For 4 years I worked with Jonathan Blow on the art of The Witness. If you’ve played the game, you will know how interconnected the art was to the game design.

With that in mind, I would like to talk in more detail about the whole experience and what we went through to create the island.

The core art team consisted of Eric Anderson, Orsi Spanyol and myself. We also closely collaborated with the Architect studio Fourm Design, to concept the buildings, and with the Landscape Architects Studio Fletcher Studio, who helped define the shape and flora of the island.

Working on this game was very different from my previous experiences, mainly due to the way Jonathan works and runs the studio.

For the art, the most relevant aspect was the lack of titles or roles. No one had a specific responsibility or task, but you would organically be as involved as you wanted to be. This meant that there was a lot more room to be creative and truly part of the final result.

If you want to have a quick overview of the whole art process, please watch my 2014 GDC Talk: “The Art of the Witness”.

You can use the navigation on the right to learn in more detail about the process of the areas I was responsible for, from the collaboration with the architects, work-in-progress images and other interesting tidbits. I STRONGLY advise you to play the game before, since these will inevitably spoil some of the experience.

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ARTWORK GALLERY (spoiler free):