The Witness designer Jonathan Blow has shown off an early prototype of a new game. While not official in any capacity, the unveiling happened during his talk at the Reboot Develop conference in Croatia. Thankfully, it was livestreamed on Twitch, so we're able to get a look at it as well—it's been uploaded to YouTube by Daniel Bross, and you can see it in the embed above.

It looks like it's a puzzle game that consists of pushing blocks around. According to Blow, it's still very early on in development, as most of the work has been focused on creating the level editor and engine, which will be made available to other developers for free. He said that he "should make and ship" a game on this engine, so we could could end up seeing it come to fruition. And apparently, he's already thrown together more than 25 hours of single-player gameplay, but he noted that it's unpolished and the visuals aren't final.

It might be a while before we see or hear anything else about this untitled game, but we'll be sure to report back when something is revealed. Blow's last two games, Braid and The Witness, were both puzzle games that garnered many positive reviews. In fact, The Witness received glowing remarks from critic Edwin Evans-Thirlwell in PC Gamer's review. 

Earlier today, The Witness and Braid creator Jonathan Blow posted an image on Twitter of what appears to be a makeshift catheter and a tub of his own pee. "Here is another thing I helped make, to help finish The Witness," Blow wrote proudly above the image, which has sent social media into overdrive.

Finding a way to urinate without leaving one's seat is an enduring concern for humanity, but few have nailed an adequate solution. Indeed, creating makeshift catheters is something society is more likely to frown upon than celebrate. It's more sensible to buy a professionally made one.

Still, is this merely a tub of apple juice, or is it a stinging indictment on video game development crunch time? Is that the right colour for pee? Does the lighting influence its hue?  

On January 17, Blow posted a Tweet which seems to suggest that if he is using a catheter to pee into during the development of The Witness, he hasn't been doing so for long:

Perhaps Blow's tube supplier had temporarily run out. Maybe he's been peeing into a catheter for many years now. Or maybe, just maybe, he borrowed a tube to make a pee joke on the internet, which he concocted and brewed over a five-day period.

What do you think? Is that really Jonathan Blow's pee? Please advise below.

The Humble Indie Bundle is back, but this time with a greatest hits collection featuring some of the best games from past bundles. It's an amazing selection for anybody that's new to indie games, or gaming in general. For everyone else, there's a pretty good chance you already own most of what's here.

As usual, the action is split into multiple categories depending on how much you're willing to pay. Whatever you pay, you'll get Super Meat Boy, World of Goo and Dustforce DX. Beat the average (currently $4.78) and you'll also get Dungeon Defenders Collection, Limbo and Braid. Finally, if you pay $1 over the average price (currently $5.78,) you'll get Risk of Rain and Antichamber. Whatever price you settle on, you'll need to pay $1 or more to get Steam keys for the bundled games.

After settling on a price, you can then decide exactly where that money will go. The sliders allow you to set how much of your cash will go to the developers, to Humble and to this bundle's two charities, Child's Play and Watsi.

The bundle will run until next Tuesday, June 16.

Every week, keen screen-grabber Ben Griffin brings you a sumptuous 4K resolution gallery to celebrate PC gaming's prettiest places.

Like Braid's protagonist himself, webcomic artist David Hellman's soft, painterly style has stood the test of time, and while the visuals here aren't sharp like a Broken Age or indeed Broken Sword given that they were never intended to display at such ludicrous resolutions, this is at the very least a nice experiment.

Until now, to the best of my knowledge, there's never been a single 4K shot of Braid. Now there are 15, all worthy of your desktop wallpaper.



Download the full-sized image here.



Download the full-sized image here.



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Jonathan Blow, the outspoken developer behind indie hit Braid and upcoming puzzle game The Witness, has posted a pair of pictures hinting that virtual reality support may be coming to the Myst-alike. The images feature the unmistakable double-vision familiar from every Oculus Rift game demo, and as pointed out by an eagle-eyed commenter on Blow s site, the images are titled VR1 and VR2.



For all of the excitement around the Oculus Rift, including John Carmack s recent full-time devotion to the project, programming Rift support into games is still fairly rare. According to Road to VR, barely two dozen games have been developed with in-house Rift support.Luckily for VR enthusiasts, third-party drivers have added support to dozens more including Skyrim, Arma 2 and Mirror s Edge.



Getting to explore the lush island of The Witness with built-in VR support will be a treat, but there is a snag in this fantasy: The Witness will hit the PS4 before it comes to PC, and Sony is rumored to be launching a VR headset for its console. Still, once the work of building to VR headsets has been done, it should translate easily.

Indie Game: The Movie is to get a special edition, bringing over a hundred minutes of new short films, and epilogues for each of the original's main subjects. Is there significantly more to that follow-up story than "everybody got extremely rich"? Will Phil Fish want to stone-cold murder anybody else? Will the movie's creators remember that not all indie games are 2D platformers. A new trailer may reveal the answers to some of these questions.



Damn, they really love that Jonathan Blow passage.

The special edition will also bring new commentaries from Team Meat and the directors of the movie. It will be available as a standalone purchase for digital owners, or as DLC for the Steam version.

In addition, DVD and Blu-Ray box-sets are being released, with over 300 minutes of new material. Details of that package are available at the IGTM website.

Indie Game: The Movie Special Edition will release July 24.

Last night's PlayStation conference wasn't all about explosions, shootings, angry dragons, invasions of privacy and whatever it is that David Cage is on. Jonathon Blow also took to the stage to introduce the first proper look at his upcoming first-person puzzler The Witness. You could tell it was the token indie game of the night, what with the colours, and the jaunty recorder soundtrack, and the lack of people being stabbed.



That's a seriously gorgeous island. I'm interested to see whether the puzzles integrate with the exploration in any way, though. As it is, I'm starting to get Myst flashbacks.

