Summer Project GDD

Game Design Document (GDD)

Batman Arkham Asylum

1.0       Story/Overview

 

• Introduction
  • General Overview

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a 2009 video game developed by Rocksteady Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in conjunction with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Based on the DC Comics superhero Batman, and written by veteran Batman writer Paul Dini, Arkham Asylum is inspired by the long-running comic book mythos. In the game’s main storyline, Batman’s archenemy, the Joker, instigates an elaborate plot to seize control of Arkham Asylum and trap Batman inside with many of his incarcerated foes. With Joker threatening to detonate hidden bombs around fictional Gotham City, Batman is forced to fight his way through the asylum’s inmates and put an end to the Joker’s plans. Most of the game’s leading characters are voiced by actors who have appeared in other media based on the DC Animated Universe; Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin reprised their roles as Batman, the Joker, and his sidekick Harley Quinn respectively.

• Basic Game Details

Genre:

Batman Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure game

Platform / Minimum Specs

• PlayStation 3
• Xbox 360
• Microsoft Windows
• Mac OS X
• PlayStation 4
• Xbox One

Video Card: 256MB GeForce 6600

OS: Windows XP/Vista

Processor: Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz / AMD Athlon64 3000+

Memory: 1 GB

Hard Drive: 9 GB free

Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

DirectX: 9.0c

Perspective:

The game is presented from the third-person perspective with a primary focus on Batman’s combat and stealth abilities, detective skills, and gadgets that can be used in combat and exploration. Batman can freely move around the Arkham Asylum facility, interacting with characters and undertaking missions, and unlocking new areas by progressing through the main story or obtaining new equipment. The player can complete side missions away from the main story to unlock additional content and collectible items. Combat focuses on chaining attacks together against numerous foes while avoiding damage, while stealth allows Batman to conceal himself around an area, using gadgets and the environment to silently eliminate enemies.

• Plot

After the Joker assaults Gotham City Hall, he is caught by Batman and taken to Arkham Asylum, which temporarily houses many members of the Joker’s gang, who were transferred after a fire at Blackgate Prison. Believing the Joker allowed himself to be captured, Batman accompanies him into the asylum. The Joker’s plan is revealed as Harley Quinn takes control of the security and the Joker escapes into the facility, aided by a corrupt guard who kidnaps Commissioner Gordon. The Joker threatens to detonate bombs hidden around Gotham City if anyone tries to enter Arkham, forcing Batman to work alone. Tracking Quinn to the medical facility to rescue Gordon, Batman is exposed to the Scarecrow’s fear toxin and hallucinates, seeing Gordon’s death and the corpses of his parents talking to him. After fighting off Scarecrow, Batman finds and subdues Quinn before rescuing Gordon. The Joker then directs Batman to the captured Bane, who has been experimented on by asylum doctor Penelope Young. The Joker frees Bane and Batman is forced to fight him, during which Quinn escapes. Afterward, he goes to a secret Batcave installation he had hidden on the island, where Batman restocks his gadgets.

There, Batman learns that the Joker returned to the asylum to gain access to Young, who has been developing Titan—a more powerful version of the Venom drug that gives Bane his strength—intending to use it to help patients survive more strenuous therapies. Young learned that the Joker had been funding her research to create an army of superhuman henchmen; her refusal to hand over the formula precipitated Joker’s return to the Asylum. While searching for Young, Batman is again attacked by Scarecrow and the fear toxin and hallucinates the night of his parents’ deaths. After he recovers, Batman destroys Young’s Titan formula and rescues Young from Victor Zsasz. An explosion kills Young and the Joker obtains the completed batches of Titan.

At the Penitentiary, Quinn releases Poison Ivy from her cell before being imprisoned by Batman. Quinn accidentally reveals that Joker has a Titan production facility in the Arkham botanical gardens. Batman travels there and learns that Titan is created by genetically modified plants. He enlists Ivy’s help to create an antidote and learns that it can only be made from spores found exclusively in Killer Croc’s lair in a sewer. En route to Croc, Batman is again attacked by Scarecrow and overcomes several doses of fear toxin. Meanwhile, Joker injects Ivy with Titan, enhancing her powers. Ivy begins ravaging Arkham Island with giant mutant plants. Pursued by Batman into Croc’s lair, Scarecrow is attacked by Croc and dragged underwater. Batman recovers the necessary spores and subdues Croc before returning to the Batcave but can only synthesize one dose of the antidote before Ivy’s plants breach the cave and destroy his equipment.

