As a huge fan of the 2016 puzzle game The Witness since last year, I decided to recreate its puzzle mechanic in Roblox this week.
The puzzles are constructed entirely out of Gui objects, primarily Frames. Despite appearing so simplistic, there is a ton of 2D vector math involved.
I would love to make a full game out of this (as a homage to The Witness, not a carbon copy) but I don’t know how well it would do on the platform, so for now this is just a fun little tech demo for puzzle enthusiasts.
The first time I actually attempted to recreate The Witness was a couple months ago, wherein I created a more original design for the puzzles which was squarer and strictly-grid based, but I ultimately abandoned this version because it was too limiting.
First, from what i’ve seen in the video its pretty accurate to the mechanics in the game, so good job, i noticed the subtle camera movement when you click in, nice touch. I’m also wondering how hard it is to make a puzzle using your system, because it would depend if its on procedural or all hard-coded per puzzle. I’ll also ask if you ever plan to make a full game, or even release the source for this because i would be super excited for that.
Thanks for your comments!
It’s 100% procedural, the puzzles themselves have no pre-existing UI. Everything is generated from Vector2-based data when the game runs, which allows for a lot of automation but makes visually designing the puzzles a little tricky (I usually plan the layouts on paper first).
In terms of difficulty, this has been one of the hardest mechanics I’ve ever scripted on Roblox because of the trigonometry involved in the path tracing alone.
I’m hoping to make a full game with this, but the project is currently on hold. And I am considering open sourcing it for my fellow Witness fans, but I really need to simplify the framework before anyone else should have to try and make sense of it.
Between making a full game and open sourcing it, I would also like to add as many puzzle types as possible. As you can see in my original design, I had gotten “dot” puzzle types working. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to recreate all puzzle types due to some of their complexities, but I would like to at least try to tackle most of the grid-based ones.
weirdly underappreciated post — really like the look of it, never played the witness but i’ll def play yours… hope development is going well