The Witness: Redesign and System Mockup

Ah, ‘The Witness’ - the game I love to play for 3 days, give up on for 6 months and then return to with no memory of where I was, what had happened or how difficult maze puzzles could really be. I tend to find that for me  there are 3 stages of being stuck in a game - 1) Frustration, 2) Despair and 3) ‘I reckon I could do a full redesign of this clip faster than I could get past this bit…’ so here we are!

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Continuing on my FMOD investigations, I wanted to look at how switches and randomisation works - so what better way to test this than some good old footsteps!

After a bit of research I found out that I could add my own parameters with discrete values and just link multi instrument sources to each surface type I added. In Wwise I would have done this with switches, but I’ve got to admit, I did feel pretty clever when I got to use the phrase ‘discrete variables’ - I knew the Physics AS level would come in handy at some point!

I also wanted to try my hand at a theoretical puzzle system. I started by setting up the ‘Puzzle Enter’ and ‘Puzzle Exit’ actions for when you first bring up the cursor to allow you to do the mazes. This was pretty simple to do by just adding a couple of 2D actions (2D because I didn’t want the sounds to be spatialised). I then did the same thing for the ‘Click’ and the ‘Puzzle Complete’ events before moving onto the Navigation Loop. I then mapped the Navigation Loop’s pitch shift and volume values to a 'cursor speed' parameter that I created.

In the final redesign there are also a few more environmental elements, including a few loops to indicate to the players that there are puzzles nearby! Now if only the puzzles were as intuitive as FMOD Timelines….

You can listen to the full redesign below! ⬇️