Batman returns to the botanical gardens and defeats Ivy, halting the rampaging plants. The Joker announces that the preparations for his party are finally complete and Batman travels to the asylum’s visitor centre where the Joker’s applauding henchmen welcome him. The Joker reveals he has recaptured Gordon and tries to shoot him with a Titan-filled dart; Batman leaps to Gordon’s defense and is shot instead. Batman attempts to resist the change, and an upset Joker takes an overdose of Titan, mutating into a massive monster. In a makeshift arena on the building’s roof, the Joker challenges Batman to a fight as Titan-induced monsters in front of news helicopters. Batman refuses to transform, uses the antidote on himself, and defeats the Titan-affected Joker and his henchmen, knocking his nemesis unconscious with an explosive gel-enhanced punch. In the aftermath, those affected by Titan begin to revert to normal, including the Joker—who is restrained and taken into custody as police officers retake the asylum. Batman overhears a call about a crime led by Two-Face in progress and flies back to Gotham City in the Batwing. In a post-credit’s scene, a crate of Titan formula is shown floating in the ocean near the asylum when a hand surfaces and grabs it.

• Setting

The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, typically called Arkham Asylum or simply Arkham, is a fictional psychiatric hospital appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics, commonly in stories featuring the superhero Batman. Arkham Asylum first appeared in Batman #258 (Oct. 1974), written by Dennis O’Neil with art by Irv Novick.

Arkham Asylum serves as a psychiatric hospital for the Gotham City area, housing patients who are criminally insane. Arkham’s high-profile patients are often from Batman’s rogue’s gallery, such as the Joker, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, the Riddler, the Penguin, Harley Quinn, Clay face, Bane, the Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, Mr. Freeze, and the Scarecrow.

• In Game Description Of Arkham

The game takes place entirely on Arkham Island, a large island on the middle of the Gotham bay. The game’s version of Arkham is like its description in Gotham Knight, consisting of individual large buildings in a spacious open-air island, rather than a single compound. Its locations include Arkham East, Arkham West, Arkham North, Arkham Mansion and the Botanical Gardens, Intensive Treatment, Medical Facility and Penitentiary. The island also features a network of subterranean catacombs, caverns, sewers, and a satellite Batcave which Batman had outfitted over the years in preparation for emergencies like the one he faces in the game.

Concept Art

• Characters

The game features a large ensemble of characters from the history of Batmancomics. Three voice actors, who worked on the DC Animated Universe series of film and television, reprised their roles for the game. Kevin Conroy voices Batman—a superhero trained to the peak of human physical perfection and an expert in martial arts, Mark Hamill voices Batman’s psychopathic nemesis the Joker, and the Joker’s sidekick Harley Quinn is voiced by Arleen Sorkin. Batman is aided by his allies Oracle (Kimberly Brooks)—who remotely provides him with intelligence, and police commissioner James Gordon (Tom Kane).

In the asylum, Batman is faced with several supervillains; he must defend himself from an enraged Bane, subdue indiscriminate serial killer Victor Zsasz, confront the monstrous Killer Croc, defeat the plant-controlling Poison Ivy, and battle his way through hallucinogen-induced nightmares created by the Scarecrow. The Riddler does not physically appear in the game, but communicates with Batman and challenges him to solve riddles placed around the island. Other characters appearing in the game include the asylum’s warden Quincy Sharp, Batman’s parents Thomas and Martha Wayne and asylum guard Aaron Cash. The shape-shifting Clayface appears in cameo, taking on the guise of other characters as he tries to trick the player into releasing him.

3.0       Design

To develop the game’s overall aesthetic, the main aim was to create designs that would combine comic book style with realism. The environmental architecture and characters had to be extravagant enough to represent the Batman universe but needed realistic texture and detail. The second aim was to recreate the dark, Gothic imagery inherent to the Batman universe, especially Arkham Asylum, so that the structure would feel as insane as those whom it houses. The asylum was considered an ideal location because it can house many of Batman’s foes.

