I was never a huge fan of Jonathan Blow's first game, "Braid." It just left me cold, as did his overall attitude and many of the comments that he made in wake of the game's runaway success seemed a bit off to me.
When he announced his next project "The Witness" way back in 2009, I was intrigued but adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude. Well, it's now 2015 and "The Witness" has yet to see the light of day.
An interesting piece over at Endgadget sheds some light on what Blow has been up to: The game has at least tripled in size, from eight hours to 25-40 hours. "The Witness" development team, nine people credited in full and eight additional contributors, hit a development milestone last month, as all of the game's puzzles are now complete. There's still loads to work on, but the majority of the creative work is finished. There are 677 puzzles in "The Witness" at this moment.
Blow also detailed some of the financial hurdles he is facing, as he his funding the project himself mainly with the money he made from the "Braid" sales. "'Braid' still sells well on platforms that are thriving, but two of 'Braid's' big platforms were the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, both of which are sunsetting at this point," Blow said.
"But not so many people are buying digital games there any longer," he continued. "So the 'Braid' income is not nearly enough anymore to fund the team. I have borrowed a bunch of money to finish 'The Witness.' So I hope when it's done, some people buy the game."
Blow also fully realizes that he's been building this game for six years, but that matters little to him.s
"If there is such a thing as taking 'too long,' we have probably already done that," he said. "Twenty years from now, I am not going to care about whether we took an extra six months or a year in development; I am going to care about the quality of the game people got to play. It'd be a shame to sacrifice some of that quality just to squeak the game out a little sooner. Though I do sympathize with people who have been waiting a long time to play."
"The Witness" hopes to finally see the light of day in the latter half of 2015. I have a hard time seeing a first-person, "Myst"-like puzzle game topping the broad popular and critical success of "Braid," but I've been wrong before. Regardless, I look forward to playing the game when it is finally released.
