Vi taler med Jonathan Blow om at skabe en episk omgang puslespil i Order of the Sinking Star

Når man knytter et navn som Jonathan Blow til et nyt projekt, er man garanteret opmærksomhed. Men selv uden Blows navn ville Order of the Sinking Star stadig ligne et puslespil, der er værd at holde øje med. Over tusind gåder præger dette omfattende eventyrspil, som balancerer kreativ tænkning med en stærk narrativ kerne. Det virker yderst unikt, og vi fik chancen for at tale med Blow i en Q&A-session tilbage i marts.

Som altid med denne slags interviews fastholder vi svarene på engelsk for at bibeholde unik kontekst.

Spørgsmål: Jeg er fortsat meget interesseret i idéen om at have 1000 gåder i ét spil. Med så stort et antal, hvordan giver man dem alle en følelse af at være håndlavede?

Blow: "They're all completely handcrafted. Some games are designed by you just sort of filling out the content of the game and then you fix some stuff and then you're done but this was really not that way because we cared a lot about the quality of the individual puzzles and we've revised some of the puzzles many times, some of them like 12 times. We probably made um more than 3,000 puzzles and then sort of cut it down to really get the best and so you know that is a lot of stuff. Sort of explains why it took so long to finish the game."

Spørgsmål: Hvor mange af gåderne skal spillerne løse for at gennemføre spillet, og hvor meget af indholdet skal de interagere med?

Blow: "Once we realized the game was starting to get big this issue came up. You can't expect everybody to like commit to doing this giant game; there's such a thing as just having a satisfying time playing a reasonably sized game and so we structured the game so that we can be maximally accommodating to that. There's three end games essentially they're all good end games so it's not like it's not like you get a bad one and then you have to work harder to get a good one it's more like um you know there's a first end game where once you get to that you could consider yourself reasonably satisfied as having completed the game um but you know for people who want to play more and want to dig in and and go further we leave a way to do that and to find the rest of the game. This is actually a real trick to make because it's not enough to just put the endings in but you have to feel like you really finished the game from the first ending and not like 'oh we just let you win after playing some portion of the puzzles.' Because that's less satisfying so part of the trick is to keep the extended part of the game sort of hidden away so you don't feel like you're expected to play it until you get there."

Spørgsmål: Vi har set puslespil på det seneste benytte en stærk følelse af fællesskab. Ser du det samme ske med Order of the Sinking Star, hvor fællesskabet må gå sammen om at løse de sværeste gåder?

Blow: "When you put together everybody on the internet that's like a really powerful amount of brain power and they'll solve things that you think are hard very quickly just because there's a lot of people and they're trying a lot of things. So if you did that if you designed parts of the game for that explicitly then regular people just playing the game wouldn't be able to solve those things right and so you got to be careful when thinking about that kind of stuff but for individual puzzles no. I think for understanding everything that's going on in the game and like finding all the things and figuring out how to get to all the things - because like I said you know there's some stuff that's hidden and pretty hard to get to - and as well as just putting together all the clues of what what exactly is everything that's happening in the story and all that that I think that's much more amenable to internet group solving."

Spørgsmål: Du nævnte tre slutninger, men hvor lang tid tager det i gennemsnit at gennemføre spillet?

Blow: "We're still tweaking that. I think right now it's probably a long time still it's not 10 hours yeah it's probably more like 50 or 60 hours. The problem is again it's a little bit challenging because we can tune back how much stuff you have to do to get there but then again it just feels like oh we just let you walk to the exit or something. I mean that's an overstatement it's a 50 hour walk to the exit or something but actually I mean that 50 that I just pulled up is a random guess. It's hard for us to test it internally because we know all the puzzles and stuff and so actually what we're doing we're starting some new play testers on the game soon and we'll just see how long it takes them to get there then we'll have a more accurate number."

Spørgsmål: Hvordan holder I historiens kerne stærk hele vejen igennem?