Batman’s design was heavily influenced by the work of comic artist Jim Lee, who drew Batman as a strong, muscular character who could believably take part in extreme combat. His black and dark grey costume was based on modern versions and has military influences and an industrial look. Approximately thirteen concept designs were produced before his final appearance took form. Artists avoided film interpretations of the Joker, partly because the developers only had access to the rights to the original Batman license. Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke influenced the character’s design. Harley Quinn underwent a drastic redesign, removing her black and red full-body outfit and jester’s hat, and replacing them with a costume with design elements from a nurse’s outfit and a schoolgirl’s uniform. Wild Storm, Lee’s comic book publishing company, produced concept art for the game.

Designs for the asylum departed from comic interpretations of a large mansion and instead developed an entire island, with hints of Alcatraz prison, composed of multiple buildings to allow for greater variety and exploration. Each building was designed with a different architectural style to make the facility appear believable and to imbue each location with a history. The medical building was inspired by Victorian architecture and its metalwork structure was intended to inspire feelings of horror. The intensive treatment unit has a Gothic, industrial aesthetic. The catacombs beneath the facility, inspired by early twentieth-century brickwork and Victorian industry, were meant to feel oppressive. The maximum-security area was designed to feel claustrophobic and was retrofitted like a bunker, and the Arkham mansion displays a High Gothic style. The designers integrated crooked lines into environmental objects, such as trees and drainpipes, where possible. 40 rooms, 34 corridors, three exterior areas, and three Scarecrow-induced hallucination areas were designed for the game.

To bring these areas to life, the level designers produced game mechanic elements using simple room layouts and shapes, while concept artists worked in tandem to create artwork for each location, following the art direction. Environment artists would then build 3D layouts based on those designs. Finding an appropriate colour palette for the game world was difficult; browns and monochromatic colours could depict the desired dark and moody atmosphere, but the developers wanted the aesthetic to resemble the vibrant colour schemes of a comic book. To this end, they used saturated colours for in-game lighting. Lighting was an important component of the game, being used to highlight points of interest and to draw the player onward in otherwise boring corridors. To maintain the intended level of detail and allow the game’s console versions to fit into the devices’ memory, each area had to be streamed in and out of memory seamlessly to free up memory for textures and geometry. All the cutscenes were storyboarded by Rocksteady artists, being visualized in the game engine before the character performances were motion-captured.  The design team decided that cutscenes should be used to advance character relationships, and that after each cutscene the player should have had their goal changed or the importance of their actions modified. Priority was given to keeping action scenes under the player’s control, rather than showing them in cutscenes.

4.0 Gameplay

Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure game viewed from the third-person perspective. The playable character is visible on the screen and the camera can be freely rotated around him. The player controls Batman as he traverses Arkham Asylum, a secure facility for the criminally insane located off the coast of Gotham City. The opening areas of the game are linear, serving as a tutorial for the moves and approaches available to the player. Once the player emerges onto the island he can freely explore the game world, although some areas remain inaccessible until certain milestones in the main story. Batman can run, jump, climb, crouch, glide from heights using his cape, and use his grapple gun to climb low structures or escape to higher ledges.

The player can use “Detective Vision”—a visual mode which provides contextual information, tinting the game world blue and highlighting interactive objects like destructible walls and removable grates, the number of enemies in an area and their status—such as their awareness of Batman’s presence—and shows civilians and corpses. The mode is also used to follow footprints, investigate odours, and solve puzzles.

Inventory/Collectables

Batman has access to several gadgets which he can use to explore or fight. The batarang is a throwing weapon that can temporarily stun enemies or trigger remote devices. A remotely controlled version can be steered once thrown, and the sonic batarang can be used to attract the attention of specific enemies wearing monitoring collars or detonated to knock a nearby enemy unconscious. Explosive gel can be used on weak walls and floors and can be remotely detonated—sending rubble crashing onto an enemy. The line launcher can be used to traverse horizontal spans. The Batclaw—a grappling device—can be used to interact with remote objects such as vent covers or to grab enemies. The Cryptographic Sequencer is used to override security panels, open new paths, or disable various asylum functions. Some areas are inaccessible until Batman acquires the gadgets necessary to overcoming the obstacle. The player is encouraged to explore the game world away from the main game to find and solve riddles left by the Riddler—who hacks into Batman’s communication system to challenge him with riddles. Objects can be collected, and some of the Riddler’s puzzles require the player to find areas related to the answer to a riddle and scan it with “Detective Vision”. The game world has 240 collectable items, such as Riddler trophies, chattering Joker teeth, interview tapes with some of Arkham’s inmates, and cryptic messages left in the asylum by its founder Amadeus Arkham that discuss the facility’s bleak history. The player is rewarded for solving riddles and finding collectibles with experience points and additional game content, including challenge maps that test the player’s skill at the game’s combat system, character biographies, and in-game statues of Arkham Asylum’s characters.

