Braid-creator Jonathan Blow on making the 'biggest puzzle game ever'

Image source, Thekla, Inc., Arc GamesByLaura CressTechnology reporterPublished4 hours agoFor ten years, Jonathan Blow has been working with a small team on what he believes is "the biggest puzzle game ever made".

The American developer is renowned as one of the fathers of the modern indie game movement, creating the genre-defining puzzle-platformer Braid in 2008.

Now, a decade on from his last project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star is due to be released on Thursday - a game with roughly 1,500 puzzles that he estimates could take around 500 hours to complete.

So why make something the majority of players may never get even halfway through, let alone finish?

Image source, Thekla, Inc., Arc Games"Some people decide what to make based on what's practical or what makes business sense," Blow says. "It's never been the way that I think."

"I sort of make bad business decisions in a sense...because I let the design dominate that process. But then because we did that, we always have something unique," he says.

The game's blurb likens itself to a "game design supercollider" - four worlds viewed from overhead, built on the mechanics of four pre-existing free puzzle games from other designers (with their permission to do so).

For example, one world's mechanics, based on those from the free 2014 game Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, sees players use mirror reflections to swap places across islands.

When combined with the system of another free game created by Hazelden, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes - where players throw stones into water to create paths - brand-new puzzle opportunities suddenly arise.

Image source, Thekla, Inc., Arc GamesHow an AI was tricked into breaking its own rules

Taking a risk on making something more experimental is what appears to ultimately drive Blow, who says that as the industry has grown, the culture for developers has also changed.

"Somewhere along the way...this idea that the best designers were trying to always make new experiences...just sort of got dropped by the wayside," he says.