Hello. I am Mihai. I've listened to all FoC podcasts with @Ivan Reese and @Jimmy Miller ,over the past year, don't remember where I found it... Now I'm listening to the older ones and started playing The Witness... I'm working in banking - building payment processing systems using pure FP + stream processing in Scala. Excited to be here and get more immersed in the ideas that have drawn to by the podcast!

Welcome!

Resident Witness expert checking in. Ask me anything.

Did not get that far in the Witness, not much time to play. Currently stuck on a puzzle that has a tetris looking tilted block in it... But not sure I want spoilers yet 🙂 still trying to figure it out on my own.

The Witness is best when you don't rush. Take your time. Look around. Soak it all in. There's a lot to see. The more you look, the more you'll find. Any on another dimension, it's nice to see someone working with reactive streams and such.

Non spoiler question: Do all puzzle types have a sort of tutorial zone ? I keep finding puzzles I have no idea how to solve… not sure if I should keep testing random solutions or move to other places hoping to find simpler puzzles of that type 😅

For most puzzle types, the first one(s) you encounter that are lit up are the tutorial for that type. The game is all about nonverbal communication, so it sort of expects you to take your best shot at figuring out the puzzle with deduction and context clues. If it doesn't click after spending a minute or two, feel free to move on and continue exploring. There's no single path through the game, and some things that might elude you at first blush will come easily after you figure out other things.

thanks. It definitely scratches an ich for me, but it’s also frustrating - that’s possibly my issue, not necessarily the game. I tend to get stuck on trying to finish a particular task too long. should probably learn to move on and come back later.

Yes, to tutorial zones. And unlike other puzzle games, communication is the goal, not hardness, nor mindlessness. There are some tricks, but they are always meant to teach. Frustratingly, the Witness wants to be as clear as it can be without giving things away. Most puzzle types do encourage testing random solutions. (The only ones that actively discourage experimentation tend to have a state space sufficiently small that you could brute force them without learning what's going on.) I suppose there is one puzzle panel in the game that's arguably a mistake, at least there's a whole Subreddit dedicated to it. As for serious flaws, I always like to say that the Witness is catnip — but you got to be the right kind of cat. Ivan and I probably argued about this late one night. I can't remember the details.