Kolzig

The Witness by Jonathan Blow

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If I remember correctly, I believe Blow was interviewed on the Bombcast a while back and made a comment that they refused to "crunch" with this game and with the exception of a demo they had to throw together in a short amount of time, they've pretty much worked standard weeks while making this game. I'm paraphrasing a bit here and things may have changed in the years since that interview but if that is true then I would imagine that partially explains why development has taken so long. Which is totally fine in my book. I hate the crunch mentality in software development.

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If I remember correctly, I believe Blow was interviewed on the Bombcast a while back and made a comment that they refused to "crunch" with this game and with the exception of a demo they had to throw together in a short amount of time, they've pretty much worked standard weeks while making this game. I'm paraphrasing a bit here and things may have changed in the years since that interview but if that is true then I would imagine that partially explains why development has taken so long. Which is totally fine in my book. I hate the crunch mentality in software development.

 

That's really great to hear. I know Blow bothers a lot of people, but I really admire what he's done with his involvement with the Indie Fund and moves like this. It seems like an important move for him (and other members of his team) to be willing to take extra time on the game and spend extra money in order to treat employees humanely. I hope it works out well for all of them.

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I imagine it actually costs roughly the same amount. If you just assume that they work basically the same amount of hours, it's the same amount of work just over a longer amount of time. You will also most certainly get more hours that are more productive. It probably takes fewer hours if you do no crunch.

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I'm a bit interested in why he would make his own engine for this game, whether that's more of his style, or more of a necessity based on some aspect of gameplay/art. I have trouble imagining anything more than the former.

 

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.

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Do game developers typically have paid overtime? I assumed they didn't.

 

I don't actually know. I guess my brain assumed they would be compensated in some way for overtime or crunch, because those are things I believe in. So naive!

 

The company would probably say that they account for that in terms of the salary the employee is being paid, but I couldn't tell you if the employees feel that way (I mean, I could tell you but it's not my place to speak for them)

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Regarding the engine, I heard this ages ago so I might be misremembering, but I think they built a real time multi-user editing tool so that all the designers could work on the same instance of the game simultaneously. Blow is also a pretty hardcore programmer and I think he wants total control of every aspect of his game. He's exactly the kind of developer Unity isn't made for. Besides, they started almost a decade ago and 'free' engines have come a long way since then.

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If you can put someone under the computer worker umbrella, employers aren't required to compensate for overtime hours if you're on a salary. If you get paid hourly, you still get paid for the hours you work, but you do not get time and a half.

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They definitely aren't required to, but personally (computer work, but not game dev) I get any overtime banked as vacation.

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If I remember correctly, I believe Blow was interviewed on the Bombcast a while back and made a comment that they refused to "crunch" with this game and with the exception of a demo they had to throw together in a short amount of time, they've pretty much worked standard weeks while making this game. I'm paraphrasing a bit here and things may have changed in the years since that interview but if that is true then I would imagine that partially explains why development has taken so long. Which is totally fine in my book. I hate the crunch mentality in software development.

 

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/690327260109283328

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http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/giant-bombcast-e3-2013-day-two/1600-513/

 

Around the 16 minute mark is where he claims that preparing the trailer for E3 2013 was the only time their team had had to crunch at all. I guess things got a little more crunchy since then.

 

Edit: Sorry, had to fix link. It was acting squirrelly.

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Twitter was pretty, pretty, pretty good last night huh?

Was it? Twitter is always pretty good to me. Was there something in particular?

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Was it? Twitter is always pretty good to me. Was there something in particular?

 

Twitter was saturated with reactions to Blow's pee-bottle last night.

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Twitter was saturated with reactions to Blow's pee-bottle last night.

 

My first thought was that it was a smoking apparatus. The color of the water was a tad yellower than it should have been but I swear I made something that looked just like that once. Then I realized it was just a pee bottle and got sad and a little grossed out.

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Reviews are coming in now. Looks like it really is all about those line puzzles and is very well designed and at times brutally tough. The thing I was concerned about, how well the puzzles, story, and environment all come together, seems to have been pulled off successfully, though reviews are deliberately vague about how that is actually done. I think this is one I'll pick up at launch and then have going alongside other games I'm playing (so I have something else to do when I inevitably get very stuck and can keep myself from looking up solutions).

 

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/the-witness-review-an-island-where-knowledge-mystery-are-the-treasures/

http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/25/10817632/the-witness-review-PC-PS4

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I don't know how anyone expected the game to be $20. Because it's indie I guess?

It costs exactly what I thought it would.

 

I'm well documented having no idea that this game even still existed, let alone was coming out soon, but I always thought it was going to be a full-price $60 release.

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That Polygon review is kind of irritating. It seems kind of like he knocked the game because the puzzles are so clever that nobody would be able to resist using a walkthrough, which would defeat the entire purpose of playing and experiencing the game. Also, hearing such a bold claim regarding the puzzle difficulty only makes me want to play this more.

