Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you
For many independent developers, of course, spending nine years on a single game idea is an unthinkable luxury. Financial constraints mean many game ideas have to be shipped “as soon as you get to the point where it’s fun and shippable,” Blow said, leading to games that “kind of converge to a certain level of complexity and then stop there.”
But thanks to the sales success of The Witness—which reportedly grossed over $5 million in just its first week—Blow said he and his team have had the freedom to spend years “generat[ing] this giant space that’s much more complex than where you go with a typical puzzle game… When we create that much possibility, we feel like we have to explore it. Otherwise we’re not doing our duty as designers and correctly pursuing this agenda of design research.”
The sales success of The Witness helped enable the extended development time for Order of the Sinking Star.
The sales success of The Witness helped enable the extended development time for Order of the Sinking Star.
Blow also said the size of this project helped get him past his general distaste for playtesting, which he said he was “not that big on” for his previous games. “Even The Witness didn’t have that much play testing, because I always felt like that was a way to make games a little more generic or something, you know? Like playtesters have complaints and then you file down the complaints and then you get a generic game.”
After being immersed in Order of the Sinking Star development for so long, though, Blow said he realized it was important to get a fresh perspective from playtesters who had no experience with the idea. “We have to playtest it because it doesn’t fit in my brain all at once, you know?” he said.
Some might say a nine-plus-year development cycle might be a sign of perfectionist tinkering past the point of diminishing returns. But Blow said that while he “might have been a perfectionist” in his younger days, the difficult process of game development has beaten the tendency out of him. “But I have the remnants of perfectionism,” he said. “I have… wanting to do something really good.”
And eventually, even an idea you’ve been tinkering with for roughly a decade needs to see the light of day. “Even for us, this was very expensive,” Blow admitted. “Man, I’ll be happy to get it out and have a new game making some money, because we need to make that happen at this point.”
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