Jonathan Blow created Braid, which became a smash indie hit particularly on Xbox Live at the time, but now the sun is setting on Xbox 360 and PS3, and so sales aren’t matching other platforms any more.
That’s trouble for Blow’s new creation The Witness, which has since grown from an 8 hour puzzler, to featuring 20-40 hours of gameplay. He’s had to ”borrowed a bunch of money” to finish the game.
”Not so many people are buying digital games there,” Blow said, referring to Xbox 360 and PS3. ”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.”
Braid hasn’t made the transition to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, meaning they can no longer take advantage of the dominate console markets. It still sells significant numbers on PC, Mac and Linux through Steam. It’s not enough to keep the lights on for The Witness however.
All of the game’s puzzles are said to be complete as of a milestone reached last month, tallying 677 puzzles to be solved. Jonathan Blow has kept the game under-wraps to keep the world mysterious and spoiler free. 11 different puzzle areas exist in The Witness, and 7 or 8 need to be solved to complete the game, but if you solve them all ”you might get a little something extra. Or a lot.”
The Witness is a first-person 3D puzzle game, with an overarching story to be discovered.
”There are some similarities between The Witness and Talos Principle, but most of those similarities are on the surface,” he says. ”I think these two games are ultimately about very different subjects, and were made for very different reasons, and you feel the differences when you play. That said, it is likely that someone interested in one game may be interested in the other game.”
”If there is such a thing as taking ‘too long,’ we have probably already done that,” he continued.
”20 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 releases on PC and PS4 in 2015.
