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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

#171

Post by JabavuAdams »

likeclockwork wrote: post #142
JabavuAdams wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, no it won't. If everyone who shared your opinion could convince 100-1000 other people to do the same, then maybe it would work. Fundamentally, though, some kinds of customer aren't worth the trouble. I'm not going to sell Lamborghinis to people who don't really care about flashy cars. So, why would I expect to sell AAA polished games to people who won't install a gamer OS, out of principle?

"a gamer OS"?

My point being ... I want to sell games to people who gotta have my games. If "ew, I hate Windows" will stop them from buying a game, then they're probably going to be a pain in the ass, as customers. I'm not going to be able to make them happy.

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

#172

Post by lkozma »

nwhitehead wrote: post #158
lkozma wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a common misconception that in the kind of puzzles you mention any number can come next in an equally meaningful way. There are well-defined (mathematically) and natural ways in which 6 is a better continuation to 1,2,3,4,5,... than say 15 or whatever else.

What's wrong with sequence A096774 (numbers with 9*10^n+7 prime)? Why is sequence A000027 (numbers starting at 1 increasing by 1 each time) better? Because it comes earlier in the encyclopedia of sequences?

I like this idea: the OEIS-complexity of a sequence (= how early it comes in the encyclopedia). But yes, what I thought of was what the other commenter wrote: given some primitive operations, how long a program can generate the sequence?

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

#173

Post by henrikschroder »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #95

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,…

There's the environmental puzzles, where you need to find the right perspective, the right spot, or line up the environment in a specific way, so that you can solve them.

Hint: Look for large circles in the environment, and start dragging a line.

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

#175

Post by dang »

azzafazza wrote: post #78

$0.15 has been deposited into your Jonathan Blow account, thank you for continuing to help us shill this game on various websites!

Comments like this will get your account banned from HN. Please (re-)read the site guidelines, and post civilly and substantively from now on, or not at all.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10987825 and marked it off-topic.

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

#176

Post by abrkn »

donatj wrote: post #20

Windows and PS4 huh? As the exclusive owner of Macs and an Xbox One, that's little irritating. I'd at least imagine a Windows to Xbox One port to be reasonable.

I'm in the same situation. Perhaps we can hope to play the game in a year or so. If The Witness is even close to the quality of Braid, I'll wait.

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

#177

Post by chaostheory »

StavrosK wrote: post #57
chrismbarr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Braid is a masterpiece, just go get it now and play it WITHOUT WALKTHROUGHS (they'll just spoil the game for you). I'm not sure the Witness can live up to Braid, but we'll see.

Without the walkthroughs though, many people most likely wouldn't have gotten the real ending.

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

#178

Post by dang »

clentaminator wrote: post #85
eXpl0it3r wrote: post #81

And why exactly is this on Hacker News?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." An open world puzzle game seems exactly like the kind of thing that might gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Plus it does make a nice change from reading the latest thing about React ;)

That, plus its creator is one of us: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jblow. Of course this belongs on HN.

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

#179

Post by topspin »

autoreleasepool wrote: post #129

How far along is he with implementing his game dev language, Jai? I haven't kept up, but I was interested in his early demonstrations.

He's still doing live coding sessions on Twitch. Nothing has been released yet. Despite that there is already at least one comprehensive Jai language tutorial that I've seen and also syntax highlighting rules for at least one editor.

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

#180

Post by codeulike »

secstate wrote: post #169
chasing wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a puzzle game. So I might argue that not being intuitive is kind of the point. And to that point, maybe one reason I've found so many recent major game titles boring recently is that there is no puzzle to them. They're just activities. Go here. Shoot that. Collect that. It's nice to actually be stumped. And not just frustrated by my lack of hand-eye coordination.

Hmm, a non-intuitive puzzle isn't really a puzzle anymore, is it? Q: I have three oranges and one grapefruit. I have to get all of them through a door that's been glued shut. There is no way to open the door. How do I get the fruit through? A: Blend them and use the tube lying next to the door and pour them through the keyhole. That's a non-intuitive puzzle. You can't intuit that there's a keyhole, a tube and a blend…

That's different. In a game you can explore and experiment. Your defn of puzzle is very restrictive.
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