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That Polygon review is kind of irritating. It seems kind of like he knocked the game because the puzzles are so clever that nobody would be able to resist using a walkthrough, which would defeat the entire purpose of playing and experiencing the game. Also, hearing such a bold claim regarding the puzzle difficulty only makes me want to play this more.

 

I thought he was saying that the game doesn't reward you enough for the frustration.  In fact, that's literally what he said:

 

But The Witness throws endless puzzles at the player while almost never recognizing their accomplishments, which creates something of an antagonistic relationship between player and creator. I fear that will send players running to walkthroughs faster than they would have in a more rewarding environment.

 

If you disagree with that, I understand, but I think that's substantially different than saying he doesn't like it for being "so clever." 

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I watched like 10 minutes of the Giant Bomb Quick Look and am totally sold on this game, if I wasn't already. I can already see how complex the puzzles will get. Plus, this is Journey levels of beautiful.

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I thought he was saying that the game doesn't reward you enough for the frustration.  In fact, that's literally what he said:

 

 

If you disagree with that, I understand, but I think that's substantially different than saying he doesn't like it for being "so clever." 

 

The Witness doesn't care if you win and it doesn't care if you're stuck. That's nothing short of a revelation in 2016. I imagine it will also send some players running to GameFAQs looking for solutions. Once they've done that — and I'm not being hyperbolic here — they might as well uninstall the game.

The danger is that in cheating their way to even one solution, the player will have robbed themselves of a crucial part of the puzzle vocabulary and, in doing so, made the next puzzle even harder for themselves. That will naturally lead to more cheating. It will snowball.

The Witness has plenty of cool aesthetic choices and an intriguing if opaque central story, but still: Solving puzzles is the whole game, so using a walkthrough will turn it into a meaningless experience.

That being said: I would have 100 percent absolutely no question used a walkthrough had one been available to me. I was stuck for five days on a single puzzle. I have no idea how people who have solutions a click away are going to avoid that temptation but, more damningly, The Witness doesn't seem to know either.

The game makes no concessions to the fact that it's being released in 2016, an era in which a full list of all the solutions will be available within 24 hours of release. It simply trusts the player not to cheat. That trust would be a lot less tempting to violate if The Witness weren't such a mean piece of shit from time to time.

 

Taking the paragraphs he wrote leading up to that statement, I stand by my claim.

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That quote you took out is sandwiched between the one I gave and these paragraphs:

 

In the world of The Witness, solving puzzles is its own reward. While finding a solution will very rarely make a small change in the environment that allows the player to proceed, it will far more commonly just activate the next puzzle to be solved with zero fanfare.

 

That's not a problem the first time you solve a certain type of puzzle with no instruction and feel like Queen or King Genius of Brilliant Mountain. Those are the revelations. But the sixth, eighth, twelfth time you bash your head against a puzzle for 30 minutes, find a solution and only have the low buzz of the next puzzle screen activating to show for it? That's brutal.

 

He's clearly talking about the lack of excitement/reward being out of balance with the difficulty.  You can take the whole context of the review into consideration or, you can just pull out the paragraphs about difficulty and be outraged.  Either way, it's truly funny that you read that review and decided he was saying he hates the puzzles for being clever.

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I think it's totally fair to say that Justin has concerns that this game will potentially push some people who may like it if they stuck it out into looking up a guide. Jonathan Blow may think his audience should be better than that, but that's not in line with the world we live in, and he can be idealistic as he wants, but that doesn't change that people don't have the patience for that stuff, especially when there are always other games to be playing instead that don't punish their players, or leave them feeling lost.

 

There are always going to be Dark Souls fanatics because they have the patience to learn the game's combat mechanics and enemy tells, but there are going to be a ton of other people that bounce off of that, and is lack of player retention a valid criticism in any game? I think it is. Not every game has to be for every person, and I think games are better when there are games that aren't for everyone. That doesn't mean that "I think this game's failing is its inability to anticipate player feelings/desires" (especially given that Justin's overall review is positive and the game got a very good score) isn't a totally reasonable argument.

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I started to write something else, and then it clicked that Justin is actually doing the thing that Rob and Danielle talked about recently on IW.  He's basing part of his review on the expected audience reaction, rather than just his own reaction.  The few reviews I've read since that discussion have suddenly made that review habit really stand out to me.  They spoke of it in terms of imagining the person who will love a game, but I think the thought applies to imagining a player who will hate a game, or be frustrated by it, or whatever. 

 

His comments, if you boil them down to what he was saying, is that he was definitely frustrated, would have cheated if he were able, is glad that he didn't, because then he would have robbed himself of an experience, and knowing that makes him kind of sad about it.  I think that communicates his concern without having to frame it in part around an imaginary future player.  It's an unnecessary rhetorical device.

 

If I have an issue with his thought, it's that there needs to be a reward that's more significant than just the success of having solved a puzzle.  You don't get a bell and achievement for solving a crossword in the newspaper (for all I know, you do on phone versions, in which case :spinnyfartemoji:).  Just the satisfaction of having solved a puzzle.  Which I think is likely enough for many of the people most excited about this. 

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