The Witness

[kpreid]

So, this is potentially interesting. The developer of the game Braid has started a new project, The Witness. It’s apparently going to be 3D, set on an island, and involve solving puzzles scattered around the island (while being able to move freely around it). Their blog is talking a lot about their graphics engine design as opposed to the gameplay — naturally, as graphics tech is more usefully shareable and isn't inherently spoilerish.

What particularly caught my eye as “I agree with this” was their post Experiments in Texturing. Good textures are hard; it's often easier to make a good, clean model than it is to make a texture that is not jarringly unrealistic. The Witness is putting a lot of emphasis on lighting: “We’re on a low budget here, being an indie game; so not only was it an open question how to solve the Ugly Texturing problem, but we also needed to solve it with relatively little manpower. I knew that, ultimately, we could just fall back on untextured geometry with lighting, if we had good precomputed lighting.” They go on to describe using textures as accents, to add texture rather than defining significant features of the object.

As a Minecraft player (structures are built of pre-textured blocks) and former Avara map designer (graphics engine does not support textures), I entirely approve of this approach.