Combat

Players can traverse enemy-controlled areas using stealth or direct combat. The game’s “Freeflow” combat uses three main buttons: attack, stun, and counter. The system lets Batman move quickly between enemies, chaining attacks together until all enemies are unconscious. Combining the three main abilities can keep Batman attacking while moving between enemies and avoiding being attacked himself. The more combo attacks that are chained together, the faster and more agile Batman becomes, and special attacks—such as a throw, grapple, and an instant takedown which can immediately defeat an enemy—become available. Combat is rewarded with experience points, which are used to unlock gadgets, combat moves, and health upgrades. Higher combos, a wider variety of moves, and avoiding damage delivers more points. Enemy attacks are pre-empted with a warning icon, which indicate the attack can be countered. Some enemies require different approaches to overcome; knife-wielding thugs must be stunned before they can be attacked, and others must be struck from behind. Some enemies are armed with guns which significantly damage Batman. Enemies react to Batman’s elimination of their allies, which raises their fear level and alters their behaviour; for example, they will adopt new patrol routes, requiring the player to adapt to the changing situation. During combat, Batman’s health is diminished by attacks, but is fully restored once the battle ends.

The player can use predatory tactics through stealth—including silent takedowns, dropping from overhead perches and snatching enemies away, or using the explosive gel to knock foes off their feet—to tilt the odds in their favour. Some areas feature sections that require the player to use these tactics to avoid alerting the Joker’s henchmen and thus failing to meet an objective. Many areas feature stone gargoyles placed high above, helping Batman remain concealed. Batman can use his grapnel gun to reach the gargoyles, giving him a high vantage point over the area and the enemies. From the gargoyles, Batman can glide down to attack enemies or hang upside down from the gargoyles to grapple a nearby enemy and leave him tethered there. The player can use floor grates to attack from below, hide around corners, use batarangs to stun enemies from afar, and use the grapnel gun to pull enemies over ledges.

Extras

Arkham Asylum features a series of challenge maps separate from the game’s story mode that are unlocked while playing, and others are available as optional downloadable content (DLC). The maps focus on the completion of specific goals, such as eliminating successive waves of enemies in combat, and subduing patrolling enemies while using stealth. The methods and variety of abilities used to achieve these goals earn an overall performance score that is ranked online against other players. On the PlayStation 3, the Joker is a playable character in the combat and stealth challenge maps via optional DLC; he must confront the asylum guards and police commissioner James Gordon. The Joker has his own combat abilities and weapons, such as a handgun, exploding chattering teeth, and x-ray glasses which allow him to see opponents through walls.

Environmental Impact

On compatible systems, the Microsoft Windows version uses nVidia’s PhysX software engine to produce realistic, dynamic interactions with the game world. With PhysX enabled, some areas contain smoke or fog which reacts to Batman moving through it, while with PhysX disabled the fog will not appear at all. Other effects include dynamic interaction with paper and leaves, surfaces which can be scratched and chipped, and dynamic, destructible cloth elements such as banners and cobwebs. The Game of the Year version features the ability to play the game in 3D on any 2D television using anaglyph 3D glasses.

 Abzu

1.0       Story/Overview

• Introduction
  • General Overview

Abzû is an adventure video game developed by Giant Squid Studios and published by 505 Games for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows. Initially released as a digital title in August 2016, a retail version for consoles was released in January 2017. Following the journey of a diver exploring the ocean and restoring life using magical springs, the gameplay allows the player to freely navigate underwater environments ranging from open water and natural caverns to ancient ruins.

