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I see a lot of people miss tutorials for puzzle mechanics and bang their heads against the wall, there's a way to find them reliably (I'm sorry if this has already been suggested, not reading a lot of this thread because of spoilers):

So I've just "finished" the game and I feel like I've barely started exploring what's there (Steam says I've played for 14 hours and it sounds correct), I still haven't even been to some areas on the island and found multiple mysterious doors and things that I still have no idea what they mean. Well, I guess the real The Witness begins here. God I love this game.

What's the purpose of this line? Vector3 orbitVector = Vector3.Cross(downwardVector, orbitDirection).normalized; Why are you creating a vector that is perpendicular to the direction you want to go? I think you should just use orbitDirection in the next step. But maybe I'm just confused. Anyway, I'm not sure what effect you're trying to achieve exactly (that's a game design question), but for simple orbiting I would just exploit the fact that every body will automatically get on an elliptical orbit if it's only affected by the gravitational force of the planet. Of course depending on it's starting velocity it can crash into the planet (if the ellipse intersects the planet or the starting velocity is zero and the ellipse collapses into a line segment), also it can get a little bit more complicated if you actually vary the gravitational force depending on the distance. To turn this ellipse into a circle I'd either set some desired distance to the planet and apply a force towards/from the planet if the body is getting too far/close or have a desired orbital velocity and brake/accelerate depending on the current speed. I think the body should stabilize into a circular orbit after a short while in both cases. This should also work under certain circumstances even if the gravitational force varies with distance. Note I haven't actually done this so maybe there's a catch.

I've played Unreal in its entirety only a few years back and while there certainly were some boring parts there, I actually remember being amazed by level design in the game. I see Unreal and the first Quake as games where you can see level designers were super excited about being able to create fully 3D FPS levels for the first time and were playing with geometry and things like reusing spaces in multiple ways a lot. I feel like some of that magic disappeared after people got used to 3D and generally moved on to more "serious" level design.

Yes, English. Well not only through games and I didn't consciously plan to learn by playing them, but they were a major part of it. There's one slightly annoying thing, if you have font scaling set in Windows, some (mostly older) games will be zoomed in and you'll only see a part of the screen. This can be fixed by right-clicking the .exe and disabling DPI scaling in the compatibility tab. I haven't noticed any other problems.

I have no trouble imagining it at all, it's clear that all engines have their weak points and you have to compromise if you want to do something that goes against the principles ingrained in the engine. You also lose a lot of control over how and where your game can work (available source code is not a perfect solution if it turns out you'd have to rewrite a huge chunk of it). And of course, he didn't create the engine on his own, there are several experienced programmers on the team. It seems to explicitly be the latter anyway, I remember him tweeting about not being able to do a good job if making some of the puzzles in the existing engines because generally games don't need the functionality required for these puzzles. He was obviously vague as to not spoil anything, I remember one of the things being about some crazy image projection technique.

Everything except proper "Lord Chris Remo" is outright insulting.

A lot of not-outrageously-mainstream games also cost as much or more, e.g. a lot of strategy games. I don't even see this game as "indie", whatever this term means exactly. I actually wonder if people would feel differently about the price if there were guns in the game. My understanding is that you interact with the puzzles through drawing on panels and the exact rules change throughout the island. The puzzles are often really about the environment itself and you only use the panel to input your answer. I remember reading that while Myst was definitely a huge inspiration for this game, it was also an anti-inspiration in the way puzzles worked there. There was a lot of obscure machines with weird nobs and buttons and you had to figure out how they work through trial and error. In The Witness, the actual things you interact with are very simple and consistent and the puzzles are more about gradually deepening understanding of concepts behind the particular areas of the game.

The price is pretty much what I (and many other people looking at the neogaf thread) expected. Of course it's a lot, but I don't see anything weird about it in the context of other video game prices. The game seems to be huge (maybe not in purely geographical sense) and it was in development for 6-7 years or so.

The Sea Will Claim Everything of course Evocative and fitting the mood of the game perfectly.

I'd suggest just ignoring the stars, they are not a part of the core game experience and they can be pretty frustrating and pace-braking. That's what I did for the most part. You can always decide to go back and search for them after finishing the game. I actually think that including this type of extra/secret layer into a game can make it worse. The intention behind it is to provide something extra for players that are really into the game but given the strong completionist impulses of many players it makes the experience needlessly frustrating to a lot of people. Even making it really well hidden doesn't help with the Internet existing, e.g. I've seen many people having a very negative opinion about Braid because collecting the stars is frustrating and even kind of broken in one place (when it's pretty clear it's intentional and there's almost zero chance the player would even notice the stars being in the game without reading about them online).

Hm, I don't even remember the difference between the artifacts but I always felt like the games are more related to the original novel (Roadside Picnic) than the film and even then the connection is pretty loose (this is also true for the film and the book of course).

My impression is that some people recommend Shadow of Chernobyl for its story and set pieces while others prefer Call of Pripyat for better open-world FarCry2ness and much better out of the box experience. Personally, while I do have quite fond memories of the first game, I'd go with the latter as I think CoP is the game where the whole concept really shines. Bug-wise I've played both of them unmodded and didn't have any problem with CoP whereas SoC was pretty janky in some places. I guess grabbing the most popular "complete" mod for either of them is the way to go nowadays. You can skip Clear Sky as that game is a broken mess, I'm not even sure if mods fixed it.

