The Witless by pogo

[raw]
made by pogo for LD 38 (JAM)

https://vectorfold.itch.io/witless

The Witless

You wake up, alone, in a strange room full of puzzles that will neither challenge nor surprise you.

Screenshots

witless<em>2017-04-25</em>03-18-59.png witless<em>2017-04-25</em>03-18-19.png witless<em>2017-04-25</em>03-22-07.png witless<em>2017-04-25</em>03-48-54.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cihFoR5J0-E

No Time to play?

Watch it played by members of the community! - gamejamcurator - elevatorsimulator - Occult Softworks

Team

Controls

  • Move with WASD
  • Look with the Mouse
  • Interact with Left Click

Stuck?

Solutions available at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lsc27w0hv7ss581/StrategyGuide.zip?dl=0 (Contains spoilers, obviously)

Source Code

If you're curious to see how The Witless works or think you can learn something from its code, check out the repository at Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/commie3d/LD38PogoSmallWorld

Download

https://vectorfold.itch.io/witless

Ratings

Overall 122th 3.857⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 153th 3.619⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 327th 3.238⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Theme 397th 3.409⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 355th 3.619⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Mood 236th 3.524⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 8🗳️ 9🗨️

Feedback

DEGLIS
25. Apr 2017 · 03:33 UTC
Hilarious name/game concept. But I think you guys aren't giving yourselves enough credit for the puzzle mechanics. They're pretty decent, if derivative. I got stuck on one of the Sphinx puzzles, which I'm pretty sure is impossible, after analyzing it for over 10 minutes.

Nice work. Wish I could have beaten it.
🎤 pogo
25. Apr 2017 · 03:56 UTC
Hi @deglis, The U shapes are tricky - their light doesn't get lit when they're activated, so it's possible to turn it on even if it's lit by another shape.
torcado
25. Apr 2017 · 05:01 UTC
Awesome game! Glad to have my Witness itch scratched after beating that one. super clever puzzle idea! Curious about the compass one, because that could be pretty ambiguous to people. other than that i liked it
Takusan
25. Apr 2017 · 11:20 UTC
I like it overall, though I must give a bit more time to finish. Good job! :D
Ace17
27. Apr 2017 · 17:36 UTC
Love the name! Too bad there's only a Windows version, can't play :-(
Local Minimum
27. Apr 2017 · 19:22 UTC
The puzzle around the Spinx was really good and I think it is a great feat that you managed to implement the puzzles and the portals during the weekend. It took me a while with the third to the last around the Sphinx and actually cheated on it. I hadn't actually considered a key part of the mechanics of the puzzle. So if you had spent seven years making it, I would have said you could have tweaked some of the earlier puzzles in the series to hint this key part a bit more. For being made during the a Ludum, I'd say you did a great job with these puzzles. The room after though, felt really like an anti-climax (especially since there were more than one way the player could have gotten the right idea without it being accepted by the game (without saying too much, I hope)) but I understand that coming up with more than one great puzzle mechanics during the weekend is really really hard. So great work over all.
🎤 pogo
28. Apr 2017 · 01:08 UTC
Hi, @local-minimum, I had another two variations of puzzle planned, but just ran out of time while doing all the level design in the last couple of hours. Thank you for the awesome comment! I agree about that room, and to make things worse, the hint doesn't lead to the correctct solution due to a mistake.
camilo
29. Apr 2017 · 02:50 UTC
cool reference!
tobico
29. Apr 2017 · 12:03 UTC
Very nicely executed! I love some of the visual effects, like how after you go through the portal the world around you is blurred. I feel bad about needing to check the guide for the last puzzle, since I did consider the correct solution but dismissed it out of hand.
spacedoubt
01. May 2017 · 04:15 UTC
I like this one a lot. It's fairly polished and it reminds me of the Myst games which are some of my favourites. This could be a really great start to a really great game. I love it, great work!
OccultOne
01. May 2017 · 22:38 UTC
I played this on Livestream Today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGr9VAOjIQs

This was amazingly well built! I've seen this pop up on my feed a few times and I was excited to play it. I was not disappointing.

My one criticism is the camera sensitivity is a little too much. Either scaling it back, or giving me an option to do so would have been amazing.
Awpteamoose
02. May 2017 · 00:42 UTC
I had to look up the solution for the compass puzzle. I understood what I was meant to do, but couldn't figure out the way the letters have to be written. Maybe I missed a hint, dunno.
garethiw
02. May 2017 · 09:54 UTC
As a huge fan of The Witness, I found this very cool. It's a shame the hint for the last puzzle didn't quite match up to the solution (mostly because I was impressed with myself that I worked out how the hint and puzzle related!), but I enjoyed what was there!

The final room was a tantalising look at what might have been coming :)
Quaternius
02. May 2017 · 23:42 UTC
Loved the puzzle ideas! On the sphinx my pc got really laggy for some reason but other than that the game is awesome, loved it.
Spinaljack
03. May 2017 · 00:28 UTC
Nice homage to the witness and scale portals. You captured the essence of those games while mixing things up. good job.
udo
03. May 2017 · 00:46 UTC
Loved it, congratz on making this for the Jam! I noticed on the Mac version, the Sphinx area has a very choppy framerate, so I couldn't complete the game (on a recent-ish iMac, Apple hardware just sucks). But even on my beefy Windows machine, areas like the compass puzzle were very sluggish.

Having enjoyed the original Witness very much, I liked the puzzle style in this game as well! Nicely done! :)
szczebel1995
03. May 2017 · 03:04 UTC
Great game! At first I thought that the puzzles are gonna be identical as in Witness but I was positively surprised, they are not that hard (finished game in 7 min) but they require some thinking :D, really nice portal mechanic, only problem that I encounter was some frame drops on the compass level but other than that everything is smooth :D Good job!
candlesan
03. May 2017 · 06:59 UTC
That was cool. it actually took me a while to figure out what the mechanic was when two patterns overlap each other.
The compass puzzle took me a while but I thought the inherent clue provided was totally fair.
The inclusion of the portals took me off guard but worked well :)
Overall this gave me a good scatch at my Witness itch. If this were made into a full game I'd play it!
Tselmek
06. May 2017 · 12:10 UTC
Really nice puzzle game. I was first scared to just see a plain The Witness ripoff but the puzzle mechanics were quite neat. The level design and difficulty curve were nicely built. The graphics did their job. My only complaint would be the very very *very* sensitive controls both movement and mouse direction. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this!
madsj
06. May 2017 · 23:36 UTC
I'm a huge The Witness fan and I assume you are too. The game obviously has a funny name and it becomes instantly recognizable what the game might be. It turns out the puzzles aren't witless, but they lack the deep design of the Witness puzzles, which is understandable, since the Witness took a bit longer to make than 72 hours. I don't know what goes into making a 3D game like this in 72 hours, I mostly have experience with 2D in 48 hours, but I imagine it takes some effort, I wonder how tight the 72 hours felt? The game ran kind of unsmooth on my GTX770, but it wasn't important for the gameplay.
ret44
11. May 2017 · 23:44 UTC
Great concept. I image a lot of work and time was spent for design here, for which I'm giving big props.