• Basic Game Details

Genre:

Adventure, Art game, Simulation

Platform / Minimum Specs

OS: Windows 7, 64-bit

Processor: 3.0GHz CPU Dual Core

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: Geforce GTX 750 / Radeon R7 260X

DirectX: Version 11

Storage: 6 GB available space

Sound Card: DirectX compatible sound card

• Synopsis

The narrative of Abzû is told wordlessly through gameplay and using cutscenes, taking place in a vast ocean. The player character, referred to as a female diver,awakens floating in the ocean and begins exploring the surrounding sea: ruins and ancient murals show that an ancient civilization which shared a symbiotic connection with the ocean. As she explores, she is led by a great white shark to wells that—when activated using an energy from within her—restore life to the local seas. That energy is being forcefully harvested by pyramid-like devices, the development of which disrupted the ocean’s balance and brought about the civilization’s downfall. Upon reaching the original pyramid, the diver sees the great white shark attacking it, and the pyramid’s counterattack damages the diver—revealing her to be mechanical and confirming her existence as a being connected to the pyramid and capable of restoring life to the ocean—and mortally wounds the great white shark, which dies as the diver comforts it. After activating the final well, the great white shark manifests and guides the repaired diver back to the pyramid. The diver destroys the pyramid, causing life to return to the ocean. During the credits, the diver and great white shark swim together through the revitalized ocean.

2.0       Design

The game’s title stems from Sumerian mythology, particularly the myth of the ocean goddess Tiamat and the fresh water god Abzu uniting to form all life: a reason this was chosen was that myths surrounding land-based life and their supposed origins in a cosmic ocean were a recurring theme in multiple world mythologies. The title is made up of the words “Ab” (water) and “Zû” (to know), translated by the developers as “Ocean of Wisdom”. The word provided difficulties early on, as the Sumerian spelling “Abzu” differed from the Akkadian spelling “Apsû”. As a compromise, the team merged the two spellings into the game’s title. The circumflex over the letter “u” caused problems for the team as hardly anyone knew how to type it and the computer programs had trouble handling it as part of the coding. The use of the word played into the game’s focus on the ocean due to its mythic connections. The Middle Eastern influences extended to the game’s architecture, and incorporated Nava’s wish for structures to have meaning beyond being simple scenery or tools for player progression.

The aim from an early stage was not to simulate diving, but instead to capture the dream-like feeling of ocean exploration. As part of his research, Nava experimented with other ocean simulation games and found they were not “fun”. By removing any time limit or air gauge, the team sought to promote a relaxing sense of exploration. One of the main issues was giving the player complete freedom to swim around, including doing a full loop—this effect was normally held back due to camera difficulties, but Giant Squid managed to resolve the issue and allow for greater range of movement. The meditation mechanic was added during later development from 2015 to 2016 as a means of allowing players a view of the surrounding marine life and environment. When choosing their game engine, Matt Nava was still the only staff member and so they needed an easy-to-use platform with tools and technology to create his vision. Unreal Engine 4 was still quite new at this time, but it was chosen after the team had vetted other developer software available at the time. The team were able to use both Unreal Engine 4’s advanced developer tools and expand the engine’s functionality to incorporate unique elements such as fish shoal behaviour, vegetation animation, and underwater lighting. Using Unreal Engine 4 allowed engineer Derek Cornish to construct unique systems for underwater lighting effects.

The artistic style was meant to portray a vibrant underwater world, but the team also needed to prevent activity on-screen from overwhelming the player, so a stylized look was chosen to both maintain the game’s artistic style and reduce the amount of “visual noise”. Environmental editing was a big issue for the team, with much of their early development dedicated to creating editing tools that could do small-scale edits to environments after they had been locked down. When creating the environments, Nava drew on his experience developing Flower for Thatgamecompany, creating sporadically scattered interaction points that triggered with player exploration and triggered new life or new elements within each environment. Since there was no dedicated animator, the team needed to use multiple techniques for animation the diver, fish and flexible vegetation: the diver used a skeletal animation run through a complex state machine, vegetation such as seaweed used rope physics, while fish mainly used mathematical motion in combination with morph target posing to remove the need of individual skeletal structures.