Blow: "It's challenging because the game is very non-linear we wanted to give people a lot of choice about where they go and in what order you see things. I'm a little bit undetermined and so the story has to be very structured around that it has to be written such that like oh you might see this thing before this thing you might see this thing after that thing.

We do a lot of implication in the story rather than outright telling...toward the beginning of the game the story is more linear because you kind of have to understand the basics of the game before you go out into the general exploration part. During that, the story tends to have more of these linear plot elements and then as you get further on it becomes more character and world interactions with occasional things happening and that just that lets people have a lot of freedom without us forcing them to to do stuff so it's more like the setting and the characters sort of ooze in while the player's playing through the game. It's like how when you listen to an audiobook for a language while you're sleeping or something like that it's something that comes in maybe while in the background you're focused on a puzzle."

Spørgsmål: Bliver karakterer og dialog holdt tilbage for at bevare mysteriet?

Blow: "The core idea of the game is about these worlds coming together the game mechanics coming together and interacting, right? When you make a story for a game it can either go with the gameplay or it can like clash with the gameplay and it's always better if it goes with the gameplay and so in this game you know the characters are uh part of what's fun is they're defined by what they do. The thief pulls stuff and the wizard teleports and all that and so if you think about it that starts to suggest their character traits and and what they're like and then the characters kind of start to write themselves at some point like 'how how would this character react to seeing this thing from this other world?' and and that tends to be interesting as a player.

The worst kind of story stuff is when it's just telling you what you're already looking at. It's like I can see this why are you telling me this right? And so it adds a dimension to what's happening and it gives you more information about the characters in the world but again it comes in very small packets...it's literally often it's like 15 seconds that's all it takes yeah to say a couple of things and then you go to the next level and maybe it's 25 seconds or something but it's never super long."

Spørgsmål: Den visuelle stil i Order of the Sinking Star er meget unik. Hvordan skabte I den?

Blow: "First of all we're very careful to keep the puzzles very readable which is a strange thing so when we first went to mock up the game the walls are just like cubes. Then the impulse is to go and say: 'Okay we're gonna make this look really good now.' But that makes it hard to play the game because you need to know where the grid lines are."

Spørgsmål: Er der lektioner fra tidligere projekter, der har hjulpet med udviklingen her?

Blow: "You always learn from every game and you take that forward but the problem with me is the games that we do are so different from each other that it's very hard to take a direct lesson. Historically in games that would be a reason why sequels would be really good is because the first game you were just figuring it out and then you make the sequel and it's all polished but the thing is I've never made a sequel so we kind of do that in the middle of the game. Because this game has gone on for so long we definitely took a lot of lessons from the early phase of development into the later phase of development...I actually so I'm not going to name drop other games because this is a criticism of them but I definitely played puzzle games in the past year or two that have an [issue with needless sokoban]. So we made this rule uh in design that there's no unnecessary sokoban in this game um the only time sometimes there might be elaborate sequences of things that you do but they're all on topic."
Spørgsmål: Du har aldrig lavet en efterfølger. Er det et aktivt valg?

Spørgsmål: På et mættet marked for puslespil og fantasy, hvordan skiller Order of the Sinking Star sig ud?

Blow: "When I think about non-puzzle games that have this kind of perspective, I'm mostly thinking about Diablo-style games. That's a very different thing game mechanically obviously but also aesthetically like all of those games have gone in for this there's a lot of skulls look which is fine right but but we're just in a different category of fantasy right we're in more of a like lighter fantasy...there's monsters that'll kill you in this game but right uh but they're not the focus of the game and so it's not that same kind of a mood and so I think that sets us apart from a lot of those games right away. There were older fantasy style games if you think of the game like Magicka or something that was a little bit lighter it's maybe a little more like that. In terms of puzzle games, the thing about them is a lot of them are low budget and so once you get into a territory where you're trying to make things look nice it starts to not look like any other puzzle game."

Order of the Sinking Star er planlagt til udgivelse i 2026.