The Witness
Jonathan Blow discusses his
follow-up to Braid
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Stuck on an island, players must unravel a series of increasingly Perplexing
puzzles to solve the mystery behind the idyllic backdrop.
Jonathan Blow explains that, “Most adventure
games require you to do arbitrary and unrelated things in order to solve
puzzles. These things are governed
by ‘if’ statements: ‘If the player does thing X with object Y in room Z, the
puzzle is solved’. One problem that happens is puzzles that only make sense when
thinking backwards from knowing the solution, the way the designer was thinking
about it, but make no sense or feel completely unmotivated when thinking forward
through the situation, the way the player would. This leads to a game that is kind of unplayable, but it happens very often.”
Blow is talking about the
common flaws found in modern adventure games that he and his team working on
The Witness at Number None are trying to avoid during the development of the
studio’s ambitious follow-up to Braid. The enigmatic adventure game was
unveiled back in 2011 when Blow first invited games™ to take a trip around the
mysterious island that serves as the setting for The Witness. The various
districts of its vibrant tropical expanse are divided by a series of visually
curious constructs and distinctive architecture – why? Well, that remains
unknown at this point – each is unlocked through a series of puzzles that are
found across a series of LCD panels littered through the world. “Another thing
that happens [in some puzzle games] is that you don’t even know if something is
a puzzle you should be solving,” Blow exclaims. “When I try to open this door,
it says it’s locked, but does that mean I am trying to get a key for it, or do
I unlock it from the other side later, or is it just ‘locked’ because it is
just part of the background scenery I am not supposed to try and go through at
all, ever?”
To avoid these kinds of problems, as Blow sees
it, The Witness approaches puzzles differently. It builds a system of
interaction through the operation of the aforementioned LCD panels that
establish how to solve puzzles to advance. “All puzzles behave according to the
same system, so there is never any ambiguity about what you are trying to do or
how you do it,” clarifies Blow. “The only question is what the answer is to
this particular puzzle. You can think of the LCD panels as providing an
extremely streamlined user interface for communicating with the game world.
This means that most of the confusion and flailing involved in older adventure
games is gone, and you can get more of a flow of puzzle-solving gameplay, the
way racing games, fighting games and Tetris have flow.”
There’s no denying that it’s a hugely ambitious
project for Blow, jumping from a linear level-based 2D platformer to a vast
open 3D world – with the engine built entirely from scratch. Not content with
simply iterating on his previous achievements, Blow regards the process of
working with a team of people and expanding his toolset while working on The
Witness as an immense challenge that has changed his perspective
of game design. “Well, if you’re challenging yourself and trying
new things, you always get better at what you do,” he says. “Yes, The Witness
is a different scale of production than Braid, so I am learning some things about
how to run a small team, how to keep a game feeling personal and thematically coherent
when a lot of people are working on it, et cetera. But every game is different and
the new skills I have built when making The Witness may or may not transfer to
the next game.” Which shouldn’t be too long, by the sounds of it. Asked what
ambitions he has once work has completed on The Witness, Blow refers to some
ideas and concepts that he’d like to explore in the future. And, he says, you
can count on his follow-up to The Witness to make similar progressive steps into
unknown territory. “If we were to make The Witness 2 with the same engine and
the same style of puzzles, just with ‘new content’, then the situation would be
pretty straightforward,” he concludes. “But we are not going to do that.”
INFORMATION
Details
Format: PC, PlayStation 4
Origin: US
Publisher: Number None
Developer: In-house
Release: TBC 2014
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1
Developer Profile
While Jonathan Blow has only released
one game to date, Braid, the opinionated developer has been a contributor to
the industry for a number of years through his writing and contributing to
Indie Game Jam. Blow was also in Indie Game: The Movie, where he discussed his
role as an independent developer.
Developer History
The Witness 2014 [PC, PS4]
Braid 2008 [Multi]
High Point
His debut title Braid is a thrilling
and involving platformer that twists conventions of the genre and conveys an
intimate story beneath the terrific execution of its gameplay.