The types of fish seen in Abzû were based on real-life creatures from the oceans of Earth, and to fit them into the game each species was distilled down to its most distinctive traits. The team had “tens of thousands” of fish within the game. Their swimming styles were directly modelled on the behaviour and physics of real fish movements. The number of fishes presented problems with running the game, but the programming staff developed a method of simplifying each fish’s animation without compromising the game’s visuals, which “multiplied the number of fish possible on screens by 10”. Each fish species had its own unique artificial intelligence that had cascading levels of awareness and interaction with other species and objects in the environment. The team started with getting the fish to swim without clipping through walls, then built upon that with further expansion on fish behaviour and interaction. Their most challenging task was creating realistic bait balling effects for shoals of small fish, which was only achieved and finalized near the end of development. The developers did take liberties by grouping together types of fish from different parts of the globe which would normally not be able to interact, though this fell in line with the game’s overall theme and the myths it referenced. Despite this, the developers emulated the zones that each fish would be found in, whether it be a coral reef or the deep ocean where sunlight does not reach. The amount of work and the team’s dedication to creating a realistic and vibrant experience meant they were creating fish until development finished.

3.0 Gameplay

In Abzû, the player takes on the role of a diver in a vast ocean—after waking up floating on the ocean’s surface, the diver begins exploring the surrounding underwater environments filled with plant and animal life, in addition to uncovering ancient technology and submerged ruins. In a few areas, the diver is also able to explore land-based environments above the water. As the game progresses, the diver unlocks new areas and pursues the secrets behind the forces harming the local environment. The diver’s course through the game follows a linear path through interconnected areas filled with marine life. The player directs the diver through the environments using full analogue control, able to interact with the environment to solve switch or item-based puzzles and sit on pedestals within each area to observe the surrounding sea life. The diver can accelerate and interact with marine life using sonar chimes. The diver can grab onto the bodies of larger marine animals and ride on them. Each area sports hidden collectables for the diver to find.

4.0 Sound

The soundtrack for Abzû was composed, conducted, and produced by Austin Wintory, who had previously worked on Journey and The Banner Saga. Wintory was first shown concept art for the project by Nava before Giant Squid Studios was founded and development began. When the studio was founded, Wintory was invited on board the project. The music was written from the start to be interactive and dynamic rather than based on specific cues. To achieve this, Wintory had to play the game extensively and repeatedly to get a sense for what players would experience and what would best match the mood. Like Wintory’s work on Journey, the first track written was the main theme “To Know, Water” and further tracks were created over the game’s three-year development based on that theme.

The score’s instrumental element began with using a harp as its base, with a choir being used later. More instrumentation was needed, with a full orchestra eventually being incorporated. As with his work on Journey and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, he used a soloist alongside an ensemble orchestra: in this case, the solo instrument was an oboe. The oboe solos were performed by Kristin Naigus, whom Wintory had heard performing an oboe cover of a track from Journey on YouTube. Wintory worked closely with Abzû’s sound designer Steve Green created a music-based story that flowed alongside and worked with the visual narrative of Abzû.

The official soundtrack was released as a digital album through Bandcamp and iTunes on August 2, 2016.A physical edition was released on October 22 through Varèse Sarabande. Music reviewers were generally positive about the soundtrack album. The soundtrack later won the 2017 Game Audio Network Guild’s “Best Original Soundtrack Album” award. The soundtrack was also nominated at the 2017 BAFTA Games Awards in the “Music” category but lost to Virginia. For his work on Abzû, Wintory won the 2016 International Film Music Critics Association award for “Best Original Score for a Video Game or Interactive Media”, making his second win in a row. The score was also nominated at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards in the “Original Score – Video Game” category. Reviewers of the game also gave unanimous praise to the soundtrack, positively comparing it to that of Journey.

Concept Art

The Witness

3.0       Story/Overview

• Introduction
  • General Overview

The Witness is a 3D puzzle video game developed and published by Thekla, Inc. It was released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 in January 2016, with later versions released for the Xbox One, Nvidia Shield, macOS, and iOS. Inspired by Myst, the game involves the exploration of an open world island filled with natural and man-made structures. The player progresses by solving puzzles, which are based on interactions with grids presented on panels around the island or paths hidden within the environment.

