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Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

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Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#101
One thing to note is that some of the optional puzzles are likely to be unsolvable by colorblind and hearing impaired players: http://kotaku.com/colorblind-and-hearing-impaired-players-wo...

As someone who is colorblind, I've been happy to see many games come out with options to enable filters for one or more types of colorblindness. It's disappointing that such a feature isn't present in this game.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#102

JBlow is featured in the documentary Indie Game[0][1] which follows the trials and tribulations of development and launch of two indie games Super Meat Boy and Fez. It's surprising how similar the whole experience is to launching a startup! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_Game:_The_Movie [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

That movie is really unfair to him. It more or less mocks him and paints him as this out of touch primadonna instead of focusing on his work. I feel it was very unfair to him and dramatized for the audience at his expense.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#103
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% sure Jonathan Blow can install Ubuntu. He is writing his own programming language. For a game like that, it just isn't economically feasible to develop for Linux. Especially since the engine was written from scratch. He spent more or less all of the profits on his previous release on this new game. From the videos I've watched about the dev, he is somewhat of a perfectionist. It would likely rankle him to re…

I had a quick look at the trailer and it looked to me like it could have been built with Unity or Unreal Engine... wondering why own engine, given the effort to then port the game to other platforms?

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Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#104

One thing to note is that some of the optional puzzles are likely to be unsolvable by colorblind and hearing impaired players: http://kotaku.com/colorblind-and-hearing-impaired-players-wo... As someone who is colorblind, I've been happy to see many games come out with options to enable filters for one or more types of colorblindness. It's disappointing that such a feature isn't present in this game.

Send him the info. Despite the success he's still an indie dev, and maybe didn't have the resources at the outset, or just didn't get to it or know about it. but maybe it could be in an update.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#105

I like the potential of the game, but sadly it did not meet my expectations. I saw it as a Myst-style game, where you have puzzles, but you also have a lot of interactive environment around you to explore. Here, I was getting taken it by a lot of beautiful scenarios in the distance, only to realise that there is nothing to do there, but solve more panels. It simply feels like this beautiful island is going to waste,…

> How's everyone feeling about this? I'm feeling like you haven't played very far into the game. :-) And neither have I! The puzzles are definitely mostly panel-based, but the environment becomes very important to solving them. I think The Witness is quite clever, so far. It's interesting how much diversity and playfulness can come from just these simple little grid-and-line puzzles.

I can't agree with this enough, I've found the puzzles to be a mechanism by which I can fully appreciate the truly beautiful environment.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#106
post #28

For those wondering, Jonathan Blow is the author of the critically acclaimed time travel platform game 'Braid'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow

And for all those wondering, YES you should go buy & play Braid if you haven't already. It's an astounding game. A 2D platformer-style game that deals with in-game undo, time travel, time distortion, and multiple realities. It's mind bending, fun, and beautiful. Watch the trailer for it here if you haven't seen it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM

Great to see OS X-compatible game recommendations on HN. Personally I find it quite challenging to find interesting games for OS X.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#107
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Braid, Blow (rightly or wrongly) took an immense amount of criticism for his views and opinions. Even more admirable is that he shrug all that off to come thru' with another game (unlike Phil Fish who took all his criticism rather badly).

Fish also stole much of his stuff, so you can't expect him to steal twice as he has eyes on him this time. http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/evidence-that-phil-fish-st... I actually paid for Fez, apart from its little gimmick and art work, it wasn't really much. Never finished it even, and I finished Assassins Creed 1 ;-) Blow just seems genuinely good at writing games/software and creating puzzles, but even better a…

Since when is it possible to steal ideas?

Edit: Sure, it's perfectly valid to extend the meaning of "steal" to include "be inspired by" or "copy", but that does nothing but devalue its original meaning.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#108

I like the potential of the game, but sadly it did not meet my expectations. I saw it as a Myst-style game, where you have puzzles, but you also have a lot of interactive environment around you to explore. Here, I was getting taken it by a lot of beautiful scenarios in the distance, only to realise that there is nothing to do there, but solve more panels. It simply feels like this beautiful island is going to waste,…

I agree with this. The game is at its best when the panels interact with the world in a meaningful way, but this is very rare.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the default sorting for Steam reviews is by how helpful a review was. Looking through some of the positive and negative reviews, it seems like the positive reviews are fairly short and don't say much about the game, while the negative reviews are longer and the reviewers do mention what they thought did and didn't work about the game, so the longer reviews that have a negative opinion end up being the most he…

The proportion of votes for negative vs positive reviews seem way off. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some vote brigading going on for whatever reason. Either that or people mindlessly vote for the longest review.

Nah, it couldn't at ALL be that people simply did not find it to be all that brilliant. It simply must be either a conspiracy or the masses are idiots.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#110
I was rather struck by this game. The puzzles are indeed clever and was immediately enamoured with the combinatoric spaces and visual appeal. Perhaps it is my experience with Go as a "conversation with hands," that drew me in to The Witness as a "conversation with the designer."

I hope Jonathan feels very lucky to have made this game. It is great and I find myself envious and over-joyed that he has had the time, privilege, and skill to build it (and many thanks to the team behind it as well).

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