Blow announced on stage that the game would be a timed console exclusive for PS4 - sneaky code for "yes, it's also coming to PC." The game's trailer description confirms, saying "This is the first official trailer for the upcoming game The Witness, to be released on the PC, iOS, and PlayStation 4... and eventually, several other platforms." The release date is still pencilled in as "sometime in 2013."

Valve kicked off its epic Steam Holiday Sale today, offering heavy discounts, flash sales, and catalog clearances lasting until January 5. And before we start drifting dangerously into wallet-pun territory, know you'll be able vote for a select game every 12 hours to go on sale.

Here's a sampling of the sales and flash deals (if you can call a 15-hour timespan a "flash") available for purchase right now:

60% off Natural Selection 2 ($10/£6)
50% off War of the Roses ($15/£9)
50% off Borderlands 2 ($30/£18.50)

The current nominees for the Community's Choice sale are Limbo, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Braid. The winner gets 75 percent taken off its price. And if, by some small chance, a specific game deal you're seeking isn't there, Valve can notify you when it shows up if you add the title to your wishlist. Wonderful.

Ready to get shopping? Deep breath, and go.

Braid creator Jonathan Blow has posted an open letter on the ills of the beaurocratic requirements that major console companies demand of every game on their platform. He compares the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 to Steam and Apple, which let developers update their games quickly and freely with no need for lengthy official certification procedures, and suggests that future platforms will have to take a similar approach to be successful.

He writes: "The edge that both Apple and Valve have going into the future is that they both genuinely care about the end-user experience and want to make it as good as possible. (Their end-user experience is already way better than any of the consoles and they are always working to improve it). Which coincidentally seems to be the place that these consoles are handicapped due to their corporate culture. Can anyone look at the current 360 or PS3 dashboards and legitimately say that those are products of an entity that deeply cares about user experience?"

To release a patch on a console, developers have to submit the update to a certification procedure in which the patch is cleared for release by the platform holder. DICE have previously told us that this is one of the reasons we have to wait so long for Battlefield patches. Blow mentions that certification procedures are designed to deliver more reliable updates, but points out that there's less need for quality control than platform holders assume. "There is no public outcry for more testing and robustness of iOS software," he writes.

Blow uses the "DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE" save warning that must be included at the start of every Xbox game as an example of the inefficiency these requirements generate. "If consoles cared about this kind of thing, it would be built into their basic save-file API, so that it would always work perfectly and no developers would ever have to think about it," he says.

"If they did this, there would be fewer things to certify, certification would cost a little less and take a bit less time. Let’s say you save 3 days of development and testing per game (this is conservative; the real amount can be substantially higher when you factor in the discussions and coordination about how the save notice should look, etc). Now add up how many games have been released just on the Xbox 360, multiply that number by 3 days, and what you get is probably OVER A DECADE OF DEVELOPER TIME that was wasted. Just on this one little requirement. For something that should just be built into the system by one person in a couple of weeks."

Ultimately, platforms will have to become more open to support the rising popularity of free to play and digital games. Blow doesn't reckon the next console generation will be able to stack up against Steam. "Whatever they do is very likely not to be enough," he says. "Their competitors are not stopping either. (Steam, which was already pretty painless in terms of updating games, recently revamped their system; the new thing is way better than the old thing, which was already way better than what the consoles do.)"

Read the whole argument over on The Witness, a site for Jonathan Blow upcoming first-person exploration/puzzle game set on a mysterious island.

Braid creator Jonathan Blow has posted an open letter on the ills of the bureaucratic requirements that major console companies demand of every game on their platform. He compares the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 to Steam and Apple, which let developers update their games quickly and freely with no need for lengthy official certification procedures, and suggests that future platforms will have to take a similar approach to be successful.

He writes: "The edge that both Apple and Valve have going into the future is that they both genuinely care about the end-user experience and want to make it as good as possible. (Their end-user experience is already way better than any of the consoles and they are always working to improve it). Which coincidentally seems to be the place that these consoles are handicapped due to their corporate culture. Can anyone look at the current 360 or PS3 dashboards and legitimately say that those are products of an entity that deeply cares about user experience?"

To release a patch on a console, developers have to submit the update to a certification procedure in which the patch is cleared for release by the platform holder. DICE have previously told us that this is one of the reasons we have to wait so long for Battlefield patches. Blow mentions that certification procedures are designed to deliver more reliable updates, but points out that there's less need for quality control than platform holders assume. "There is no public outcry for more testing and robustness of iOS software," he writes.

Blow uses the "DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE" save warning that must be included at the start of every Xbox game as an example of the inefficiency these requirements generate. "If consoles cared about this kind of thing, it would be built into their basic save-file API, so that it would always work perfectly and no developers would ever have to think about it," he says.

"If they did this, there would be fewer things to certify, certification would cost a little less and take a bit less time. Let’s say you save 3 days of development and testing per game (this is conservative; the real amount can be substantially higher when you factor in the discussions and coordination about how the save notice should look, etc). Now add up how many games have been released just on the Xbox 360, multiply that number by 3 days, and what you get is probably OVER A DECADE OF DEVELOPER TIME that was wasted. Just on this one little requirement. For something that should just be built into the system by one person in a couple of weeks."

Ultimately, platforms will have to become more open to support the rising popularity of free to play and digital games. Blow doesn't reckon the next console generation will be able to stack up against Steam. "Whatever they do is very likely not to be enough," he says. "Their competitors are not stopping either. (Steam, which was already pretty painless in terms of updating games, recently revamped their system; the new thing is way better than the old thing, which was already way better than what the consoles do.)"

Read the whole argument over on The Witness, a site for Jonathan Blow upcoming first-person exploration/puzzle game set on a mysterious island.