Interesting, I don't remember any jump scares being in the game. Sure, there are sections when things happen and become dangerous fast, but I can't recall any "instant monster in your face" heart attack attempt moments. About SOMA being a horror game, I actually felt that it is one only during monster hide & run parts (or when it's clear one of these parts is imminent). I see it more as a narrative-focused game with dark atmosphere and themes, which wasn't the case for Amnesia. I'm still unsure how I feel about the monstery horrory parts, it was always a mix of "oh my god that's terrifying" and "sigh, again? I hope I'll get to the exploration part soon". But I also can't confidently say that removing this aspect would improve the game for me, I recognize that not feeling safe probably does play a role in experiencing the game. Otherwise the game is great, Sno already elaborated on the themes and narrative better than I could. I would also add that the audio is phenomenal in this game.

For multiplayer, Gasworks in Half-Life: Opposing Force. For me it stands out as the best example of this alternative FPS multiplayer experience I like that is very distinct from games that are actually played competitively. I loved playing this large map 1 on 1 which was quite slow, but always led to intense long-range sniper duels, laser traps and barnacle ambushes (yes, you could pick up and use the hanging barnacle monster as a weapon in OF). Somehow the layout combined with all the goofy OF weapons always caused people to try to outsmart others in interesting and funny ways. I've found some footage here, however the people there play the map in a more traditional Quake-y manner because it's the vanilla HL version and there's a lot of players.

That's what happens when you forget to compress it and rename the archive to system.dll.

Well, I think the term "minigame" does not have a scientific definition, but not many game design concepts do. I'd say a minigame is a part of game rules that makes a self-contained whole of certain complexity that barely interacts with the rest of the rules, most commonly it only generates a binary success/failure output which the "main" game uses. Sure, it's not a bulletproof definition (or even a definition really) but I believe the concept is valid and identifiable by most people. Wondering about bad minigames is not the same as wondering about incongruous mechanics in general. Game designers are certainly familiar with the concept, their thought process when adding this type of thing is more likely to be "let's put a minigame here" than "let's add a set of mechanics solving this problem to our game".

Clyde, in your original post you claimed you'd like to just use any image (or sound) you can lay your hands on without caring about anything and giving any credit to anyone. Such a strong claim understandably caused some strong reactions, which you then used as a proof there is a clear consensus about all possible nuances of using non-original material in your work, which is not true and nobody said that. Of course it's a complicated issue without clear binary good/bad answers and there is an interesting discussion to be had. I think the way this thread started is quite unfortunate.

Well, stealing photos is obviously not ok for ethical and legal reasons (unless we're talking about permissive licenses, fair use etc of course). There is one more thing to consider: your reputation. Even if you won't do much harm by stealing photos, someone may notice and you may be (rightfully) labeled as a scummy developer, which is not an easy label to get rid of. Also I agree with SMB, you assumptions are quite douchebaggy. You just assume the only reason people might object is their unreasonable fear. It's problematic on three levels: - You assume that it's ok to dismiss people's unreasonable fear. - You assume that the fear is obviously unreasonable. - You assume that fear is the only reason people would not be ok with stealing their photos. I don't think I have to provide counter-examples to this points. As a wise Steven Seagal movie character once said, "Assumption is the mother of all fuckups".

Social isolation (to an extent it could cause mental issues) and not being attracted romantically/sexually to people are very different things though (not that you claim otherwise). I'm pretty sure the studies you mention deal with quite severe cases of isolation.

Oh? Which disorder would that be? And why should it be addressed? (Also you can google "aromantic").

There's a lot of "did you know it's actually made in Unity?" games coming out lately, see Pillars of Eternity which is out today. Regarding kids cooping games by splitting controls, I thought everyone had done that? I remember my way of introducing other kids to games was by letting them to handle shooting and the use key in Doom and Duke 3D. Also I'm pretty sure the subdued nature of the Souls games is very intentional, it's present in every aspect of the games as Chris said and I always felt like I can see the designers went out of their way to achieve that. There is an interesting interview with Miyazaki and other people that worked on Dark Souls in the Dark Souls Design Works book which touches on this subject. I especially like this part: Waragai: I remember when I was drawing the Undead Dragon, I submitted a design draft that depicted a dragon swarming with maggots and other gross things. Miyazaki handed it back to me saying, “This isn’t dignified. Don’t rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can’t you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?” You can find the translated interview here: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/7force/blog/dark-souls-design-works-translation-creating-the-w/97235/

I've never cared for driving or cars in general and my relationship with the idea of me driving is exactly what SBM posted. I actually have a licence, I was basically forced to get it when I was 18 for no good reason (pressured by my family because apparently that's what you do when you're 18). So I started in some cheap trashy driving school which I think expected that since I'm an adolescent male, I obviously know everything about cars and somebody taught me basics of driving already. Let's say it wasn't very fun experience and I hated every second of it. I'm not very good at multitasking and automating things so I had a lot of problems with knowing where I am exactly, handling gears, observing traffic, deducing the right of way etc while being acutely aware that even a small mistake can ruin my/others lives forever. I still have no idea how so many people manage to do it like it's the most natural thing ever. There was a lot of stress and being yelled at. I somehow managed to pass the exam on the first try and that was pretty much the last time I've sat behind a wheel. I never really needed to drive and right now I live in a city with exceptionally good public transport system. I've talked to some people about this and it turns out a lot of them don't have a license in their twenties and thirties. Maybe at some point in the future I'll want/need to drive and I'll just buy some refresher lessons or something like that.

I'm pretty sure you can get one for a lot less if you're not interested in hi-end space mattress tech and stuff.

That's funny, I have the opposite experience. For me, up until recently, it was the internet where all the people that play Portal and stuff were.