I remember seeing early parts of his work on papers please and there is something wonderful about sharing your process and exposing it to feedback.
I literally had no idea so much went into the dithering, my presumption was there was just an off the shelf posterization filter applied.
The end result looks fantastic and managed to give me wild nostalgia for playing games like The Manhole on my friends Macintosh Classic as a kid.
One of my favorite games ever, my wife and I played through it together. I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with another person if you have the chance.
Excellent list! I'd also add The Crimson Diamond to it.
Don't read too much about it, you want to go in as blind as possible.
May I suggest Her Story / Telling Lies / Immortality ?
Absolutely. Shameless self-plug to my list of games for "non-gamers" that I find enjoyable with a friend or significant other: https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=nongamer . The first of the list is ...... Return of the Obra Dinn ^^.
Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations. To me, this felt frustrating compared to the sharpness of an Obra Dinn deduction. But for others it might be part of the appeal, and at any rate it's undeniably a polished game, so I understand that a lot people enjoy it :)
Regarding other similar recommendations I see in-thread and that are not already in the list:
- The Outer Wilds: one of my fav games ever (it's at the top of my "absolute best" list), but too 3d-mechanically-demanding for a very-non-gamer.
- The Witness: same, thus for this "non-gamers" list I preferred recommending its excellent 2D little-brother, Taiji :)
- Case of the Golden Idol: yeah it's a clear "play that too if you liked Obra Dinn", added as Obra Dinn addendum
- Lorelei and the Laser eyes: haven't played it yet, will soon!
I definitely found the misinterpretations entertaining. It seems like they went to some amount of effort to anticipate potential misinterpretations, such that discovering those misinterpretations later would lead to amusement.
For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way. It is a game that seems to value the creators vision above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices for the audience.
Edit: I realize I misread and thought you were saying you were going to add The Witness to the non-gamer list, which was why I was saying that a disclaimer would be extra useful. Left it anyway.
For sure, "uncompromising" or "design-opinionated" are adjectives that fit Jonathan Blow (lead designer & programmer of The Witness) and I doubt he'd object :D.
He was asked about these inaccessible puzzles, and from what I remember, his answer was pretty much what you intuited: that he was aware, but unwilling to compromise, in a "not every art if for everyone and that's fine" kind of way. And announcing them or having { I am color-blind, I am deaf } accessibility options to adapt could/would have spoiled the surprise, so he went ahead with them.
I still like The Witness for what it is. Maybe I will change my mind someday and will flag my recommendation with an inaccessibility warning, but for now it's in my "absolute best" sub-list without caveat.
> Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games that I played this past year. I think it might be good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love puzzles.
Cool, will try it soon! And might add it to my "best puzzle games" sublist, https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=puzzle
After not too far in, you eventually start confirming the meanings of words. Eventually you confirm the meaning of every word of every language. So, while learning a language can be a challenge of interpretation, eventually you do get concrete meanings.
Edit: I'd also recommend The Sexy Brutale for your list, it's a time loop detective game.
(With the usual qualifier: for me ! I don't doubt many puzzle freaks absolutely loved it and 100%ed it, but for me it was too much, too hard, too tedious).
I think what might work properly is:
- A "fractal" dither pattern so that it can be zoomed out and in smoothly and is scale invariant
- Doing things in texel space so that both camera movement and object movement works properly
- Doing bilinear filtering (perhaps keeping all samples instead of storing the weighted average) or perhaps supersampled rendering of the dithered pattern, and then using some sort of error diffusion pass in screen space (with a compute shader)
But not actually sure if this works in practice.
If that's not enough, an alternative would be to do things in screen space "naively", then reverse map the screen space rendering to texel space (in a resolution-preserving way), and use the information in texel space on the next frame to create a screen space solution compatible to the one in texel space, map it to texel space, etc., effectively building up the fractal per-texel pattern incrementally at runtime. This might be the best solution but seems very expensive in terms of memory, computation and complexity.
Could have easily published this at SIGGRAPH under temporal coherence for non-photorealistic rendering.
It is amazing to me that something that was so integral to the 80s computing experience is now actually quite tricky on modern hardware. For my own project[0] I found that it is almost impossible to ensure a one-to-one mapping between offscreen pixels and the canvas provided by the browser.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...
Found a new mantra for my life.
[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.260 [2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121719... [3] https://www.scale2x.it