Of course, for many indie developers, spending nine years on a single game idea is an unthinkable luxury. Financial constraints mean that many game ideas have to be implemented “once you get to the point where it's interesting and ready to ship,” Blow said, resulting in games that “sort of converge to a certain level of difficulty and then stop there.”
But thanks to the sales success Witness– which is reported grossed over $5 million in just the first week— Blow said he and his team had the freedom to spend years “generating[ing] it's a gigantic space that's much more complex than what you're put in in a typical puzzle game… When we create so many possibilities, we feel like we have to explore them. Otherwise, we are not fulfilling our duty as designers and implementing the design research program properly.”
Sales success Witness helped increase development time Order of the Falling Star.
Blow also said that the scale of the project helped him overcome his general aversion to playtesting, which he said he “wasn't really into” in his previous games. “Even Witness I didn't do that much playtesting because I always felt like it was a way to make games more general or something like that, you know? For example, playtesters have complaints, and then you record them and get a standard game.”
After diving into Order of the Falling Star however, development took so long that Blow said he realized it was important to get a fresh perspective from testers who had no experience with the idea. “We have to test this because it doesn’t fit in my head right away, you know?” – he said.
Some might say that a nine-year development cycle could be a sign of a perfectionist past the point of diminishing returns. But Blow said that while he “could have been a perfectionist” in his youth, the arduous process of developing games had knocked that tendency out of him. “But I have some remnants of perfectionism,” he said. “I… want to do something really good.”
And in the end, even an idea you've been working on for about ten years should see the light of day. “Even for us it was very expensive,” admitted Blow. “Man, I'll be happy to release it and make a new game that makes some money because we need that to happen at this point.”
