The IGN Blog gives us a quick look at the work done on The Witcher and a short history into it's development.

We started work with great impetus, which may have been unwarranted, because we had the impression that the game could be completed in a very short time. In the fall we started testing new unit-rendering graphics. The first tests were satisfactory in terms of the visual quality, but not so much in terms of efficiency and performance. The environments we created looked far better in 3DS Max (3D graphics program) than those from NWN. The great speed at which we were working had its drawbacks. The worst thing was that although we had a general vision of the game, the majority of the ideas were lacking in details; we learned things on the fly and implemented new features as we went along. Later we learned that that was probably one of the worst things we could do. The ideas were not always compatible with one another and they were not always well thought out; because of that -- instead of working faster in the end -- the work was done slower because at times some of the ideas proved impossible or unusable, and we had to start again. This meant working twice on the same elements. Of course, this is inevitable even in a perfectly organized team, but at the beginning of development, I think it happened far too often.

However, we worked like mad. By April 2004 our team grew to 16 people and it seemed like a considerable number. In April we experienced an incredibly intense period of work. When we were preparing a demo for E3 2004 we worked without stopping seven days a week, and a few days before the event we even worked 20 hours a day, often sleeping in the office. In the end we managed to prepare quite an interesting demo -- basically from nothing, since many game elements were far from finished

Mishtram via blogs.ign.com »