Despite the aesthetically appealing, yet beautifully simplistic art style that The Witness has, development on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 has been effectively abandoned due to “the relatively low system specs”.
To increase the ease of development for The Witness, the gameplay and the games engine were all simplified, this in turn helped further work with the idea of player perception as part of the gameplay mechanic. This initially drew concerns from the gaming community, calling it “pretentious”, these worries vanished however after the game was shown by Sony where it proved to be more than just another “Dear Esther”-esque game. The non linear nature of the game, and the emphasis on perception has brought Blow to hope that individual players will have their own view on the story and how it unfolds. The non linear style of exploration in the game and the focus on perception and solving puzzles is the focus of the game and because of this, he has compared the gameplay mechanic and the magic moment to discovering a spoiler for a movie, likely meaning it is an unexpected but often pleasing surprise. When developing a separate prototype game, Blow has said that there was a “magic moment”, rather than continuing with one idea to base a game around, he took this magic moment from the prototype and distilled and refined it until he was able to make a gameplay mechanic based on it, giving it its own game and story. Official and dedicated development for The Witness began some time in late 2008, Blow had both high expectations and concerns surrounding the game but despite these, the games compelling nature made him continue on. Whilst working on these various prototype builds he built the initial concepts of The Witness, which he has said seemed “very ambitious and challenging”.
His plan was to spend time working with various new video game prototypes and experiment with the game medium and the concepts within.ĭuring each of these prototype development periods, Blow would spend a couple of months on each, bouncing from project to project while carrying interesting concepts across. How The Witness came into existence was a result of Blows decision to take time of from “serious development” after seeing how much of a success Braid had become. Video game developer Jonathan Blow has said that his ideas and plans for The Witness came to him after he released his smash hit puzzle platforming game Braid.
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