Announced in 2009, The Witness had a lengthy development period. Jonathan Blow, the game’s lead designer, started work on the title in 2008 shortly after releasing Braid. The financial success of Braid allowed him to hire a larger production team without ceding control over the final product. In order to create the game’s visual language, the team developed their own game engine and retained artists, architects, and landscape architects to design the structures on the island. This required a protracted development process, and the game’s release was delayed from 2013 to 2016. Blow desired to create a game around non-verbal communication, wanting players to learn from observation and to come to epiphanies in finding solutions and leading to a greater sense of involvement and accomplishment with each success. The game includes around 650 puzzles, though the player is not required to solve them all to finish the game.

• Basic Game Details

Genre:

Puzzle

• Microsoft Windows
• PlayStation 4
• Xbox One
• Nvidia Shield
• macOS
• iOS

Platform / Minimum Specs

OS: Windows 7

Processor: 1.8GHz

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: Intel HD 4000 series

DirectX: Version 9.0

Storage: 4 GB available space

 

4.0       Design,Art & Sound

The island has been structured to provide a fair mix of puzzle solving, exploration, and narrative elements while avoiding a “paradox of choice” by giving the player too much freedom and confusion about where to go next. According to artist Luis Antonio, one of the first things that Blow wanted the player to see was the mountain, to make them aware that this was their ultimate goal. The game initially started the player in an abandoned bunker converted to a living space, but as it was originally arranged, the player would exit the bunker not facing the mountain. Though they attempted to move and rotate the bunker space to meet Blow’s goal, it was ultimately scrapped in favour of a simpler space with interior elements that fit with other portions of the game, and which the player would climb out of into the external environment with the mountain in full view. This introductory area was also meant to serve as the game’s tutorial, helping players to understand the fundamental mechanics of switching between solving puzzles and exploring the environment to find others, and Thekla spent a detail of time fine-tuning the details to be clear without verbal explanation. The team’s artists worked to support Blow’s objective of guiding the player by using contrasts of colour and of natural and man-made structures to highlight areas that the player would be drawn towards. Blow wanted the game’s art to start off with bright colours and high saturation, to present a type of optimism to the player, while later settings in the game would become less bright. He also wanted to make sure all elements of the game world stood out to avoid visual noise within the game that may have interfered with puzzle solving. To accomplish this, he and his team often had to review the game as if they were new players to it, and identify what elements they were visually drawn to; this would often identify features of the island they had incorporated early on but were no longer appropriate for the final game.

The art style was influenced by a simplification approach, eliminating enough details but keeping overall shapes to make objects clearly recognizable. According to Antonio, they took inspiration for simplification from real-world photography, from artwork, and from the environments of the games Journey, Team Fortress 2, and Mirror’s Edge.[45] They still wanted to ensure that a player would be able to recognize an area of the island they were in based on the visual appearance, such as by the types of trees around them, and ensured there was enough distinction while simplifying the assets to make this possible. Blow’s team also engaged with Forum Design Studio, a real-world architecture firm, and Fletcher Studio, a landscape architecture team, to help develop the environments for The Witness. According to Forum’s founder, Deanna Van Buren, they developed the various man-made and cultivated areas based on the concept of three different civilization periods, with later civilizations building on the structures from earlier ones and repurposing these structures as needed. Their studios helped to bring design principles to the main development team, allowing them to then extrapolate their own ideas for the final game. Blow said that the guidance and advice of the architects helped to craft the island in a way that “feels more immersive just because the details are in place, and your brain kind of picks up on it”. Blow gives an example of how many of the buildings on the island are in various states of deterioration but were designed as fully detailed and complete structures and purposely worn down to create the ruined look; the resulting structures retain logically consistent details, such as the remains of wooden support posts for rotted-away stairways in a castle, which aid in immersion for the player.

The final game shipped with very little music, instead relying on the ambient sounds of the environment, which were developed by Wabi Sabi Sound. Blow felt that the addition of music was a “layer of stuff that works against the game”. The ambient sound effects were difficult to include, as the game world has no wildlife, making the player aware of how alone they are while on the island. Most of the ambient sounds were recorded by Andrew Lackey of Wabi Sabi Sound, capturing them while walking around Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Lackey layered the various sound effects to enable many different variations depending on the player’s location on the island while also providing a seamless transition from one environment to the next.

