Jonathan Blow creates The Order of the Sinking Star
Indie game pioneer Jonathan Blow is set to release The Order of the Sinking Star, a puzzle game featuring 1,500 puzzles and 500 hours of gameplay.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Indie game developer Jonathan Blow is launching his new title The Order of the Sinking Star.
- The massive puzzle game features around 1,500 puzzles requiring roughly 500 hours to complete.
- Blow built a custom programming language called Jai and a custom engine completely from scratch.
- The ambitious project took a full decade of development following his previous game The Witness.
American developer Jonathan Blow, renowned as one of the founding figures of the modern indie game movement and the creator of the genre-defining 2008 puzzle-platformer Braid, is preparing to launch his latest major project.
A decade after the release of his previous project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star is scheduled to be released on Thursday. The game features approximately 1,500 puzzles, which Blow estimates could take around 500 hours for players to fully complete.
Addressing why he would create a game where the majority of players might not even reach the halfway point, Blow explained that his design choices often override business considerations.
"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,"
Jonathan Blow
These creative concepts are smashed together to forge entirely brand-new brainteasers. For instance, the mechanics of one world are based on Alan Hazelden's free 2014 game Mirror Isles, allowing players to use mirror reflections to swap places across islands, combined with Hazelden's Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes where players throw stones into water to build paths.
Taking risks on experimental concepts is what ultimately drives Blow, who points out that as the gaming industry has expanded, the cultural mindset for developers has also shifted away from constantly inventing brand-new experiences.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
The choice to write a custom programming language and build a proprietary game engine from scratch, as Blow did with Jai, is exceedingly rare in the modern game industry. While most developers rely on commercial engines like Unity or Unreal Engine for efficiency, coding everything independently demonstrates an uncompromising dedication to complete creative control, albeit at the cost of immense technical hurdles and a development cycle described as nightmare mode.
Blow's refusal to compromise on any aspect of The Order of the Sinking Star goes far beyond its core puzzle design. The developer made the bold decision to build his own programming language from scratch, named Jai.
He subsequently utilized this custom language alongside a proprietary game engine to build the entire experience. While many developers rely on pre-built commercial software like Unity or Unreal Engine, Blow wanted an engine tuned and authored specifically for his precise vision.
Reflecting on the grueling decade-long journey that began as a simple design experiment, Blow noted that he hopes his next project will move away from what he jokingly characterized as nightmare mode.
Source: BBC Business
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