gaming leaders in Los Angeles at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this May 22-23. ![]()
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