Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you

Of course, for many independent developers, spending nine years on a game idea is an unimaginable luxury. Financial constraints mean that many game ideas have to be shipped “as soon as you get to the point where it’s fun and shippable”, Blow said, causing games to “get to a certain level of complexity and then stop there.”

But thanks for the sales success Witness—which reportedly grossed more than $5 million in its first week—Blow said he and his team have the freedom to spend years “creating”[ing] This huge space is much more complex than what you’d walk into with a typical puzzle game… When we create so many possibilities, we feel like we have to figure it out. Otherwise we are not doing our duty as designers and properly pursuing this agenda of design research.

Blow also said that the size of the project helped him overcome his general distaste for playtesting, which he said was “not as big” for his previous games. “Even Witness I didn’t have that much game testing, because I always felt like it was a way to make games a little more casual or something, you know? Like players have complaints and then you file complaints and then you get a normal game.

after drowning in order of the falling star With such a long period of development, however, Blow said he realized it was important to get a fresh perspective from playtesters who had no experience with the idea. “We have to test it because it doesn’t fit in my head all at once, you know?” He said.

Some might say that a growth cycle of more than nine years might be a sign of perfectionist manipulation beyond the point of diminishing returns. But Blow said that while he may have been “a perfectionist” in his younger days, the arduous process of game development had tempered that tendency. “But I have remnants of perfectionism,” he said. “I… really want to do something good.”

And finally, the idea you’ve been pondering for almost a decade also needs to come to light. “Even for us, it was too expensive,” admitted Blow. “Man, I’d love to take it out and play a new game to make some money, because that’s what we need to do at this point.”