5.0 Gameplay

The Witness is a first-person puzzle adventure game. The player, as an unnamed character, explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations. The island is roughly divided into eleven regions, arranged around a mountain that represents the goal for the player. The regions are differentiated from one another by changes in vegetation, and the puzzles within each region are like one another (e.g. their solutions may all involve symmetry). Throughout the island are yellow boxes housing turrets. These can be activated once the puzzles within the box’s region have been solved. When activated, the turrets emerge to shine a light toward the top of the mountain, indicating that a section of the game is complete. Several such turrets need to be activated to unlock access to the inside of the mountain, and ultimately reach the game’s final goal. Additional puzzles can be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated.

There are additional optional puzzles scattered around the island. One such set of puzzles, accessible after entering the mountain and colloquially referred to as “The Challenge”, is a time-based test to complete about a dozen algorithmically generated puzzles of various types within seven minutes. The sequence is set to music from Edvard Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King”. The game has more than 650 puzzles, which Jonathan Blow estimates will take the average player about 80 hours to solve. The puzzles include one that Blow believed that less than 1% of the players would be able to solve.

Mechanically, all puzzles in The Witness are solved in the same way: a path is drawn on a grid. For a path to be a solution to a puzzle, it must satisfy several rules. The rules are usually simple. For example, in a grid with white and black squares, a path may be required to separate the different kinds of squares, as illustrated to the left. The rules are taught to the player throughout the course of the game by the puzzles themselves, as such, there is no text or dialogue directly explaining a puzzle’s rules. While the rules a path must satisfy can differ substantially across the game, at least three rules apply to all puzzles: paths must always begin from a round node, end on a line segment with a rounded end, and avoid self-intersection. As such, many of the game’s puzzles can be classified as mazes.

The game has two modes of interaction. The first, a walking mode, allows the player to move around and explore the island. The second, the path-drawing mode, is the one the player uses to attempt to solve puzzles. This mode is distinguished from the former by a white border around the screen. In path-drawing mode, the player’s avatar is prevented from moving and instead allows the player to use their controls to trace the path through the puzzle’s grid. The mode ends once the player solves the puzzle or cancels the mode. Normally, this mode is activated in front of a panel, moving the player’s view directly to the panel to solve it, but it can also be activated at any other time. Nearly all puzzles provide immediate feedback if they have been solved correctly or not through sound effects or visual indication.

Most puzzles are easy to identify, located on recognizable eye-level panels scattered around the island. Sometimes several panels will be clustered together, as is typically done when the game is teaching a rule to the player. Most panels are daisy-chained to one another with power cables; solving one will light-up the cable, and unlock another panel. When this occurs in one of the game’s regions, the complexity of the puzzles increases as the player works towards unlocking the region’s yellow box (the size of the grids may increase, the region’s rules may be refined, or new rules may be created). Though puzzles in a given region usually need to be completed in order, the regions themselves do not. This gives the game an open-world feel, and allows players who get stuck in one region to move on to another.

Sometimes the rules of a puzzle depend not on the elements in its grid, but on the environment itself (for example, studying a tree whose branch structure mimics that of a nearby grid). There are also a number of optional environmental puzzles, where a single path is disguised in the environment. As with the game’s grid puzzles, these are solved by entering path-drawing mode and tracing out the path. However, the components of such paths are distributed across different parts of the environment and disconnected. Only when a path is viewed from a certain perspective do the components join to form a continuous path. The player then needs to find the correct viewpoint to complete the puzzle. Completing one such puzzle leads to one of the game’s endings which shows a live-action sequence, apparently taken from the point-of-view of the player, as they finish the game and take off their virtual reality headset, having seeming been lost in the game for several days, and trying to get back to their senses but still looking for the game’s puzzles in the real-life environment.

Throughout the island are audio recordings that provide insightful quotes for the player, from people such as Buddha, B.F. Skinner, and William Kingdon Clifford. Voice actors for these logs include Ashley Johnson, Phil LaMarr, Matthew Waterson, and Terra Deva.The player can also encounter a theater where short video clips, such as from James Burke’s Connections series or the ending of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, can be viewed. A number of visual illusions based on depth perception from the player’s position can be found in the game’s environment, such as two seemingly disparate human figures at different parts of the island that appear to be holding hands when viewed from the right position and angle.