The Witness was envisioned after Jonathan Blow released
Braid. After seeing the title become a success in 2008, Blow took time off from "serious development" to prototype new game concepts, spending a few months on each. The concept that proved to be the basis for
The Witness was a prototype that Blow considered to be "very ambitious and challenging". He considered it risky as it would include the development of a 3D gameplay engine, and feared that he would "fall back to square one"—referring to his lifestyle before the success of
Braid—should it fail. The game concept itself is based on an earlier title that Blow had envisioned but never completed. According to Blow, in this unfinished title, there was a side gameplay aspect with a "magic moment" that would have made the title exciting.
The Witnesss gameplay is based on distilling out this "magic moment" and wrapping it within its own game and story. Blow compared this moment to a
spoiler for a movie, and thus avoided disclosure of the mechanic or other aspects of the game before release. The maze panel idea came from an earlier idea that Blow had around 2002 for a game involving wizards where the player would cast spells through
mouse gestures, a popular element of video games at the time, with the ability to modify the effect of the spells through slight alterations of specific gestures. One of Blow's goals for
The Witness was to explore the types of non-verbal communication that can be achieved through the medium of video games, an exploration he felt to be important to understanding
them as an art form. The name
The Witness is derived from the core gameplay aspect of making the player attentive to the surroundings to discover meaning and solutions to puzzles without verbal communication, similar to the approach taken by
Myst (1993). Blow attributes much of
The Witnesss design to
Myst, citing
Myst as a game that inspired him to become a developer. An aspect of
Myst that Blow desired to correct was the nature of "pixel hunting" in some of its puzzles; the player would have to click on various parts of the virtual machinery without knowing what the end result was until sometime later in the puzzle. Within
The Witness, Blow created the maze panels as a unifying mechanic for all the puzzles to avoid this confusion. While the basic mode of interaction is the same for every maze in the game, the rules for solving each puzzle differ depending on the set of symbols included on each specific maze. Puzzles were designed to be unique and meaningful within the context of the rest of the puzzles in the game. Part of the game's concept is a balance between puzzle-solving and perception, giving the player the freedom to explore
The Witnesss world and creating a non-linear approach to gameplay. Two of the first puzzles Blow created involved "clues in objects that populate the world", which led him to recognize he needed to create a world to support these puzzles. This would form a dichotomy between exploration and puzzle-solving, which "made a lot of sense" to Blow. Blow felt that a common issue among most adventure games was punishing the player for being stuck, so he created the island as an
open world, allowing players to abandon puzzles they were stuck on to explore others. Blow wanted puzzles to be clearly presented in the open and without any
red herrings, similar to the approach he had taken with
Braid. Blow saw
achievements as hollow and false rewards for the player in comparison to puzzle-solving epiphanies and only implemented them because of requirements for certification by the game console platforms. He was very careful to avoid "over-tutorializing", noting that when a new idea is introduced in a game, the decision to immediately explain it to avoid confusion "kills epiphany and related things like the joy of discovery." "This is going the other way. It's more like the original
Legend of Zelda, which didn't tell you anything." The company's name is taken from a city in
Italo Calvino's novel
Invisible Cities. Starting in December 2009, Blow worked remotely with a 3D artist and a technical programmer full-time. who provided 3D concept artwork for the game, and Ignacio Castaño, who developed a rendering system for the game's illumination and visual effects. Blow gives much credit to Orsolya Spanyol, a freshly graduated graphic artist he hired around 2011, for transforming the original sparse imagery of the island to the more vivid scenery that was included in the final game. Blow attributes this long period to the expansion of the game's scope as he and his team continued to work on it. He opted against time- and cost-saving solutions that would have affected his ambition for the game, such as condensing the game's scope or using an off-the-shelf game engine. Blow had to seek out additional capital in February 2015 after exhausting the
Braid revenues, but believed that regardless of the costs of extra development time, the debt would be justified in the long run. Final development costs were estimated at just under . While Blow considers
The Witness to be an
indie game due to the lack of funding or support from a major publisher, he also feels that the scope of the project by time and cost is closer to what a
AAA studio would produce, and that it represents a new type of game development in the industry.
The Witness uses its own engine developed by Blow and his team, which took a significant portion of the development time. Though the technical support for VR is present in the released game,
The Witness was not designed to take advantage of virtual reality, as many of the puzzles could be "cheated" if the head movement could be separated from the body movement, according to programmer Andrew Smith.
Design, art, and sound The design and layout of the island in
The Witness has been nearly consistent since the start of development, with the team working on populating the world with specific puzzles, and detailing the landscape and other art assets. Sam Machkovech, a writer for
Ars Technica who played a demo in 2012 and 2015, noted that the island had remained familiar between these two sessions. 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. This introductory area was also meant to serve as the tutorial, helping players to understand the fundamental mechanics of switching between solving puzzles and exploring the environment to find others, and Thekla spent a great deal 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 color and of natural and man-made structures to highlight areas that the player would be drawn towards. 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 Fourm Design Studio, a real-world architecture firm, and Fletcher Studio, a landscape architecture team, to help develop the environments for
The Witness. Their studios helped to bring design principles to the main development team, allowing them to then extrapolate their own ideas for the final 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. 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. == Marketing and release ==